Lira's breath trembled in the cold wind as she clutched the ring in her palm.
Somewhere far beyond her small town — beyond the tangled woods and cracked highways — the world trembled.
The Book AwakensDeep beneath an abandoned university on the outskirts of Prague, a single candle burned in a room that shouldn't exist.
The archives had been sealed since the war — a labyrinth of forgotten corridors filled with mold, dust, and things that whispered when the air grew too still. No one came here anymore.
But tonight, the candle flickered without a hand to light it.
On a rotting wooden desk sat a leather-bound book, blackened by age and something darker. Chains once wrapped around it lay broken — not snapped, but disintegrated, as if time itself had surrendered.
The air thickened.
Faint whispers drifted from its pages — not in one voice, but many. Some pleaded. Some screamed. Others laughed in tones that made the walls pulse and the candle flame bend toward the cover.
The Book shuddered.
Its spine creaked like an ancient door opening. The pages fluttered — first slow, then faster — until they stilled on a page filled with bleeding letters that rewrote themselves endlessly:
"Knowledge… is hunger."
A librarian ghost that had lingered in this place since the fire decades ago watched silently from the corner.
She tilted her head, eyes hollow, trying to remember what books used to feel like.
The moment the book pulsed with red light, she vanished — drawn into its pages, her form dissolving into ink.
The Book sighed.
Then it breathed, drawing in the stale air, the mold, the dust, the faint remnants of life from every dead thing in the archive.
On its cover, faint symbols glowed — four circles intersecting. Only one burned bright red.
The Book had awakened.
And far, far away —
in the hands of a girl clutching an ancient ring —
The same symbol faintly shimmered beneath Lira's skin.
Elsewhere the mountains of Nepal, buried in a shrine long forgotten by its monks, a totem carved from bone began to hum — its carved eyes bleeding golden tears.
In a vault beneath the sea, inside a sunken temple, a crystal gem refracted impossible colors, twisting reflections into moving shapes that stared back with awareness.
And above them all, the night sky rippled — a subtle, soundless distortion, as if reality itself held its breath.
The world didn't know it yet.
But the soul of a man long dead had begun to remember itself — piece by fractured piece.