Morning always begins the same way: the bell, the robes, the lamps. But today, every sound feels sharper, every shadow longer.
I clutch my satchel too tightly as I walk the aisles, my steps echoing like hammer blows in the cavernous silence. The other scribes move with their usual precision, but I can see it in their faces in the way they glance up from their books too often, the way their hands tremble at the quill. They feel it too. The Library is unsettled.
And above us, the Overseers are watching.
They stand at the ends of the great aisles like statues draped in black, their faces hidden beneath heavy hoods. No one knows what lies beneath the cloth… if there are eyes, or only emptiness. They never speak, never move, except to drift silently from one row to the next, robes trailing like smoke.
I've seen them my whole life, but never like this. Today they seem closer, heavier, their presence pressing against my skin. Every time I look up, I swear their hoods are angled toward me, though I can't see their faces.
I tell myself it's just guilt. That they cannot know what I did last night. That my secret is safe, folded between blank pages. But my book was silent. And the silence still clings to me like ash.
At my desk, I open the day's first volume. The hum greets me faintly, steady but thin. I run my fingers across the page, forcing myself into rhythm. Ink, quill, copy. The life of a tailor, mundane and solid. Thread and cloth. Needle and stitch.
But the words blur before my eyes. I keep glancing sideways, to the aisle's mouth where an Overseer stands. Still as stone. Watching. Or is it watching?
There is no proof they even see us. Perhaps they are blind beneath the hoods, listening only to the books. Perhaps they are as much legend as flesh. But when I shift in my seat, the fabric of its robe stirs faintly, as if acknowledging me.
My hand jerks, and ink spills across the page, blotting out a line of the tailor's life. Panic surges through me. A mistake. I've marred the record. The Library does not forgive mistakes.
I reach for the knife to scrape the blot clean, but before I can move, a shadow falls over my desk.
The Overseer has crossed the aisle.
It towers above me, close enough that I can smell the faint musk of dust in its robes. My breath catches. My hand freezes on the quill.
The hood dips once, a movement so subtle it might have been nothing more than a trick of the lamp. And yet, the message is clear: it saw.
I bow my head quickly, pressing ink-stained hands against the desk in silent apology. The air grows heavy, colder. The hum of the books around me dulls, as though muffled under a thick cloth.
Then, just as silently as it came, the Overseer drifts back to its post. I release a shaky breath, scraping the blot from the page with trembling fingers. The tailor's life is restored, unmarred. But mine… mine is already damaged.
For the first time since I was a child, I realize the Overseers are not guardians. They are wardens. And I am no longer certain whether they're keeping watch over the books or over me, over us.
The rest of the day felt like writing with a broken hand.
Every page blurred as I copied it, my quill dragging slower than usual, my mind not on the tailor's stitches or the baker's dough or the soldier's march, but on the silence waiting in my own book. That blank expanse was lodged behind my eyes, heavier than any word I could write.
When the lamps dimmed for the midday bell, I gathered my things and walked to the refectory. Rows of long wooden tables stretched across the hall, scribes hunched over bowls of broth and crusts of bread, their conversations hushed and careful. Normally the air here buzzed with the low murmur of gossip—disputes over record-keeping, whispers of whose book grew most quickly, who had received mention in the upper registers. Today, the silence pressed harder than the Overseers' gaze.
I slid into a seat beside Tomas, a broad-shouldered scribe with a voice like gravel. He nodded once, then kept eating, his spoon clinking softly against the bowl.
I cleared my throat. "Did you… did you notice anything strange in the stacks yesterday?"
Tomas stiffened but didn't look up. "Strange how?"
I lowered my voice. "A hum, maybe. Or the lack of one."
At that, he set his spoon down, slowly. His eyes flicked toward the Overseer standing at the hall's edge, its hood angled toward us like a blade. Then he turned back to me, face blank. "You should be careful what you ask, Tony."
"I just meant—"
"You didn't mean anything," he cut in, voice sharp but quiet. He picked up his spoon again. "Eat your bread."
The conversation was over.
I tried again later with another scribe, Mira, as we passed each other in the corridor. "Have you ever… heard the shelves go silent?"
Her face paled instantly. She shook her head so hard her braid whipped over her shoulder, and she hurried away without a word.
By the time the evening bell rang, I understood. No one would talk to me. Not openly. Not about this. The whispers I'd overheard yesterday had been dangerous enough. Whoever spoke them had risked punishment, maybe worse.
And me? I had seen it. Felt it. My book itself was empty. That silence wasn't a rumor, it was inside me now.
Back in my quarters, I lit a single lamp and sat cross-legged on the stone floor, staring at the satchel where I'd hidden the book. My hands itched to take it out, to see if anything had returned, but fear held me back. What if the pages were still blank? What if even the past had begun to fade?
What if, when I touched it, I found there was nothing left at all?
I pressed my palms over my eyes and breathed hard, trying to steady the tremor in my chest. The Library is eternal, I told myself. The Library remembers. The Overseers watch. But I no longer knew if any of those words were true.
I had barely slept when the summons came.
The knock on my door was softer than I expected, almost courteous, but when I opened it, two Overseers loomed in the corridor. Their hoods angled down toward me, faces hidden, robes brushing the stone.
No words. Just the gesture of a pale, ink-stained hand, curling for me to follow. My mouth dried, but I obeyed. You always obey when the Overseers call.
We walked in silence through corridors I had never entered before. Narrow, winding, the lamps fewer and farther between. The air grew colder the deeper we went, the stone sweating with damp, the hum of the shelves fading until I could barely feel it at all.
Finally, they stopped at a massive iron gate. One Overseer raised its hand, and the lock melted away like wax under a flame. The gate creaked open, and I was ushered inside.
The sight stole my breath.
Shelves upon shelves, stretching upward into blackness—emptied. Not a single book. Only dust and pale outlines where spines once rested. The silence was suffocating, like standing inside a cathedral whose god had abandoned it.
I stepped forward slowly, my boots echoing too loudly on the stone. The emptiness seemed to press against my skin, pulling at me. I reached for a shelf instinctively, and the moment my fingertips touched the wood, I felt… nothing. No hum. No pulse. Just dead grain beneath my hand.
The Overseers fanned out around the chamber, their hoods lifting as if in silent communion. The air stirred, faint and cold.
"What happened here?" My voice was a whisper, but even that felt like blasphemy.
None of them answered. They never do.
Instead, one extended a hand, presenting me with a stack of blank parchment and a quill. An assignment. My task was clear: record what I saw. Catalog the absence.
My stomach knotted. We scribes were trained to record lives, events, moments of fate—not… nothingness. To write emptiness itself felt wrong, dangerous. But refusing was not an option.
So I dipped the quill and began.
"Row upon row, shelf upon shelf. Volumes missing. Silence where there should be memory. The Library has forgotten…"
The words looked foreign, even monstrous, scrawled across the page. As though by writing them, I was making them true.
Hours passed. My hand cramped, my back ached, but the Overseers never moved, their hoods fixed on me, as if ensuring I did not flinch from what I saw. I filled page after page with silence—descriptions of emptiness, absence, erasure.
And with every line I wrote, one thought gnawed deeper: this was not the failure of a single book. This was plague. Spread. Decay.
When the final page was complete, the Overseer took the parchment from me, tucking it into its robe without a sound. Then they turned, leading me back through the winding corridors.
At the threshold of my quarters, one paused. Its hood dipped, slow and deliberate, and though no words came, I felt the weight of meaning press into my skull.
They had trusted me with this work. Or tested me with it. Either way, I was marked now.
The door closed behind me with a soft thud, leaving me alone with ink-stained hands that smelled of dust and nothingness.
I wondered if perhaps the Library wasn't eternal after all.
I thought the worst was over once they released me.
But as I stepped into the corridor outside my quarters, I realized one Overseer had lingered behind. It stood in the shadows at the far end, still as a pillar, its hood lowered as if it were listening for something.
I froze. My pulse pounded so hard I thought it might echo down the hall. Slowly, it lifted its head, and the hood angled directly at me. The air shifted. Heavy. Cold.
Then, for the first time in my life, an Overseer spoke. Its voice was not a voice at all—it was the sound of dry leaves stirred by wind, the scrape of quills across stone. A whisper that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"Your book is silent."
My breath hitched. My fingers clawed the fabric of my robe.
The hood tilted further, as if peering into me, stripping me down to marrow.
"Do not seek to hear it again."
The words slithered into my bones, leaving frost behind. I wanted to speak, to ask how they knew, to plead for explanation. But my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth. The only sound I made was the shallow rasp of my own breath.
The Overseer lingered a moment longer, the silence between us crushing, and then it turned. Its robes whispered against the stone as it drifted away, dissolving into the dark.
I stumbled back into my quarters, slamming the door and pressing my back against it. My chest heaved, sweat slicking my palms. They knew. Not just of the silence in the shelves. Not just of the erasures. They knew about me. My book. My emptiness.
And if the Overseers knew, then the Library itself knew. I sank to the floor, clutching my knees, my thoughts unraveling like loose threads.
I felt certain of two things: The Library was failing and I was failing with it.