The Grand Library did not sleep. It merely entered a low-power state, the hum of its ventilation systems deepening into a resonant, subterranean growl that vibrated through the canyon rock.
Kaelen stood at the edge of the God-Scar, the wind whipping his robes against his legs. The main brass doors of the Library were bathed in the harsh, stroboscopic flicker of Starlight lamps—far too exposed. Varrick's mark on his door had been a warning, but it was also a tether. If Kaelen walked through the front gate, the sensors embedded in the archway would read the chalk's isotopic signature and flag him instantly.
He had to use the waste chute.
It was a narrow, rusted orifice jutting out from the canyon wall, twenty feet below the foundation. Kaelen slid down the scree slope, his boots kicking up clouds of shale, until he caught the iron lip of the chute. It smelled of mildew, rotted parchment, and the metallic tang of old ink.
He squeezed inside. The darkness was absolute.
He slid.
The descent was a claustrophobic blur of scraping stone and rusted metal. He landed hard on a pile of shredded paper, the impact jarring his teeth. He lay there for a moment, listening.
Above him, the heavy thrum of the building's heating system masked his breathing. But underneath that mechanical rhythm, he heard voices. They were rhythmic, monotonous, chanting in a cadence that sounded less like prayer and more like a status report.
The Sub-Basement. The Incinerator Room.
Kaelen rolled off the pile of refuse. He pulled the iron knife from his belt. It was a pathetic tool—a rusted piece of cutlery against the might of the Orthodoxy—but the cold metal grounded him.
He crept through the shadows of the stacks. The sub-basement was where the "Rejected Texts" were exiled—books with printing errors, unauthorized poetry, or binding defects. Usually, it was a cold, silent tomb. Tonight, it was lit by the flickering orange glow of a roaring furnace.
He pressed himself against a metal shelving unit, peering around the corner.
Three figures stood around the massive central incinerator. They wore the heavy, fireproof aprons of the Sanctifiers—the low-ranking grunt labor of the Inquisition. Their faces were hidden behind polished brass masks that had no eye slits, only a single, vertical grate.
They were feeding books into the fire.
They moved with a synchronized, jerky efficiency. Grab. Pivot. Toss. Grab. Pivot. Toss. There was no reverence in the action. They weren't checking the titles. They weren't reading the contents. They were shoveling history into the flames as if it were coal.
Kaelen squinted. The Corruption in his blood—a low, buzzing 1.5%—acted like a lens. The heat haze rising from the furnace didn't look like shimmering air; it looked like pixelated distortion.
To the naked eye, the books looked normal. Heavy, leather-bound tomes.
To Kaelen's altered perception, they were... empty.
The covers were a flat, textureless grey. The titles on the spines were not words, but shifting strings of garbled alphanumeric code that dissolved as soon as he tried to focus on them.
One of the Sanctifiers threw a volume open before tossing it. The pages fluttered in the updraft.
They were stark white.
[Object: Book | Content: NULL]
[Status: Data Purged. Formatting Physical Container...]
Kaelen's breath hitched.
They weren't burning heretical texts. They were burning blank books.
Why burn something that has nothing written in it?
The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. They weren't blank when they were printed. They were blank now. Something had deleted the information—the histories, the names, the events—from the very fabric of the world. The ink had simply ceased to exist.
The books were just empty shells. The Inquisition was destroying them to hide the evidence of the edit.
It was a memory hole. A hard format of the physical drive.
"Sector 4 clearance complete," one of the Sanctifiers droned. The voice sounded tinny, synthesized, as if filtered through a cheap speaker. "Proceeding to Sector 5: Genealogy."
Genealogy.
Kaelen's heart hammered against his ribs. That was where he had been this morning. That was where Bren had handed him the note. That was where the records of every citizen in Oakhaven were stored.
If they were burning Genealogy, they were scrubbing the traces of the people they had erased.
He had to move.
He waited for the Sanctifiers to turn toward the coal cart, their brass masks reflecting the firelight. He slipped across the aisle, his soft-soled boots making no sound on the concrete. He knew the layout of the Archives better than he knew the lines of his own palm. He bypassed the main lift and found the service ladder, climbing silently up the shaft toward the second floor.
The Genealogy Wing was dark.
The gas lamps had been extinguished. The only light came from the pale, artificial glow of the moon filtering through the high dome windows. The air here was cold, conditioned to preserve paper, but it felt sterile. Dead.
Kaelen rushed to the filing cabinets at the back of the wing. These weren't the public ledgers he had checked earlier. These were the "Deep Storage" scrolls—the birth records, the bloodline charts, the raw data of the city's population.
He frantically scanned the brass labels on the drawers. T... U... V.
Vance.
He yanked the drawer open. The rails screeched in the silence—a sound like a dying animal. He froze, crouching low, waiting for a shout, for the sound of heavy boots.
Nothing. Just the distant, hungry roar of the furnace below.
He pulled out the file folder labeled VANCE, KAELEN.
He opened it on the floor, the moonlight illuminating the pages.
There was his birth certificate. His academy transcripts. His assignment to the Library. Everything was there, written in the crisp, golden ink of the Canon. The paper felt heavy, authoritative.
But there were gaps.
Physical gaps.
A strip of paper had been cut out of his employment history—the year he had taken paternity leave. The cut was surgical, the edges precise.
A page in the middle of the file had been torn out so violently that the jagged edge of the paper was still stuck to the binding.
Kaelen touched the torn edge. A spark of static jumped from the paper to his finger.
[Trace Detected: Deleted Object.]
[Object ID: Marriage_Certificate.doc]
[Recovery: Failed. Source File Missing.]
He flipped to the back of the drawer. There should have been a secondary file linked to his. VANCE, ELEN.
There was a folder.
It was labeled VANCE, [REDACTED].
Kaelen's hands shook so hard he nearly dropped it. He opened the folder.
The paper inside wasn't torn. It was blank. Pure, snowy white. No name. No date of birth. No weight or eye color. Just a sheet of high-quality parchment that had never known ink.
But in the center of the page, near the bottom right corner, there was a single, tiny smudge.
A fingerprint.
It was small. Greasy. The kind made by a toddler who had just eaten something sweet and grabbed a piece of paper she wasn't supposed to touch.
Kaelen touched his own thumb to the empty space beside it. He remembered. He remembered the day Elen was born. He remembered the priest smiling, saying, "A healthy soul for the Light." He remembered signing the document, and Elen reaching out with her tiny, sticky hand to grab the quill.
The System could delete the ink. It could delete the digital record in the minds of the neighbors. But it had missed the grease. It had missed the dirt.
"You missed a spot," Kaelen whispered. His voice broke. A tear cut a cold track through the dust on his cheek, landing on the blank page.
[System Logic Error.]
[Contradiction Found: Physical Anchor (Fingerprint) exists without Data.]
[Corruption: 1.5% -> 1.6%]
The smudge glowed faintly purple—the color of the Void. It was a glitch. A stain on the perfect white coat of the world.
He shoved the blank paper into his satchel, right next to the wooden horse and Bren's note. It was proof. Not of existence, but of the crime.
Clang.
The sound of a heavy iron gate slamming shut echoed from the floor below.
Kaelen stiffened. The air pressure in the room dropped suddenly, popping his ears. The moonlight streaming through the dome flickered, dimming as if a cloud had passed over the sun—but the sky outside was clear.
The silence that followed wasn't natural. It was heavy. It pressed against his eardrums.
[System Warning: Local Reality Stabilization in Progress.]
[Threat Detected: The Silencers.]
He wasn't alone.
He crept to the balcony railing and looked down into the main atrium.
The Sanctifiers were gone. Standing in the center of the great hall were three new figures.
They were tall—too tall to be human. They wore long, grey robes that seemed to absorb the light around them, darker than the shadows they stood in. Their heads were covered by deep hoods, but where a face should be, there was only a smooth, featureless mask of white porcelain.
No eyes. No mouth. No nose. Just a blank, white oval.
They didn't walk. They floated an inch above the marble floor, the hems of their robes trailing like smoke.
One of them tilted its head up. The blank mask looked directly at the darkened balcony where Kaelen was hiding. It couldn't see him—it had no eyes—but Kaelen felt a cold, static prickle wash over his skin, like a thousand insects crawling on his neck.
It was scanning for him.
Then, the sound began.
It started as a low hum, vibrating the glass of the display cases. Then it rose in pitch, becoming a piercing, oscillating ring that bypassed the ears and drilled directly into the brain.
It wasn't coming from the creatures. It was coming from outside.
BONG.
The Great Bell of the Sanctum Solis.
Kaelen flinched. The sound was deafening, a physical shockwave that rattled the dust from the rafters.
BONG.
The second toll.
BONG.
The third toll.
The sound hung in the air, vibrating in the marrow of his bones.
Kaelen's blood turned to ice. He remembered the nursery rhyme the children sang in the streets of the lower district.
One bell for the morning prayer,
Two bells for the evening air,
Three bells mean the Silence is here,
Hide your tongue and cover your ear.
Three bells meant a City-Wide Purge. It meant the Inquisition wasn't just looking for contraband anymore. They were looking for a virus.
Below, the Faceless figures began to ascend the stairs. They moved in perfect unison, gliding up the marble steps without bending their knees, defying gravity and friction.
Kaelen backed away from the railing. He looked at the main exit. Sealed by the lockdown gate.
He looked at the service vent high on the wall—the one that led to the roof. It was forty feet up, unreachable without a ladder.
He looked at his hand. The blue static was back, dancing between his fingers, reacting to his terror.
He had the blank paper. He had the toy. He had the truth.
Now he just had to survive the cleanup crew.