The world of dusty ledgers and faded ink dissolved. The low hum of the fluorescent lights, the rhythmic clacking of keyboards, Sarah's occasional cheerful humming—it all faded into a distant, irrelevant buzz. Elias's universe had shrunk to the size of a single, century-old entry in a forgotten book.
Anomalies. Voids. A space that feels wrong.
The words of the long-dead surveyor echoed in his mind, a perfect description of the Librarian's work. This wasn't just a clue; it was a scar, hiding in plain sight in the city's own memory. The Librarian that had hunted him last night wasn't the first to visit Veridia. Something had happened here, long ago. Something that required a piece of the city to be surgically removed from existence.
"A wound," the voice of Aeridor whispered, its thoughts resonating with his own dawning horror. "A place where the fabric of your reality was torn open and then crudely stitched shut. Such places are… thin. The echoes of what was lost are often trapped there. And they can attract things that linger in the silence between."
Elias's hands were trembling. He carefully closed the heavy ledger, the dry leather puffing a small cloud of dust into the air. He had to go there. The thought was immediate, irrational, and absolutely unshakable. It was the most dangerous thing he could possibly do, walking willingly into a place that a cosmic enforcer had sterilized. But his apartment was gone. His life as a quiet, anonymous clerk was over. Hiding was no longer an option; the only path forward was through the mystery.
"I have to go," he muttered under his breath.
"Go where?"
Elias jumped, his head snapping up. Sarah was standing by his desk, holding two mugs of what she charitably called coffee. She was looking at him with an expression of genuine concern.
"Just… out," he stammered, trying to regain his composure. "Feeling a bit under the weather. Think I need some fresh air."
"You look like you've seen a ghost, Elias," she said softly, placing a mug on his desk. "Are you sure you're okay?"
Her simple, human kindness was almost more jarring than the cosmic threats. He was a man with the ghosts of a billion dead souls in his head, being hunted by monsters, and she was worried he had a cold. The gulf between their realities was an ocean.
"I'll be fine," he lied, forcing a smile that felt brittle and thin. "Thanks for the coffee, Sarah."
He waited until she was back at her desk before he stood up, his movements stiff. He grabbed his satchel, leaving the coffee untouched. He walked to his supervisor's office, mumbled a half-coherent excuse about a sudden migraine, and left without looking back.
The freedom of the city streets felt different now. It wasn't a comfort; it was an exposure. Every shadow seemed to stretch, every passerby's glance felt like a potential threat. He was a man with a target on his back, and he was walking toward the bullseye.
Since his apartment and everything in it was gone, he had to rely on his emergency cache. He kept a small, waterproof bag in a locker at a public transit station—a few hundred dollars in cash, a burner phone, a set of lockpicks, and a few carefully chosen items he'd collected over the years. The most important was a heavy, dull iron compass. It didn't point north. Its needle, forged from the metal of a meteorite that had passed through a forgotten reality, pointed toward conceptual voids—places where the rules of reality were thin or broken.
He took a bus to the industrial outskirts, the cityscape slowly decaying from gleaming high-rises to squat, brick warehouses and rust-eaten factories. The air grew heavy with the smell of chemicals and stagnant water. Finally, he got off at a stop by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A faded, peeling sign read: "VERIDIA MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY - NO TRESPASSING - CONTAMINATED SOIL."
This was it.
He pulled out the iron compass. The needle, which had been spinning lazily, snapped into position, pointing directly through the fence at the field beyond. It quivered with a frantic, insistent energy.
"The wound is strong here," Aeridor confirmed, its voice a low hum in his mind. "I can feel the silence. It is… hungry."
The field was a bleak, empty expanse of cracked dirt and sickly, yellowed weeds. It was utterly unremarkable, yet looking at it made the hairs on his arms stand up. The surveyor had been right. It felt wrong. There were no birds circling overhead. No insects buzzing in the weeds. It was a patch of profound and unnatural stillness, a dead spot in the heart of the living city.
He found a section of the fence that had been bent and peeled back, a gap just wide enough to squeeze through. He hesitated for only a moment, the rational part of his brain screaming at him to turn back. Then he thought of his unwritten apartment, of the Librarian's relentless pursuit, and of the endless, gnawing question of why.
He pushed his satchel through the gap and slid through after it, the rusty metal of the fence snagging on his jacket. He was in.
The moment his feet touched the soil inside, the world changed. The distant hum of city traffic vanished. The air grew unnaturally cold, clinging to his skin like a damp shroud. The compass in his hand began to vibrate violently, the needle now spinning in a frantic, uncontrolled circle.
He had not just stepped onto a piece of land. He had stepped out of his reality.
He took a cautious step forward, the dry ground crunching under his boots. And then he saw it. In the center of the barren field, something was glinting under the pale, afternoon sun. It wasn't metal or glass. It was a flicker of motion, a distortion in the air, like heat haze on a summer road.
But it was giving off no heat. Only a soul-deep, penetrating cold. As he got closer, he realized it wasn't a haze. It was a tear. A shimmering, vertical rip in the fabric of the world, no taller than his hand. And through that impossible window, he saw something that did not belong in Veridia.
He saw a sky filled with black stars.
End of chapter 7