The Library was no longer a place.It had once been a sanctuary—a haven carved from quiet thought and careful preservation, where the walls breathed silence and the shelves stood like monuments to memory. Its foundations had been etched in the stone of time, the air perfumed with the scent of old parchment and forgotten wisdom. It had once existed as something fixed, something sacred.But not anymore.Now, it was a storm.A howling tempest of thought and unraveling continuity. History shrieked through shattered rafters, clawing its way out of scrolls too old to be named. The very walls—once strong enough to bear the weight of a thousand forgotten tongues—bled ink in steady, grief-soaked rivulets, like the tears of a god who had finally admitted they were never omniscient. The halls twisted, stretching impossibly in directions that no geometry could explain. Doors opened into yesterday, and stairwells collapsed into the day after next. The Library no longer held knowledge. It was knowl

The library trembled.Not from footsteps, nor voice, nor storm—but from the memory of things that had once mattered.The walls, impossibly tall and curving into the shape of an eye that had long since gone blind, pulsed with whispers—echoes of forgotten fates. Runes etched themselves across the pillars like veins bleeding prophecy. The ceilings cracked with seams of time undone. And from the infinite heights of the library’s dome, books fell—not dropped, but exhaled, as if the library itself was trying to breathe out its last secrets before it forgot how.Pages screamed.Each one ripped itself from its spine mid-fall, howling the lives they held within—poems erased before they could be confessed, deaths reversed then remembered again, lullabies sung in languages that never had alphabets. Ink flowed upward in convulsions, staining the ceiling like rain returned to the sky, like regrets crawling home.And at the nucleus of this impossible, sacred ruin—two Selenes stood face to face.It

The floor of the Library had once been smooth white stone—blank, cold, unyielding to time. But now, it pulsed. Not with light, but with meaning. The bleeding pen—Kael’s last tool, the relic he had laid down to abandon authorship—lay trembling in the center of the grand chamber. Alone, it had begun to move.No hand touched it. No voice commanded it.And yet it wrote.Not in lines. Not in letters. Not even in the intricate, ancient glyphs of the Authors’ forgotten tongue. What bled from its impossible tip was song. The lines it traced into the polished floor glowed like liquid gold—and the symbols it etched sang.Kael stood frozen, breath caught between awe and fear. Every movement the pen made left behind a phrase that was not just readable but audible—like staves of a celestial orchestra, invisible instruments tuning to an unknowable scale. The glyphs shifted as they formed, looping into themselves, rethreading across the floor in widening circles. Not a story. Not a prophecy. Somethi

The light faded behind them, and the breath of reality ceased. No stars. No wind. No sound. Only the blank white void where a world used to be—a place once called the Cradle of the Architect, now wiped of all features, stripped of narrative, reduced to a silence that felt sentient.Kael stepped into it first.The moment his foot touched the groundless plane, something shifted. Not around him—within him. He had expected a shattered world, the kind of place scorched by divine fire or haunted by ghosts of the multiverse. Instead, what lay before them was not a place at all. It was a shape, ever-shifting—made of instinct, memory, and fear. Not terrain. Mind.“It’s you,” Selene whispered, standing at his side. Her voice was quieter than usual, not out of fear, but reverence. “This whole place… Kael, it’s your mind.”Elias frowned, hand on his sword. “No. Not just his. Look closer.”And then they all saw it—the world before them rearranging not into buildings or mountains or skies—but into

There was no sound.No wind, no flame, no rift crackling with broken light.Only Kael—standing in stillness, suspended in a realm that had no border, no bottom, no name.And then—A breath.Not from Kael.From memory.It began with a flicker, soft as the whisper of turning pages in a silent Library. A golden echo rippled through the void—not light, not heat, but recognition.And with that flicker, Kael remembered.Not the wars.Not the betrayals.Not the impossible burden of being a vessel, a god, a legend.He remembered her.Selene.Not the goddess. Not the weapon. Not the worldbreaker.Just Selene—the girl with stormlight in her eyes, standing on the observation deck of a dying world the first time their souls truly touched.Not with words. Not with fate.But with memory.⸻Kael stood again in that moment, the ancient version of himself watching the stars fade on the horizon, unsure whether to grieve them or follow them.She had said something then—quiet, unsure, entirely human.“I