The scratching was no longer just a feeling. It was a sound, dry and brittle, and it was coming from the other side of his apartment door.
Scrape. Scrabble. Hiss.
It was the sound of ancient parchment being dragged across splintered bone. Elias stood frozen in the center of the room, his blood like ice in his veins. The migraine from bending reality still hammered behind his eyes, but it was a distant pain now, overshadowed by the raw, primal terror coiling in his gut.
He stared at the door. It was a solid oak thing, reinforced with a steel frame he'd installed himself. It was currently secured by three deadbolts. Against this, those defenses were meaningless.
"They feel the life within this space," the voice of Aeridor whispered in his mind. It was weak, a flickering candle flame of consciousness. "They feel your memories. To them, it is the scent of water in a desert of dust. They do not knock, Archivist. They consume."
As if to punctuate the thought, the wood of the door began to change. It wasn't splintering or cracking under a physical assault. It was… fading. The rich, dark brown of the oak leached away, turning a pale, sickly grey. The very texture of the wood seemed to thin, becoming dry and fibrous, like a piece of driftwood that had been baking in a sun that had never existed. It was being unmade, its history as a tree, as a door, being eaten from the other side.
"What are they?" Elias breathed, his voice a ragged whisper.
"A mistake," Aeridor replied, the thought laced with a deep, cosmic dread. "A reality born without substance, only need. A cancer that sought to devour its neighbors. It was the first reality the Librarians ever… scoured. But they could not erase the hunger. It remains, drifting in the void between worlds, listening for the quiet places."
A fine grey powder began to sift from under the door, spreading across the floor like sand from a broken hourglass. It was the dust of his door's existence.
Elias backed away, his gaze darting around the room, searching for an escape that wasn't there. The windows led to a five-story drop. The walls were solid. The bubble of folded reality he had created to hide from the Librarian had become his tomb.
The scratching stopped.
For a single, heart-stopping moment, there was only silence. Then, a sound like a dry twig snapping echoed from the door. A small, dark hole, no bigger than a coin, appeared in the center panel. It wasn't a hole that had been drilled or punched through. The wood had simply… ceased to be.
Through that hole, Elias saw nothing. Not the hallway outside, not darkness, but a perfect, absolute void. It was a patch of anti-reality, and as he watched, it began to grow, the wood around its edges dissolving into grey dust.
The Thirsting Things were pouring through.
Panic, sharp and blinding, finally broke his paralysis. He couldn't fight that. How could you fight a hole in the world? He couldn't reason with it. How could you speak to an appetite?
His eyes fell upon the one thing in the room that wasn't entirely of this reality: the ugly, iron-bound chest. His conceptual blind spot. It didn't bend space; it simply convinced the universe that whatever was inside it wasn't worth noticing.
It was his only chance.
He lunged for it, his feet slipping on the fine layer of dust that now coated the floor. The hole in the door was widening, the circle of nothingness expanding at an alarming rate. The air in the room grew cold, the colors of his wall charts and books seeming to dim and flatten as the void's aura of non-existence spread.
"Hurry, Archivist!" Aeridor's voice was a shriek in his mind.
He reached the chest, his fingers fumbling with the heavy iron latch. It was cold to the touch, a deep, grounding cold that felt fundamentally real in a way nothing else in the room did anymore. The latch was stiff. His hands, slick with a cold sweat, slipped on the metal.
Behind him, the sound of dissolving wood was replaced by a low, hungry hiss. The void had consumed most of the door and was now spilling into his apartment like a silent, black tide. It flowed across the floor, and where it touched, the wooden floorboards turned the same lifeless grey, their essence consumed in an instant.
The latch finally gave way with a heavy clunk. Elias threw the lid open. The inside of the chest was dark, smelling of old iron and ozone. It was an invitation to oblivion, but it was a safer oblivion than the one that was currently eating his apartment.
He didn't hesitate. He grabbed the crystalline shard from the mail table, its faint light a small comfort, and scrambled into the chest. He was halfway in, his legs dangling over the edge, when the edge of the void touched the leg of his desk.
The wood didn't burn or break. It simply vanished, turning to a puff of grey dust that was immediately swallowed by the encroaching nothingness. The desk collapsed with a clatter, its contents spilling onto the rapidly disappearing floor.
With a final, desperate heave, Elias pulled his legs in and reached for the heavy lid. The hissing of the Thirsting Things was all around him now, the color draining from the world above.
He slammed the lid shut, plunging himself into absolute darkness. The last thing he heard before the iron sealed him in was the sound of a billion years of unending, ravenous hunger filling the empty space where he had once lived.
End of chapter 5