The silence inside the chest was absolute. It was a thick, heavy, and dreamless quiet, the kind that existed before the universe learned how to make a sound. For a long time, Elias didn't move. He simply lay curled in the fetal position, the smooth, cold shard of Aeridor pressed against his chest, and let the nothingness soak into him. The iron walls of the chest didn't just block out sound; they blocked out the world. Inside, there were no Librarians, no Thirsting Things, no memories of dying suns. There was only him.
Eventually, the silence became its own form of pressure. He had to know what was left.
With muscles that ached with a profound, soul-deep exhaustion, he pushed against the heavy lid. It swung open with a low groan, and he was met with the pale, grey light of dawn filtering through a window that was no longer there.
Elias slowly, cautiously, climbed out of the chest. His apartment was gone.
It hadn't been burned, or smashed, or torn apart. It had been… unwritten. The space remained, but everything that had made it his home was a landscape of uniform grey dust. The floor, the walls, the pathetic remnants of his furniture—all of it had been consumed, reduced to the same lifeless, fibrous powder. The void of the Thirsting Things had eaten the very concept of his apartment, leaving behind only the indigestible shell of the building itself.
He stood in the center of the ruin, the dust puffing around his ankles. His star charts, his books, his bed, his clothes—all gone. All except the clothes on his back, the satchel at his side, and the iron chest that now stood like a bizarre monolith in a desert of ash.
"They are gone," the voice of Aeridor whispered in his mind. It was faint, tired, but present. "The void has moved on, having scoured this place of all substance."
Elias didn't answer. He walked over to the gaping hole where his front door used to be and looked out into the hallway. It was untouched. The faded, peeling wallpaper was exactly as it had been. The smell of boiled cabbage still lingered in the air. The Thirsting Things had been surgical. They had come for him, and him alone.
He was homeless. He was a walking ghost in a city of 4 million people, and his only companion was the collective consciousness of a dead alien race currently residing in a piece of crystal in his pocket.
And he had to be at work in two hours.
The thought was so absurd, so profoundly mundane in the face of the cosmic horror he had just survived, that he almost laughed. He worked as a junior archivist—a glorified clerk—in the Veridia Municipal Records Department. It was a job of soul-crushing boredom, cataloging property deeds, zoning variances, and century-old tax ledgers. It was also the perfect camouflage. Who would ever look for a man who remembered dead universes in a place that actively weaponized tedium?
He couldn't just disappear. That would create a record, a loose thread for someone, somewhere, to pull on. The Librarians were nothing if not thorough. They would check the mundane trails, too. So, he had to go. He had to pretend it was just another Wednesday.
He used the bathroom of a 24-hour coffee shop to wash the dust and dried blood from his face. The man who stared back from the mirror was a stranger. His eyes were too wide, his face pale and gaunt. There were shadows in his gaze that had not been there yesterday. He looked haunted, which, he supposed, was the most honest thing about him.
He bought a black coffee and a stale pastry he couldn't taste and made his way to the office. The Municipal Building was a grey, brutalist block of concrete, a temple to bureaucracy. Inside, the air was stale with the smell of old paper and weak coffee. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sterile, flat light on the endless rows of metal filing cabinets.
"Cutting it a bit fine there, Thorne," a voice chirped.
Elias looked up to see Sarah Jenkins smiling at him from her desk. She was a woman of relentless cheerfulness, her workspace a chaotic explosion of colorful post-it notes and pictures of her cat. She was the most normal person he knew, and talking to her always felt like trying to describe color to a man born blind.
"Morning, Sarah," he mumbled, sliding into his own impeccably neat, sterile chair.
"Rough night? You look like you wrestled a ghost and lost," she said, her smile unwavering.
If you only knew. "Something like that," he said, forcing a weak smile in return. "Just didn't sleep well."
"Well, a mountain of pre-war water board ledgers will either cure your insomnia or make it worse," she laughed. "Coffee's fresh, if you can call it that."
He spent the next four hours in a state of detached numbness. He pulled dusty, leather-bound volumes from the shelves. He carefully turned brittle, yellowed pages. He entered dates and reference numbers into a database that was probably older than he was. The work was methodical, rhythmic, and blessedly mindless. It was a shield. As long as he was focusing on the precise ink strokes of a long-dead city clerk, he wasn't thinking about the sound of his door dissolving.
But the silence was a fiction. Aeridor was a constant, quiet presence in the back of his mind, a faint, melodic hum of thought. It was observing his world with a detached, ancient curiosity.
"This is your reality?" it asked, its thought tinged with something like pity. "It is so… dense. So slow. The patterns are simple. Repetitive."
It's called 'safe', Elias thought back, his fingers tracing a faded map of the city's original sewer lines from 1888. Or it was.
He was halfway through a ledger from 1902 when he saw it. It was a zoning variance for a plot of land on the city's industrial outskirts, near the old cannery district. The request was standard: a petition to build a new chemical processing plant. But it was the addendum, a handwritten note in the margins, that made him freeze.
The note was from the city surveyor at the time, a man named Alistair Finch. It was written in a shaky, frantic hand, so different from the neat cursive of the main entry.
"Request denied. Ground is unstable. Unsuitable for deep foundation. Bedrock survey shows… anomalies. Voids. As if something was there before and was… scooped out. The space feels wrong. Cold. I recommend this parcel of land be left fallow. Permanently."
Elias's blood turned to ice. He knew that feeling. The cold, wrong feeling of a place that had been scoured.
He quickly cross-referenced the parcel number in the modern database. The plant was never built. The land was still empty. It was officially designated as a municipal brownfield site, too polluted for development.
But that wasn't what held his attention. It was the parcel's official designation, a string of letters and numbers that meant nothing to anyone else.
To Elias, it was a scar. A faint, barely-there pucker in the fabric of his city's history.
And it was less than three miles from where the Librarian had found him last night.
End of chapter 6