So much weeping, wasn't there?
A soul cracked here. A birth-of-evil there.
Even Ascendants wringing hands like mortals at a funeral—
And Qaritas?
Oh, sweet shadow-born boy.
He heard the scream.
Hex's scream.
The one that split galaxies and still echoes in the marrow of gods.
We watched Cree and Hydeius speak truths most deities bury in silence.
We watched Ayla peel back the past like a bandage still sticky with blood and light.
And most delicious of all?
He asked it.
The forbidden question.
"Isn't there another way?"
The air went still.
The old ones tensed.
And silence whispered: We've heard this before.
But here's the twist—
He meant it.
He meant to find a way.
Outside the Prophecy.
Outside the Path.
Outside the neat little loop the gods have been tying around existence since before the first mistake.
He wants to speak to Daviyi.
The Librarian.
The Keeper of Unforgiven Truths.
And so—
Lights, please.
Curtains open.
Shadows lean in.
Because now, my lovelies...
We leave the dreamers.
And meet the one who never dreams at all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The dining hall faded behind them like a memory set aside. Qaritas followed Ayla in silence, the shadows of his form still pulsing faintly in rhythm with her presence beside him.
The hallway ahead was vast, its arched ceilings aglow with threads of starlight and dreamfire. Along the curved walls stretched glowing doors, each marked with a symbol that shimmered faintly—a sword, a flame, a spiral, an eye, a crown—icons of truth, realms, and memories long buried. Each door pulsed with soft magic, quiet sentience, like slumbering gods waiting to be named.
But only one door pulled at them.
It bore a golden book, open but burning slowly from the spine outward—pages dissolving into light. Beneath it, the threshold was laced with veins of glowing gold, spreading like roots across obsidian-black stone.
Komus stepped ahead, brushing a hand against the symbol.
The moment his fingers met the door, voices exploded behind it—angry, echoing, sharp.
"—I told you not to reorganize the living texts by emotional impact, you logic-bound slab of hierarchy!"
"You said I had an hour, and I took exactly one."
"You erased five centuries of marginalia! Do you know what happens when you rearrange an echo-manifested library by logic? The books eat each other!"
Qaritas blinked.
"Should we...?" he asked, half a step back.
"Too late,"
With a flick of Komus's wrist, the door split open like the turning of a grand tome.
The chamber beyond was not merely a library—it was a city of memory carved from moonlight and crystal ink.
Floating shelves swam through the air like drifting planets. Pillars of text spiraled into infinity. Lanterns suspended from nothing shimmered with truths too ancient for language. A soft hum buzzed in the bones—a vibration of bound words, still whispering.
And at the center, the argument continued.
A woman stood inches from Jrin, who looked characteristically composed despite the furious finger pressed to his chest.
She was breathtaking in a way Qaritas didn't fully understand—purple skin like twilight mist, hair a flowing mass of silver-blue, and eyes the green of new worlds forming. Her clothes were tailored but practical—trousers, a sleeveless double-breasted jacket stitched with glyphs—more suited to war than reading, but she wore them like truth made flesh.
Qaritas froze.
"I know her," he murmured. "From the council."
Ayla leaned beside him, voice quiet with amusement.
"That's Daviyi. The Librarian. The one who asked you how it feels to be mistaken for someone else."
"She looked... softer then," Qaritas said.
"She was bored then," Ayla replied. "Now she's furious."
Daviyi shoved a thick tome into Jrin's chest.
"You reorganized the Infinite Shelf by alphabetical significance," she hissed.
Jrin shrugged. "Well, now you'll have time to reorganize it properly. You can thank me later."
Instead of thanking him, she threw the book at his head.
Jrin caught it, barely. "Precisely."
"Out." she snapped. "Get out of my library."
Jrin, utterly unfazed, gave a soft smirk. "I'll see you in my bed later."
Qaritas's head whipped around. Daviyi blushed—barely, just a flicker of warmth in her cheeks—but it was there.
"Unbelievable," she muttered.
Ayla smiled, gently nudging Qaritas forward.
"They've been like that since the First Fold. They're... beloveds."
"Beloveds?" Qaritas echoed.
"Soul-bonded," Ayla said. "Bound by Hrolyn in the early days to forge lines of power and purpose. Twenty-six of the Ascendants are paired."
"You mean... romantically?"
"It's deeper than that. They complete each other. Balance each other's flaws. Some are lovers, some are partners. All are linked."
"What about the Primarch Ten?"
"All ten are together," Ayla said without hesitation. "Cree and Hydeius? Bound across thousands of universes. The Primarchs not only bonded—they created. Children. Dynasties. Half the old constellations were named for them."
Qaritas said nothing, watching Daviyi and Jrin. There was annoyance in her expression—but not hate. Something deeper. Older.
He wondered—for the first time—what it might mean to be chosen like that. Not simply for power or prophecy, but for balance. For understanding.
Daviyi finally turned her attention to Qaritas.
Her tone didn't soften, but her eyes studied him with the same quiet intensity they had in the council hall.
"You want forbidden truths?" she asked. "Then bleed for them. Words here have teeth. And they bite deepest when you lie."
She gestured behind her, where a column of light descended onto a floating staircase of glass tomes.
"Come. You'll read with me."
"All of us?" Ayla asked.
Daviyi gave a long look. "He came to ask. The rest came to watch."
She smiled, faintly. "But fine. You can read, too. Just don't move anything."
Jrin cleared his throat. "I reorganized the Lost Annals of Causality, actually."
Daviyi didn't blink. "And I'm going to reorganize your face if you don't leave."
"Love you, too," he said with a smirk, and walked off.
As the others followed, Qaritas stepped into the light beside her.
He did not yet know what the Library would show him.
But he knew this—
The truth did not live in thrones or trials.
It lived here.
And it was watching.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daviyi turned a page, and the world did not just shift—it breathed around them.
Reality thinned.
The arena pulsed with truth sharpened by memory.
He could still smell ink—but now it lay buried beneath ash, ozone, and the faintest trace of blood.
"Let me explain something," Daviyi said from her raised dais, voice cutting clean through the rumbling sky. "Every time you read within the Library of Knowledge, you don't just read. You enter."
The air shimmered again, like time hesitating.
"In here," she continued, "time folds. Hours stretch into days. Days into years. You might live a week inside a single book, and return with only a heartbeat passed here. But your mind will carry the years. And your soul? It remembers everything."
She let the book hover open beside her, its pages glowing with script older than speech.
"So when I tell you that the knowledge you seek—combat techniques, rituals of sealing, forgotten languages of dying gods—you can live it here. Mastery that would take twenty years outside can be earned in hours, if you survive the experience."
Komus muttered, "Training through recursive time compression. Of course. You'd weaponize study."
Daviyi smirked. "Is there any other kind?"
Then she closed the book.
The light died.
"The weapon you're seeking may already exist—buried in a forgotten failure. This library remembers all of them."
The arena dimmed.
And then—
Boom.
A thunderclap rippled through the stone, and the ground trembled under their feet. A massive door on the far edge of the coliseum groaned open. Inside was only dark, shot through with violet lightning and the scent of something wrong.
Hydeius tensed. "Something stirs."
Daviyi nodded, stepping down from her dais. "You want to forge a new weapon against Eon? A way to fight without shattering another world?"
She stopped in front of Qaritas, eyes cold and vast and full of knowing.
"Then you must understand why Hrolyn created the Aun'darion in the first place."
A heavy pause. Her voice dipped lower.
"Because sometimes... what you're fighting isn't a tyrant. It's not a man, or a mind. It's a cosmic hunger with the face of a child and the will of a god. And when that hunger learns how to hope—it learns how to lie."
Cree's expression darkened, the flames behind their eyes smoldering low. "We agree," they said. "You can't fight Eon's creations without facing them."
Hydeius stepped to Cree's side, his massive form casting a long, steady shadow. "Only when you walk through a horror do you understand its shape. Only then can you name it."
Daviyi turned to the rest of them now—her gaze not commanding, but clear.
"This place will teach you. But it will not protect you. Every encounter here is a truth, manifested in flesh and fury. You cannot break them. You must survive them. Learn their cadence. Their logic. Their absence of logic."
Niraí cracked her knuckles, grin sharp and hungry. "Finally. A library worth dying in."
Ayla didn't smile. Her gaze stayed fixed on the first gate—on the dark that remembered.
That phrasing mirrors your poetic tone and echoes the idea of remembering pain.
Komus looked toward Qaritas. "This is for you, shadow-born. But we're with you."
And Qaritas?
He didn't speak.
He couldn't—not yet.
Because that pressure inside him—the not-empty—was awake again. Watching. Humming. Something about this place stirred it. Fed it.
Not with malice.
With memory.
Daviyi turned toward the yawning gate.
"The first gate leads to the Broken Fold," she said. "A fragment of a failed world where the Djallra turned on their creators. Where mortals outlived gods... and then unmade them."
She began to walk.
"Follow me, if you want to live long enough to rewrite prophecy."
The light behind the gate flickered.
Then—
"And somewhere in that dark—the not-empty bared its teeth.
Of course it did. You expected anything less?"