The walls shifted as the beast's roar echoed through the library's lungs, yes, lungs, Altherion was almost sure now that the place was breathing. The floor pulsed beneath his feet. Every footstep a drumbeat in a funeral march yet to be written.
He stumbled past a shelf lined with books titled only "?", the spines twitching like worms when he brushed past them. The air thickened with static. The creature was near.
It barreled through a nearby corridor, smashing a pillar of ink-stone and shrieking as sparks rained around it. Its movements were less erratic now almost as if it had learned from him.
"Of course it adapts," Altherion hissed, eyes scanning the area. "Why wouldn't it?"
He threw up a quick prism ward. The monster's claw shattered it on contact, but just enough delay for Altherion to leap to the side, roll across the floor, and-
Boom.
A trap glyph, buried under a layer of illusory dust, activated beneath the beast's feet. Mana lines flared crimson.
"Inverse field: kinetic bleed."
The ground exploded upward, hurling the beast into a ceiling that had somehow become a mirror of the sky filled with stars that blinked in slow panic.
As it dropped back down, twitching, Altherion formed a triangle in the air. From each point, he channeled:
Arcane friction
Displacement current
Dimensional loop
It took form as a three-layered lattice, anchored to floating runes drawn in blood from his split lip.
"You want force? Let me show you pressure."
He slammed his palm into the center rune.
The air collapsed.
A sphere of gravity wrapped around the monster imploding space like a folding pocket of existence. The beast contorted inward, roared in pain, its compass-eye cracking into spinning shards.
Altherion fell to his knees, coughing, vision flickering. Blood ran from his ear. Using that spell took more than mana, it scraped at the mind.
But it wasn't enough.
The creature screamed, and its form began unraveling, only to reverse, rebuilding itself in ways less physical, more… suggestion. As if memory was trying to remember what shape it used to be.
It reformed from doubt.
"Of course," Altherion whispered. "You're made of this place. You're not supposed to die. Not here."
The beast now had wings. They shimmered like oil. It took flight, flinging debris and books and jagged pieces of meaningless text at him.
One hit. A sentence embedded itself in his shoulder like a curse: "What you forget will become you."
He tore it free, eyes burning.
Think.
You're not stronger. You're smarter.
He reached for a volume, no title, no spine, just a writhing knot of potential. He opened it. A scream poured out. But beneath that:
A map.
Not of locations. But of paths of thought.
He traced one with his finger. It shimmered and led him not away from the beast, but through it.
No, not through. Between.
He ran forward.
The creature struck. He slid beneath it, casting "Vector Split" and his body bent, momentarily occupying two spatial angles at once. He phased just enough to dodge its claws and land behind it.
He snapped both fingers.
The gravity glyphs detonated.
The monster collapsed, massive, twitching, blind now in one eye.
Altherion approached, slowly, carefully.
Its body shuddered, twitching against time's will.
He whispered: "You're not real. You're a concept infected with instinct."
And the thing laughed.
It laughed.
The sound was wrong, like someone trying to mimic joy without knowing what it meant. A howl bent backwards.
The fight wasn't over.
It had learned him now.
Altherion stood straight, jaw clenched.
"So let's see if you can learn what it means to lose."
And then-
The beast surged again.
Another round began.
The creature moved faster now. Not because it had grown stronger, but because he had begun to fray. Every movement of Altherion's body felt borrowed, stolen from a version of himself that existed only seconds ahead in time. His heartbeat, distant. His vision flickering between reality and a dream he did not remember having.
Yet he did not run.
He drew another sigil in the air, but the mana around him began to argue. Glyphs refused to form. Logic unraveled. Even the laws of cause and effect trembled under the pressure of this place.
The monster's laughter echoed again, louder, no, not louder, closer.
It lunged.
Claws like concepts regret, repetition, failure, slashed across the air.
Altherion ducked.
Not because he predicted the strike, but because he remembered surviving it.
The timeline here is broken. Bent. Not fixed.
He smiled, lips split and trembling.
Then closed his eyes.
"Vector collapse."
He spoke the words without forming a spell. And yet, the magic obeyed.
Not because it was logical.
But because he believed it would.
A paradox cast in faith.
The beast froze midair.
Altherion opened his eyes. One pupil dilated far beyond the other, and in that blackness was a single shape:
A spiral.
"The spiral has no center," he whispered. "Only the illusion of motion."
The creature's body began to fragment, not shatter, not dissolve, but forget itself.
Its legs turned to paragraphs. Its torso, an equation with no equal sign. Its wings became longing. And its face-
It never had a face.
It never had anything at all.
Altherion stepped forward.
"You are nothing but a metaphor. And now I reject you."
With a final gesture, just two fingers drawn across the air like a closing wound, the beast was undone.
Not slain. Not destroyed.
Unwritten.
Silence returned to the library.
Real, terrible silence.
Books no longer whispered. The walls no longer wept ink. Even the geometry of the space stilled, if only for a breath.
Altherion stood alone, blood dripping from his hands. Not all of it his.
He looked down.
The floor no longer pulsed.
The library had accepted him, if only as a scar.
"Liesette…" he muttered, then clenched his jaw. "I'm done chasing phantoms."
He turned, but paused.
On the spot where the creature had died, unbeen lay a single object:
A mask, made of mirrored glass.
It bore no expression, but Altherion saw himself in it.
Except the version of himself reflected there… was smiling.
He looked away.
And continued walking.
***
Altherion's footsteps echoed across the twisting floor of the library if it could still be called a floor.
The space no longer obeyed shape or symmetry. Hallways bent where they shouldn't, shelves bloomed like fungus in impossible angles, and the very air felt... aware. Watching. Rewriting itself as he walked.
Then, there he was again.
Velimir Drahoslav.
Still standing between two towering shelves, his back to Altherion, head slightly tilted as if listening to something that didn't belong to this world. The fog masking his face still shimmered like static, as if the universe had censored his identity out of kindness or fear.
This time he was seated, perched on a chair made of books that hadn't been written. His pen danced across the air, scratching invisible letters into the nothingness.
Altherion hesitated, then approached.
"You again," he said, weary. "I thought you'd vanished with the rest of this place."
Velimir didn't look up. "I vanish only when I'm no longer needed. But you, you're still full of questions. And the worst kind, too. Personal ones."
Altherion narrowed his eyes. "I'm looking for someone. A girl. Her name is Liesette. Have you seen her?"
Velimir stopped writing.
Slowly, he tilted his head to one side, as if weighing the name like a stone in his hand. He murmured, "Liesette... A delicate name. Like the breath before a lie."
"Please," Altherion snapped, impatience seeping into his voice. "If you know where she is, just tell me."
Velimir stood, the books beneath him groaning like something alive.
"I do not know where she is, but I know where someone is who once carried a name like that. Maybe it's the same. Maybe it's not. Names are loose threads here, constantly stitching themselves into new meanings."
"What does that even mean?"
"It means," Velimir said, beginning to walk, "that the girl you seek may not be waiting to be found. She may be busy becoming someone else."
He stopped beside a wall. With a single gesture, the stone rippled like water, revealing a thin vertical slit, a passage? A scar? It was hard to tell.
"Walk through, beyond this fracture, there is something... someone... who bears a resemblance to what you remember. But beware, resemblance is the cruelest kind of hope."
Altherion didn't move. "Why are you helping me?"
Velimir turned halfway, fog-shrouded face twitching subtly, almost like a flicker in a corrupted film reel.
"I'm not helping you, I'm helping the version of you who'll look back and wish you'd tried."
Then he added, in a quieter tone, "And maybe, I'm helping the versions of myself that never said anything at all."
Silence.
A moment passed where neither man moved. Then Velimir gestured again, and the doorway pulsed softly.
"Go, seeker. Time has already forgotten what you're looking for. If you don't hurry, you might forget it too."
Without another word, Velimir turned back to the shelves and resumed writing in the air, as if Altherion had already vanished from his mind.
The young man glanced once more at the strange passage, then stepped forward into light that fell upwards, into the mouth of a stairwell spiraling down into the sky.
***
He walked.
He kept walking because not walking meant thinking, and thinking in this place was dangerous. Thoughts echoed, multiplied, distorted.
Memories unspooled in reverse, then snapped forward again like whips of cold air against his temples.
It was not a path, not truly.
One moment his boots stepped on something like stone, another on something like flesh. And once, for a terrible stretch of time that lasted perhaps a heartbeat or a year, the ground beneath him was made of pages, each page covered in ink that bled his own name.
He muttered to himself. Sometimes curses. Sometimes prayers. Sometimes the same phrase, again and again, like a rope thrown into the dark sea of madness.
The silence of the realm had texture here. It rubbed against his ears like static, like the moment before a scream. And still, he walked.
Through archways that melted into sand. Through doorframes suspended in midair. Through mirrors that reflected not his face but that of a child he had never been.
Then came the street.
A cobbled corridor in the fog, almost absurd in its mundanity. The stones glistened with dampness. Lanterns swung gently, rhythmically, though no wind touched his face.
Buildings lined the path, too symmetrical, too perfect like a town rendered from a memory someone else had dreamt.
And at the end of the street. A figure.
Small. Slender. Familiar.
Blonde hair, fluttering with invisible motion. A stillness that struck him harder than any blow ever had.
"…Liesette?"
It felt too fragile to speak her name here. Like it would shatter if he said it too loud.
She stood unmoving.
He walked closer, slowly.
The light flickered in strange rhythms. His shadow elongated, twisted, seemed to fracture into several copies of itself. He ignored it.
His chest hurt.
The girl turned.
And it was her.
Her face. Her eyes. Her presence. Even the curve of her lips that had so often turned upward in that smug, infuriating smile of hers.
But something, no, everything was wrong.
Her gaze pierced through him not with recognition, but with… curiosity. Detached, clinical, like he was an equation she was trying to solve. The face was Liesette's. The soul behind it? He wasn't so sure.
Altherion stopped walking.
"…Liesette, is it you?"
Her head tilted. A subtle motion, but there was something marionette-like in the way it moved, as though the bones of her neck didn't quite understand the function they performed.
Silence stretched between them.
Then-
Crack.
A sound. Like porcelain fracturing. But not in the ground. Not in the buildings.
In the air itself.
He gasped.
Thin white lines raced across his vision like lightning bolts under glass.
The street split down the center, not physically, but conceptually. He could see the idea of the street breaking, the notion of it unravelling. As though it had been painted on a thin sheet of ice and someone had taken a chisel to its core.
Another crack.
His vision split.
The girl who looked like Liesette smiled, and in that smile he saw everything she was not. There was no cruelty, no compassion, no malice, no warmth. She was an imitation that had forgotten what it was imitating.
And then he heard it.
A voice, clear and panicked, tearing through the disintegrating noise:
"Altherion!!"
It was her.
The real her.
Not some mirrored echo.
He turned, spinning through the fractured dimensions, and through the mosaic of splintering light he saw her, Liesette rushing forward, mouth open in desperation, hands reaching as the world fell apart.
"Altherion, don't-"
His name was the last thing he heard before the glass of existence shattered completely.
White light surged from every crack.
Sound disappeared.
And Altherion fell, not into darkness, but into something far more terrifying. A possibility.