Kael woke to silence.
Not the soft kind of silence that came with sleep, but a suffocating one—absolute and oppressive, as though the world itself had been muted.
He pushed himself up. Cold stone pressed against his palms.
Rows upon rows of shelves stretched endlessly in every direction, towering higher than cathedrals, stacked with countless blank tomes. No dust. No signs of life. Only pale marble and the faint glow of white lanterns that hung without chains.
"…Where am I?" His voice felt strange, swallowed before it could echo.
Kael remembered nothing clearly. There had been… a street, a screech of metal, then pain—sharp and blinding. Then this place.
A flutter of motion caught his eye.
One book drifted from the highest shelf, descending slowly as though invisible hands guided it. It stopped before him, hovering at chest height. Its cover was plain, unmarked.
When Kael reached out, the surface shivered beneath his fingers.
Letters burned into existence, carved in lines of light:
You are the new Archivist.
Kael stumbled back. "What—?"
The words kept writing themselves.
Duty: Catalog fragments of dead worlds.
Failure: Erasure.
The book pulsed once. Before he could drop it, the cover dissolved into smoke and sank into his hand. Pain lanced up his arm as lines of ink seared across his skin, shaping into a tattoo-like script that moved, shifted, alive.
A voice—cold, detached, and vast—spoke from everywhere at once.
"Another failure of mortality. Another servant gained."
Kael spun, searching the endless hall. No one stood among the shelves.
"Who's there?!"
No answer. The silence returned, heavier than before.
His hand tingled. The living tattoo reshaped itself into a small black book—its pages turning on their own.
Symbols bloomed into words:
Fragment Detected: Ruins of Carathos.
Stability: Critical.
Entry: Required.
The floor trembled. Ahead, the marble split open, spilling ink and ash that twisted into a swirling archway. Beyond it was only darkness, deep and endless.
Kael's pulse hammered. Instinct told him to run, but the pull of the vortex was already tugging at his chest, dragging him forward.
"What happens if I refuse?" he whispered.
The book in his hand answered with a single word etched in stark, merciless letters:
Erasure.
The choice was no choice at all.
The force yanked him off his feet. He fell into the darkness, the shelves vanishing above him, the hall swallowed whole.
As the black void closed in, the last words on the page burned into his vision:
The Library watches.
The Archivist must not fail.