The Library breathes when I breathe.
That's what it feels like, anyway. Each step I take along the marble aisles, each turn of a page, each stroke of my quill—it all seems to echo through the endless halls, as though the shelves themselves are listening. I have never known silence, not true silence, because here the air is never still. Every book hums, low and steady, the way a body does when it sleeps. That humming has been the sound of my life since childhood. Some people hear the sea when they dream. I hear paper.
I start my morning the same way I always have: by checking the lamps. The flames never go out on their own, but sometimes the shadows creep further than they should, and that means a wick has faltered or a lens has cracked. Shadows are dangerous in the Library. You can lose a whole lifetime in a single misplaced shadow.
Today the lamps burn steady, the rows of shelves stretching beyond sight in a golden haze. The air smells of ink, leather, and candlewax, familiar as the back of my hand. My own hands are blackened with permanent stains, little scars of the quill that no soap or scrubbing can erase. I used to be ashamed of them. Now, I think of them as proof that I belong here, that I am part of something greater than myself.
I press a hand to the spine of a passing book as I walk. It vibrates faintly under my palm, alive with the story of someone out there—someone who will never know I touched their life. My duty is simple: to keep their book safe, legible, and whole. To ensure their story continues without interruption. I am one of many scribes. We do not choose which books to tend; the Library decides. And the Library never errs.
That's what we tell ourselves.
I move to my assigned shelves and open the day's first volume. The ink is fresh, still glistening faintly, describing a child's breakfast in a farmhouse far away. It's mundane, unremarkable, but it matters. Every life matters, no matter how small. My quill dips into the inkpot, and I prepare to copy the words into the Record—a ledger we keep as backup, though none of us has ever had cause to use it. The Library is eternal. The books endure.
Still, my hand trembles faintly as I write. Lately, I've begun to notice little irregularities. A smudge where there should be clarity. A hesitation in the hum of a book. I've told myself it's my imagination, a trick of exhaustion or the dim light. But the doubt gnaws at me.
I shake the thought away and force my attention back to the text. The boy finishes his porridge, runs out to chase chickens. I write it all down. My job is not to judge or question. Only to preserve.
By midday, I have copied seven lives. I rise, stretch my back, and walk the aisle, running my fingertips along the spines like rosary beads. Every vibration reassures me: they are alive, they are whole, the world is as it should be.
And yet, somewhere deep in my chest, there's a weight I can't shake. A heaviness, as if something in the Library has already gone still.
It began with a whisper too soft to be real.
I was leaning over a book about a farmer in the western provinces, recording the day's harvest, when I felt it: a faint flutter in the hum beneath my fingers. Normally the books vibrate with a steady rhythm, a pulse like a heartbeat. This one stuttered, skipped, then faltered entirely.
I froze. The quill in my hand dripped ink onto the desk, pooling like a spreading shadow. The spine beneath my palm felt cold. Dead.
I lifted the cover and turned the page, expecting to see the man's life as usual. The morning's entry had been written, his footsteps across his fields faithfully inscribed. But halfway down the page, the words bled thin. Ink that had once been solid black was now pale gray, the letters dissolving into the parchment as though the book itself were trying to forget them.
I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes, certain it was fatigue. When I looked again, the page was worse. Entire sentences gone. Paragraphs swallowed into blankness.
"No…" The word slipped out before I could stop it. Speaking aloud in the Library is forbidden, but silence felt heavier than sin.
The book's hum stuttered again, a dying candle flame. The erasure spread like frost across the parchment. The farmer's wife no longer existed on the page. His morning's work faded grain by grain from the record. And then an entire line vanished in the span of a heartbeat: He returned home at dusk, tired but content.
Gone.
I slammed the book shut and pressed both hands against the leather cover, as though sheer force could anchor the life inside. My pulse thundered in my ears. This couldn't happen. Books don't forget. Lives don't simply vanish.
I tried to calm myself, whispering the old creed: The Library remembers so that the world may endure. But the words felt hollow, like reciting a prayer to a god that had already abandoned its temple.
What unsettled me most wasn't the fading, though—it was the silence. Normally, even the smallest life hums with quiet persistence, a vibration that tells you: yes, they are still here. But as I held that book, the silence inside it deepened until it was like pressing my ear to a grave.
And I swear, in that silence, I heard something else.
Not nothing. Not emptiness. But a low hiss, like ink poured into water. A sound that didn't belong in the Library. A sound of unwriting.
I ripped my hands away from the book as though burned. The silence lingered, clinging to me, sinking into my skin.
For the rest of the day, I copied page after page, forcing myself into the rhythm of duty, but every word felt brittle, every line fragile. I avoided looking at the farmer's book again. I couldn't. Not yet. But the image stayed in my mind, the gray letters dissolving like snow in fire.
When the lamps dimmed that evening and the other scribes dispersed to their quarters, I lingered at my desk, staring down the aisle at the shelf where that book waited. My hands itched to open it, to see if the words had returned, if the hum had steadied. But I didn't move. I was afraid of the answer.
I did not sleep well. My quarters are carved into the stone beneath the Library, no windows, no sound but the faint, eternal hum of the shelves above. Usually that hum soothes me to sleep. Last night it gnawed at me instead, a reminder of the one voice that had gone silent.
When the morning bell rang, I washed the ink from my arms, dressed in my gray robe, and told myself the previous day had been an illusion. A smudge. A trick of the lamp. Nothing more. But as I walked back into the aisles, my steps slowed. The shelves seemed taller, the shadows deeper, as though the Library itself was listening for my disbelief.
I went about my duties carefully, double-checking every volume I touched. The hums were steady. The pages full. And yet the weight in my stomach would not ease.
It was near the southern stacks, past the genealogical registers, that I heard them. Voices. Soft, urgent, not the casual murmurs of colleagues but the kind of whispers carried like contraband.
I should have turned back. Instead, I lingered, fingers grazing spines as though in idle work.
"…two shelves. Entirely gone," one voice said, tight with fear.
"That's impossible. Shelves don't just—"
"I saw them myself. Silent as stone. Every book cold."
My pulse thudded.
"Do not speak of it again," a third voice hissed. "If the Overseers hear, we'll be punished."
"But what if it spreads? What if—"
"Silence."
I leaned too far, trying to glimpse them around the corner, and a loose scroll slipped from my sleeve, tumbling to the floor with a papery sigh. The whispers cut off instantly.
I froze, blood pounding in my ears. Then, slow footsteps approached.
A scribe rounded the corner—a boy younger than me, sharp-eyed, with ink still wet on his cuffs. His gaze flicked from the scroll at my feet to my face.
"You didn't hear anything," he said flatly.
I bent to pick up the scroll, my mouth dry. "Of course not."
For a long, tense moment, he studied me. Then he nodded once, turned, and vanished into the shelves with the others.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
Not a dream, then. Not an illusion. Others had seen it—whole shelves gone silent. The same coldness I had felt in the farmer's book.
I clutched the scroll tight as I returned to my station. My hands wouldn't stop trembling.
We were taught from the beginning that the Library is eternal, immutable. The shelves do not fail, the words do not fade, the books never lie. To question this is to question reality itself. And yet…
Something is happening here. Something the Overseers don't want spoken aloud. I can no longer convince myself it is only in my imagination.
By the time the lamps dimmed that night, my nerves were raw. The whispers haunted me, their words clinging to the inside of my skull: two shelves… entirely gone. I couldn't stop replaying them, over and over, until the silence between each thought was unbearable.
I should have gone to my quarters. Should have lain down, closed my eyes, and let exhaustion drag me into dream. But instead, I found my feet carrying me deeper into the Library. Past the southern stacks, past the registers, down a narrow corridor where the light bent strangely against the shelves.
To my book.
We are told never to look at our own stories. Not out of law, but of wisdom. The future is a weight too heavy to bear, and the present too fragile to tamper with. But tonight, the rules felt meaningless. If the shelves themselves could vanish, then what did tradition matter?
The hum met me before I touched it, soft and familiar, like hearing your own heartbeat through a wall. My name glowed faintly across the spine: Tony, Son of No House. I had always hated the way it was written—so stark, so small—but tonight it looked heavier than any crown.
I hesitated, hand trembling in the lamplight then I opened it.
The first pages were as I expected. Childhood written in crisp black: the day I first held a quill, the smell of ink staining my fingers, the weight of my first mistake. The sentences were precise, uncaring. My mother's laughter recorded in neat strokes. My father's absence marked by blank space. My apprenticeship among the shelves. Each moment there, carved into permanence, undeniable.
I turned the pages quickly, desperate to see the present. My work from yesterday was there: copying lives, correcting smudges, tracing ink across parchment. Even my sleepless night was etched already, as though the book had been watching me toss and turn.
I should have stopped. But curiosity is stronger than caution, and dread even stronger than both. I turned the next page.
Blank.
Not smudged. Not faded. Blank. My throat tightened. I turned another. Blank. Another. Blank. Page after page of nothing, stretching on, mocking me with its whiteness.
I gripped the parchment so hard it crinkled in my hands. "No…" My voice cracked in the hollow silence. I flipped back and forth, desperate to find even a trace of words. But the future had stopped. Not erased—simply… unwritten.
The hum beneath my fingers faltered. Faint, uneven. A heart struggling to beat. And then it ceased.
I staggered back, clutching the book to my chest as if I could press life back into it by sheer will. But it lay cold and silent in my arms. The Library has always remembered. The Library has always endured. But my book—my life—was gone still before it was finished.
Which meant one thing, the thought pressing ice into my bones: I was already beginning to vanish.