The universe tore apart beneath Kael's feet in a cataclysm of shattered glass and twisted shadows. When the vertigo subsided, he found himself prostrate in what could only be described as a library of nightmares: the Black Archive. The thick air tasted of poisoned ink and charred flesh, burning his lungs with each inhalation.
The shelves, carved from the femurs of forgotten giants, stretched into the endless darkness. The books breathed raggedly, their human-skinned spines pulsing in unison. Some cried out from their black chain bonds. Others, more disturbing still, whispered his name with the voices of people he had once loved.
And at the heart of this meticulously organized madness, behind a desk that seemed carved from a single obsidian teardrop, she waited.
Lirya.
Her beauty was a wound in reality itself, a paradox of grace and horror. Her hair, silverer than the light of extinct moons, fell in liquid cascades that reflected unknown constellations. Her skin, pale as the marble of ancient tombs, shone with a ghostly glow, as if mercury flowed beneath its surface instead of blood. But it was her eyes that chilled the soul: two perfect eclipses, pupils black as the void between worlds, surrounded by rings of molten silver that burned with a cold, inhuman light. When she blinked, entire galaxies were born and died in those depths.
The tears that fell down her cheeks were living mercury, perfect drops that engraved forbidden truths on the pages of the book open before her, each word burning into the parchment before being rewritten.
"What are you?" Kael roared, feeling the seal on his chest throb in sinister synchrony with the heartbeat of the Archive.
Lirya's mercury tears shone with unearthly intensity. Her smile revealed three rows of razor-sharp teeth, arranged in concentric circles.
"The archivist of everything the universe wants to forget," she replied, her voice a chorus of dead librarians' whispers. "And you..." Her index finger, elongated and tipped with an obsidian nail, stroked the page where countless versions of Kael aged and rejuvenated in a time loop, "...are my favorite reading."
Kael tried to rise, but the shadows on the floor coiled around her limbs like living ebony snakes, their fangs dripping a substance that made her skin sting.
"What do you want from me?"
"To play," Lirya whispered, leaning down until her breath, cold as interstellar space, caressed Kael's face, carrying the scent of cursed scrolls and dried blood. "Every question demands payment. Are you willing to sell your memories for answers?"
"What kind of wicked game is this?" Kael struggled against his shadowy bonds, feeling the seal on his chest accelerate until it almost burst.
Lirya reached out a hand, the palm revealing a hungry mouth. "The only game that matters: truth by memory." The words came from the mouth in his hand, not his lips. "Ask, little echo. Feed my hunger."
The pain was a white explosion as Kael mouthed, "What are the Paths?"
From his chest emerged a golden thread—the memory of the first time he saw the sea—which Lirya caught with a jeweler's delicacy. She inhaled deeply, and for a moment her eclipsed eyes showed the reflection of forgotten shores.
"The Paths are the veins of the primordial god," she replied, licking her lips with a forked tongue. "And you, little thief, are merely a parasite drinking from his infinite corpse."
Kael felt the emptiness where her memory had been, but continued, "Why do my other selves want to kill me?"
This time the outburst was pure agony. The taste of the raspberries her sister (did she have a sister?) had given her on her tenth birthday (had she celebrated a birthday?) vanished forever. Lirya shuddered with ecstasy as she consumed it.
"Because the original ordered the failed copies purged," she whispered, her mercury tears forming animated snakes that danced around her face. "And you, my dear mistake, are the most... persistent of all."
Panting, her mind filled with empty spaces, Kael forced out her last question: "Who is the origi—"
The Archives shook like a wounded animal. Books tore from the shelves, howling like damned souls. Lirya rose with the grace of a spider, her dress made of the shadows of forbidden lore fluttering in a nonexistent breeze.
"Too curious, little echo," she murmured as her mercury tears formed a floating cage around her. "They've come for you."
The east wall exploded in a shower of burning splinters. Three figures emerged from the rubble:
The Judge of a Thousand Tongues, whose cloak was woven from the severed tongues of heretics, each reciting their crimes in dead languages.
The Girl That Time Forgot, her face a kaleidoscope of erased identities, leaving a trail of absolute nothingness wherever she stepped.
The Silent Executioner, a hollow suit of armor that echoed with the screams of the Eclipsed he had purged, his helmet briefly revealing Kael's face within.
Before they could pronounce sentence, Lirya snapped her fingers with a sound that echoed like the closing of a gigantic book. The ground disappeared beneath Kael, sending him tumbling through layers of reality.
"Run away, Echo Thief!" her voice echoed in his mind, urgent and melodious. "Run faster than their judgments, farther than their anger! If they catch you, there will be no forgetting to save you!"
Lirya's eclipsed eyes were the last image before the void claimed him, her unearthly beauty etching itself in his mind like a beacon in the gathering darkness.