Novels by Christina Wilder

Elias could only stare at his sister, Anna. Her smile—natural, chaotic, completely free of the cold, crystalline knowledge that had defined her for weeks—was the most beautiful, most terrifying thing he had ever seen.​The fading gold script on his hands, the residual light of the Librarian’s Oath, burned against the raw, visceral joy of seeing her whole. He had risked everything, achieved the impossible, and broken the perfect prison.​But the prison was a shell. The Oath was the sentence, and it was bound to him.​“Elias?” Anna repeated, closing the distance, her brow furrowing with genuine concern. “What is it? You’re trembling. And what are those scratches on your hands?”​Elias felt the Keeper's knowledge surge, providing the instantaneous, most efficient lie: a structural explanation for a personal crisis.​“I… I found the Prime Root,” Elias managed, forcing his mouth to form the words. “But the geometry was unstable. I was calculating the final variables when the main power gri

The light of the Obsidian Nexus was overwhelming, but the void in Elias's mind was deeper. His hands, now glowing with the gold script of the Librarian’s Oath, knew the geometric sequence of the Prime Root, the seven coordinates necessary to execute the final command. He was the perfect, calculating Keeper.​But when he looked at the shimmering red thread woven into the crystalline core—the thread of uncontained grief, the archive of his beloved—he reached for the name, and found only the cold, polished steel of nothingness.​Liss. The sound, the scent, the very concept of the word—gone. Purged by the Oath itself.​To save her, you must forget yourself and become the Keeper. The Creature's final, cruel paradox.​The Librarian’s knowledge—now Elias's knowledge—screamed at him: Execute Command: Containment. The most efficient solution was to seal the archive now, becoming the detached entity that managed the world's chaos, sacrificing the one emotional imperfection that threatened the s

​The moment Elias flicked the index card toward the Obsidian Nexus, time didn't slow; it fractured.​Anna, the Librarian in human disguise, reacted not with muscle, but with semantic force. The air around the plummeting card seemed to solidify, and a high-pitched, grinding noise erupted—the sound of the Archive’s systems trying to zero out the object's meaning before it reached the core. The card was a testament to human sentiment and chaos, and the Nexus was straining to deny its existence.​“Stop this folly!” Anna shrieked, her voice echoing and breaking, the human modulation dissolving into a layered chorus of countless whispers. “That piece of paper is a threat vector! I will not allow you to introduce disorder into the core program!”​Elias, still leveraging the impact of her earlier blow, hurled himself forward. He wasn't aiming to fight Anna; he was aiming to capitalize on her distraction. He knew the card—Albright’s desperate, chaotic truth—was his only window.​Anna pivoted i

​The impact was less a landing and more a sudden cessation of motion. Elias hit a surface that felt like solidified smoke, sprawling across something vast, flat, and chillingly cold. He scrambled onto his hands and knees, fighting a sudden, severe vertigo.​He was no longer in the ordered geometry of the maintenance room. He was in the Uncataloged Archive.​This space defied all logic that governed the Athenaeum. There was no up or down, only a suffocating blackness interrupted by floating, geometric shards of light—reflections of books that had never been written, ideas that had been permanently vetoed. Gravity was a suggestion; he felt anchored to the cold platform beneath him, but the air above swirled with phantom manuscripts, pages peeling away into nothingness.​The entire chamber hummed with a low, chaotic frequency, the opposite of the Clockwork Heart’s rhythmic ticking. It was the sound of everything existing simultaneously: the ultimate noise of raw, unfiltered information.

​The silence in the maintenance room was broken only by the loud, hissing combustion of the exposed pipes and the faint, terrible sound of the Vector beginning to twitch.​Elias clutched the sea-worn glass, his eyes fixed on the massive granite wall. The crystallized Clockwork Heart embedded in the stone was breathtaking in its terrible beauty. It was a dense, pulsing engine of pure order, crisscrossed by veins of arcane energy that formed the magical firewall. He knew instinctively that touching the runes would burn him to ash.​He had seconds before the Vector fully rebooted and became the Creature’s perfect weapon again. Elias had to find the Librarian’s Flaw—a vulnerability Varen or Albright must have foreseen.​The entire maintenance room was antithetical to the Creature’s mandate, yet this powerful Core was placed here, behind a fake incinerator door. Why? Because the Creature needed the Core to draw power from the oldest, most chaotic part of the building: the original stone fo

​The moment Anna sealed the brass bars around the carrel, Elias’s frantic, collapsing mind found a terrifying clarity. The Containment Field was not just a lock; it was a brazen display of power. Anna was using the coordinates he had correctly deciphered—the Tilted Pin and the A#-to-C Frequency—as the cryptographic key to fuse the brass. He had given her the tools to trap himself.​Anna’s serene face, framed by the bars, was maddeningly calm. “The physical link is strongest when it is supported by truth, Elias. You correctly isolated two pieces of the Prime Root. Now they serve the Archive’s true purpose: absolute order. This containment is mathematically perfect.”​Elias ignored the cold logic. He didn't have the mental capacity for theory anymore. All he had was the grief for Liss, and the chilling rhythm of the Clockwork Heart—the slow, metallic tick-tick-tick that was driving the fusion of the bars.​He pressed his hands against the brass, focusing not on the metal, but on the inv