Lira was looking at the golden words above the gate.
There was no emotion in her eyes, but this time, those very emotionless eyes were showing her deepest emotion.
She stepped one foot across the threshold of the library — and it was as if she froze.
For a second, her mind refused to understand what her eyes were seeing. It wasn't just a library—it was a world built upward.
The space was hollow at its center, a colossal open chamber stretching so high she had to tilt her head until her neck ached just to see the top. Floor upon floor—hundreds of them—rose in endless rings around the hollow core, each level curving perfectly into the next like layers of a giant mechanical hive. The walls themselves were the bookshelves.
What struck her first was the scale.
It was too big.
Far too big for something meant to hold books. But then again it's not just to keep books.
A cold gust of wind brushed past Lira's face. She suddenly felt a chill.
She was just about to zip up her hoodie when complete silence fell over everything.
Slightly confused, she looked up.
The sight before her was surprising, not just for her, but for everyone present there.
Every single book in the library was floating in the air, flying in circular motion like pilgrimming something.
And then all at once, they came crashing down to the floor.
Everyone standing there was stunned and shaken.
"Neil, did you see that?" a girl standing behind Lira said.
"Yeah," other one replied.
"Wait — I'll call the control room," said, voice tight with panic.
Lira turned around and noticed they were two security officers, likely the ones in charge of this floor.
The girl took out her phone and began speaking to someone.
"Hello, Control Room? Something abnormal has happened with the books on the first floor. Please check the security cameras and send a team up here to see what happened."
She paused suddenly, visibly startled.
"Riley, what happened?" the officer beside her asked with concern.
"Every book — every single book in the entire library — showed same anomalies, on every floor. " Riley said in a slightly disbelieving tone, as if she couldn't quite trust what she was hearing.
"What do you mean?" Neil asked.
"We don't know," she replied.
"The control room picked up the phone and said all the books in the library suddenly started flying through the air and then fell to the ground. They're trying to identify the phenomenon, but for now they're sending a team to clean up the mess."
"It's alright maybe it is just—" Neil couldn't form a sentence to assure his teammate.
After a moment, Riley turned to face the people around her.
"Excuse me, everyone — please don't panic. As we all know, these books are magical in nature. So perhaps for some reason they got a little agitated, but we've spoken to the control room — everything is alright and nobody is in danger."
As an officer, no matter how she felt, she had to make the people around her feel safe.
Everyone on the library floor visibly relaxed a little.
They all knew that these books — the Books of Judgment — were magical.
So most of them simply brushed it off, thinking this is just the nature of them. Besides, with everything happening in the world, seeing books floating in the air wasn't exactly a big deal anymore.
This world was no longer the normal world where humans would be frightened by anything abnormal. These people had already seen a world where facing monsters, creatures, and anomalies was just another Tuesday of their life now.
For all they knew, if a little fragment of the library were found here, witnessing a portal opening right in front of them was not a big deal — the door wide open for creatures from other worlds to walk through and destroy this building.
So everyone went back to their work. For them, this was perhaps just normal.
But for Lira, this was the first time she had seen the Books of Judgment up this close — and at first glance, they showed her something that no one had ever seen before.
Lira's feet and her mind were moving in two different directions.
Her mind was drifting back to her father — to his condition, to everything that weighed on her — while her feet were pulling her toward some nameless destination.
Where they were taking her, perhaps they knew, or perhaps they didn't.
But by the time Lira came back to her senses, she had already arrived at a section of the library where there were no people, no light.
The space before her had no visible end. Rows upon rows of towering redwood shelves spiraled upward, surfaces carved with strange patterns that seemed almost to shift when caught by the dim golden light.
White marble stretched beneath her feet, carrying the same cold she had felt when she first stepped inside.
Cobwebs draped the corners like abandoned silk. It felt as though she had stepped beyond the edge of the world she knew.
The books on the shelves looked as though no one had ever tried to reach for them. The dust settled over everything was proof enough.
Slightly puzzled, she thought to herself — these books didn't fall.
"So why were they saying every book in the library had fallen?" She asked herself the question. But she was already worn out enough.
She had neither the time nor the space to think about this unimportant one.
Now that she became aware of where she was, exhaustion hit her suddenly — as though she had been walking for ages.
As though she had traveled some long and winding road just to arrive here.
The benches here were thick with dust, so sitting was out of the question.
She cast an indifferent glance toward one of the cupboards, as though these books were somehow responsible for all of it. But her eyes snagged on the name of one particular book.
The Veil of Soil.
As strange as the name was, the book itself was placed just as unusually.
In that slot — that single compartment of the wardrobe — there was only that one book.
Perhaps that was exactly why it had caught her eye.
Her feet, once again, found their own destination without asking her permission.
And by the time the thought drifted down from her head to her hands, the book was already in them — and she was sitting on that very dust-covered bench, turning to its first page.