I woke before the morning bell, slick with sweat, the Overseer's whisper still clawing at my ears. Your book is silent.
For a while I lay in the dark, trying to pretend I hadn't heard it. That the voice had been a dream born of exhaustion. But no dream lingers in the bones like that. No dream chills the marrow.
By the time the bell rang, my decision was made. Fear had done its work, but curiosity had sharpened into something else. If the Overseers already knew, what good was silence on my part? Pretending ignorance would not protect me. The only weapon I had left was knowledge.
The Library hummed faintly as I stepped into the aisles, the sound thinner than it had ever been. Fewer scribes were at their desks, their faces pale and drawn. The Overseers loomed heavier than usual, stationed at every crossing, their robes trailing like shadows that never moved with the light.
I kept my head down, feigning normality, copying from a farmer's book. But my eyes betrayed me, flicking sideways, watching, searching. Looking for others who felt the same crack in the world that I did.
That's when I noticed her.
At the far end of the aisle, bent over a stack of volumes, a scribe moved too quickly. Her hands trembled not with fatigue but urgency, turning pages as though searching for something that wasn't there. Her quill lay abandoned beside her, ink drying on its tip.
When she looked up, our eyes met. Just for a heartbeat but in that moment, I knew. She had seen it too. Her gaze sharpened, warning me to look away. I obeyed, but my pulse thrummed with new heat.
I wasn't alone.
The thought carried me through the day, filling my lungs with something dangerously close to hope. There were cracks in the silence. Whispers hiding behind blank stares. Others knew the truth. Others were watching.
When the final bell tolled and the scribes filed out toward their quarters, I lingered, stacking my parchment slowly, waiting for the chance.
She passed my desk, her hood drawn low, her pace steady. But as she brushed by, a slip of paper fell from her sleeve and landed on my notes. Smooth, practiced, deliberate.
I froze until she had vanished down the corridor. Then, with trembling fingers, I unfolded the scrap.
Two words, written in hurried ink:
Midnight. Atrium.
My throat tightened. My palms slicked with sweat. For the first time since the silence began, the Library felt less like a prison and more like a secret waiting to be broken open.
The Library never truly sleeps, but after the last bell it grows still, like a beast at rest. The scribes retreat to their quarters. The lamps burn low. Only the Overseers drift through the aisles, silent as smoke.
It was under that silence that I crept from my room.
Every step felt like treason. The corridors stretched too long, shadows clinging to the walls, every corner a possible trap. My palms sweated against the folds of my robe, but I held the slip of paper tight. Midnight. Atrium.
The Atrium is one of the oldest halls in the Library, carved with towering columns and latticed windows no one has seen open in centuries. The ceiling vanishes into shadow, the air thick with the dust of forgotten ages. We are not supposed to linger there. The place is too quiet, too echoing, too sacred. The Overseers patrol it heavily.
Yet when I arrived, the space stood empty. No guards. No sound but my heartbeat thudding against the stone.
At first I thought I had been a fool. That the scribe—whoever she was—had lured me into a trap. My stomach twisted, my legs tensed to flee.
Then I heard it. A whisper. Low, deliberate. Not the thin murmur of a book, but a human voice.
"Over here."
I turned and saw her standing in the shadow of a column, hood drawn low. The same scribe from earlier, though in the dim light her features were difficult to make out.
"You came," she said.
My throat was dry. "You left me no choice."
A faint smile flickered across her face, there and gone. She stepped closer, her eyes catching the light. "You've seen it, haven't you?"
I hesitated. The Overseer's warning still clung to me, heavy and cold. But the memory of my book's blank pages pushed the words out before I could stop them.
"Yes," I whispered. "I've seen it."
For a moment, relief softened her features, as though she had carried a weight too heavy to bear alone. Then her expression hardened again.
"Don't speak of it openly. Not even here. The walls are not deaf."
My skin prickled. "Then why call me?"
"Because you're not the only one," she said. Her voice lowered to a dangerous hush. "Others have noticed. The silence. The erasures. Whole shelves gone, as though they never were. But fear keeps their mouths shut."
"And you?" I asked.
Her eyes gleamed. "I'm done being afraid."
The words struck me harder than I expected. For so long, fear had been the water I swam in. To imagine a world without it felt impossible—yet intoxicating.
Before I could answer, a cold draft swept the atrium. A shadow rippled across the far wall. Both of us froze.
An Overseer glided between the columns, hood angled toward us.
My blood turned to ice. I pressed myself against the stone, barely breathing. The scribe beside me was still as a statue, her face hidden in her hood.
The Overseer paused. Tilted its head. The silence deepened until even the dust seemed to hold its breath. Then it drifted on, disappearing into the darkness beyond the columns.
Only when its robes had faded completely did I dare exhale.
The scribe turned to me, her eyes hard. "You see? Even they know. They fear what is happening more than we do."
I shook my head. "If they fear it, then why not stop it?"
"Because," she whispered, "maybe they can't."
The thought shivered through me like a blade of ice.
Before I could ask more, she pressed another slip of paper into my palm. "Burn this after you read it." Then she vanished into the shadows, leaving me alone in the hollow vastness of the Atrium.
I clutched the note tight, my heart still hammering. I was no longer imagining it. No longer alone. There were others. And the silence was not just mine. It was spreading.
The slip of paper was small, barely larger than my thumb. By lamplight in my quarters, I unfolded it with shaking hands.
North Wing. Third level. Tonight.
The words blurred from sweat on my fingers. I held the parchment over my lamp's flame until it curled black, then crushed the ash between my palms. Still, the message burned hotter in my mind than any fire.
I should have ignored it. Should have stayed in my bed and prayed the Overseers would forget my name. But my book was silent, its pages already surrendering me to oblivion. What harm could come from a little treason, when my future had already been erased?
So when the lamps dimmed, I went.
The North Wing was older, colder, the shelves leaning inward like tired giants. The hum was faint here, threads of memory barely clinging. Dust lay thick, disturbed only by faint footprints. My heart raced as I followed them upward, past silent aisles, until the stair gave way to the third level.
That's when I smelled it. Smoke.
It clawed the back of my throat, bitter and acrid. My steps quickened, following the haze until I reached a long, narrow aisle lit by an orange flicker.
At the far end, a figure crouched with a lamp, holding its flame to a row of books. The parchment curled and blackened under the fire, pages twisting into ash. One by one, the hums went silent as volumes shriveled into nothing.
"No," I breathed. The sound tore from me before I could stop it.
The figure spun.
Not an Overseer. Not a scribe. Something else. Its face was pale and taut, its eyes wide with a madness that gleamed in the firelight. In its hands, the lamp shook, spilling sparks onto the floor.
"You shouldn't be here," it hissed, voice cracked and sharp.
Neither should you, I wanted to say. But the words died as my gaze fell on the shelf beside it. Every book was blank. Not burned, not erased. Just empty.
I staggered back, the floor tilting beneath me. The figure laughed, a dry, ragged sound.
"See?" it whispered. "There's nothing left to save."
Before I could speak, the flames leapt higher, licking up the spines, racing across the wood. The fire roared, hungry and sudden, and the figure vanished into the smoke, leaving me choking, eyes stinging, trapped between fire and silence.
I stumbled backward, the aisle alive with sparks. Pages fluttered down like black snow. My lungs burned, my vision blurred. Somewhere far off, the Overseers would already be gliding this way, drawn by the destruction.
But the image seared into me, hotter than any flame, was not the fire. It was the shelves that had burned before the fire touched them. Shelves already empty. Already forgotten. The flames only revealed what was already gone.
The fire swallowed the aisle in seconds. Flames clung to the shelves, racing upward like veins of molten gold. Smoke billowed thick, pressing down, clawing at my lungs.
I stumbled backward, coughing, eyes stinging. The hums around me faltered, each book falling silent as the fire consumed it—or revealed the silence that had already claimed it. I couldn't tell which was worse: the burning or the blankness.
Through the haze, shadows drifted. The Overseers had come. Their robes glided untouched by flame, their hoods angled toward the destruction. For a terrible moment I thought they would let me burn as punishment.
But then one lifted its hand. The fire bent.
I had no other word for it. The flames twisted sideways as though pulled by an unseen thread, collapsing in on themselves. Smoke curled upward and vanished into nothing. The shelves stood blackened, skeletal, but the fire was gone.
Silence filled the space where heat had been. A silence heavier than any roar.
The Overseers did not look at me. Not directly. They only tilted their hoods toward the ruin and then turned, robes trailing back into the dark, leaving me gasping on the floor.
I thought I was alone until a hand gripped my arm.
It was her—the scribe from the Atrium. Her hood was down now, her face sharp, eyes dark with soot. She hauled me to my feet with surprising strength.
"Come," she hissed. "Before they change their minds."
I stumbled after her through smoke-stained corridors, down staircases, through passages I had never seen. Finally we burst into a small chamber lit only by a single lamp.
Three other scribes were there, their faces pale, eyes wary. They looked at me as if weighing whether to welcome or condemn.
"This is Tony," the woman said simply. "He's seen it."
That was enough. One by one, the others nodded.
The chamber was bare, but on the floor lay scattered scraps of parchment. I bent to pick one up. The words were frantic, written in a dozen different hands: blank shelves, vanished hums, empty books. Desperate testimonies, proof that what I had seen was no fever dream.
"We call ourselves the Rememberers," she said. "Because if we don't remember what's being lost, no one will."
Her gaze fixed on me, steady and unflinching. "The Overseers will never tell us the truth. They're not guarding against the silence they're hiding it. And it's spreading faster than any of us feared."
I clutched the parchment in my hand, the ink smudging under my sweat. My chest still heaved from the smoke, but inside, a different fire had caught.
I was not alone. The silence was real. And there were others willing to fight it.
"I'm in," I said, my voice hoarse but certain.
The woman nodded once, as though she had expected nothing less.
And in that dim chamber, surrounded by the last fragile scraps of memory, I swore an oath. If the Library was dying, I would not let it go quietly.