The flesh-coordinates burned like brands beneath Kaelion's skin. He traced the glowing sigils along his forearm with a trembling finger, watching as they pulsed in time with the Godforge Core's arrhythmic heartbeat. These markings had appeared after his confrontation with Zarethiel, seared into his flesh by the dying god's revelations. Now they pulled him toward Mount Scripture's eastern face with an insistent tug, like fishhooks embedded in his marrow.
The entrance revealed itself reluctantly, as though the mountain itself resisted his intrusion. Where the granite slope should have been solid and unyielding, Kaelion's approaching shadow caused the stone to ripple like disturbed water. A fissure opened with the sound of tearing parchment, exhaling air that smelled of ancient ink and spoiled meat. Beyond it, stairs spiraled downward not carved by tools, but grown from the fused vertebrae of some colossal being. Each step bore intricate carvings that shifted when viewed from different angles. One moment they depicted celestial wars with brutal clarity, the next showing scholars flaying their own skins to make vellum, before finally resolving into the Arcanthus crest half-submerged in a river of blood.
Kaelion placed his boot on the first step. The bone was warm beneath his sole, pulsing faintly as though remembering life. As he descended, the air thickened with memories not his own, pressing against his skin like damp parchment. By the third revolution of the staircase, every breath came labored and wet, his lungs fighting against atmosphere that had forgotten how to be breathed. The walls wept black fluid that resolved into words when it pooled between the steps: warnings written in a language his bones understood even when his mind did not.
The Godforge Core flared in warning as the tunnel finally opened into a cavernous space that defied mortal understanding. Kaelion's pupils dilated, struggling to reconcile the library's impossible geometry. Bookshelves stretched upward into darkness, their contents chained like prisoners. Rivers of liquid shadow flowed between reading tables, their currents moving against gravity in lazy, hypnotic swirls. Floating lanterns pulsed with trapped lightning, casting strobe-light shadows that moved independently of their sources.
At the chamber's heart rose a throne of fused spinal columns, its occupant reduced to a mummified husk wrapped in the tattered remains of celestial robes. The corpse-god's skeletal fingers still clutched a massive tome to its chest, the cover embossed with screaming faces that smoothed into blank parchment when stared at directly. Kaelion's living tattoos itched beneath his sleeves, the ink rearranging itself in response to some unseen stimulus. The Hollow Codex at his hip grew heavier with each step toward that throne, as though trying to anchor him in place.
The attack came from the silence itself one moment Kaelion stood alone before the throne, the next, papery fingers closed around his wrist with surprising strength. The Librarian's touch crackled like vellum left too long in the sun, its grip deceptively strong for something that looked so brittle.
"You smell of dying truths," it whispered, breath carrying the cloying scent of mildew and myrrh.
Kaelion's free hand went instinctively to the Oblivion Sceptre at his belt then froze as he truly saw the creature before him. The Librarian existed in layers, each more unsettling than the last. At first glance, it appeared as an elderly scholar draped in moth-eaten robes, its bald scalp covered in moving tattoos that rearranged themselves as Kaelion watched. But beneath that benign exterior lurked something insectile too many joints in its fingers, too many teeth in its smile when it thought he wasn't looking. And deeper still, when he blinked just right, Kaelion glimpsed its true nature: a swirling mass of ink and fragmented memories held together by will alone.
Its offer slithered between Kaelion's ribs like a cold blade. "One secret from the Black Collection," it said, gesturing to shelves where books screamed behind glass cases, their bindings straining against their restraints. "For one memory of joy. Not the recollection the memory itself. The neural pathway. The synaptic weight."
Kaelion's fingers twitched toward his missing digit, the phantom pain flaring in response to the Librarian's words. "Define joy."
The creature's smile unfolded like origami, its lips parting to reveal teeth that were slightly too long, slightly too sharp. "The warmth of sunlight when you still believed the world was kind. The certainty of love before betrayal carved its hollows in you. The last unguarded laugh before adulthood's chains settled about your shoulders." It leaned closer, its breath now smelling of burnt sugar and rotting parchment. "You have so few left. That makes each one precious."
A memory surfaced unbidden his sister's hands guiding his own as they mixed ink for his first ritual, her laughter bright as the copper bowls they used. The recollection was abruptly severed as the Librarian's fingernails bit into his wrist, drawing beads of blood that hovered in the thick air rather than falling.
"Ah," it sighed, licking its lips with a tongue that was disturbingly segmented. "That one."
The extraction required ceremony, as all terrible things do. The Librarian led Kaelion to a reading desk carved from a single massive knucklebone, its surface polished smooth by centuries of use. Upon it sat instruments of exquisite cruelty: a scalpel made from a saint's fingernail, an inkwell filled with liquid twilight, a quill that wept black tears onto the bone below.
"Lie down," the Librarian instructed, and the desk reshaped itself into an altar, the edges rising to form restraints that clicked shut around Kaelion's wrists and ankles with finality.
The process was not gentle.
The first memory it took was his sister's laughter the bright, bubbling sound she'd made when he'd shown her his first successful rune. The Librarian's fingers plunged into his temples like a surgeon's scalpel, extracting the sound like a tumor being removed from healthy tissue. Kaelion's body arched against the restraints as the memory unraveled not just the event itself, but every neural connection it had forged, every associated emotion tied to that moment. When it was gone, he knew intellectually that he'd had a sister, but couldn't recall what made her laugh, or why the memory had been important.
The second memory went slower, the Librarian savoring each strand of connection as it snapped. His mother's hands guiding his through the Ninefold Inscription ritual the warmth of her palms against his, the way her sleeves smelled of lavender and iron-gall ink. The removal was methodical, the creature's fingers moving through his mind like archivists culling a forbidden text. Kaelion vomited black bile as the tactile memory of her touch dissolved into static, his stomach convulsing against the emptiness left behind.
The third memory was the scent of the Scriptorium's inkpots after rain that particular blend of iron-gall and oak and something indefinably safe that had always meant home. This the Librarian took through his nostrils, threading thin filaments up into his olfactory cortex and pulling with steady, relentless pressure. Blood dripped from Kaelion's nose as his sense of smell rewrote itself around the absence, the coppery tang the only remaining proof something had been taken at all.
In return, the Librarian pressed a single inked finger to Kaelion's forehead and showed him the truth: The Silent Judges moved through the world like needles through flesh, their forms hidden beneath stolen faces. They wore his father's likeness stretched over something older and hungrier, their voices spliced together from dozens of stolen throats his father's baritone woven through with the shrieks of the damned. They harvested Arcanthus memories not as thieves, but as archivists preserving condemned texts, their purpose hidden even from themselves.
And they were coming for him.
The Judge's attack came the moment Kaelion's fingers brushed the cover of The First Lie. The throne-husk reanimated with a sound like dry sticks snapping in reverse, black thread stitching bone fragments back together with unnatural precision. Its movements were all wrong too fluid for something that should have been brittle with age, the skeleton unfolding from its seated position with the grace of a dancer rather than the jerky motions of the undead. When it spoke, the voice was his father's, but layered beneath it were other voices, older voices, things that had no business wearing human speech.
"Little scribe," it rasped, the words bubbling up through whatever passed for its throat. "You shouldn't be here."
Kaelion barely had time to draw the Oblivion Sceptre before the Judge was upon him. It fought using his own childhood memories as weapons, plucking them from his mind with skeletal fingers and twisting them into physical manifestations. A recalled picnic became a hailstorm that shredded his robes. A bedtime story manifested as barbed wire lyrics that wrapped around his limbs, each word cutting deeper than the last. The lullaby his mother had sung the one he'd just sacrificed to the Librarian twisted into a blade of pure sound that sought his throat with terrifying precision.
The battle raged through the collapsing library, Kaelion's boots slipping on the liquefying remains of books as he fought to stay upright. The Judge moved with his father's fighting style, every block and counterattack perfectly mirrored from countless sparring sessions in the Scriptorium's courtyard. It knew his weaknesses before he did, exploiting every hesitation, every moment of doubt. When its fingers plunged into his chest, seeking the Godforge Core, the pain was beyond physical it was the agony of having one's history rewritten, the very fabric of his being unraveling at the seams.
Kaelion's tattoos burned as they scrambled to protect their host, the living ink forming desperate new patterns across his skin. In his desperation, he did the unthinkable he reached into his own mind and altered a cherished memory mid-combat. That moment when his father had hugged him after his first successful ritual became something else, something sharp. The embrace transformed into a dagger plunged between the Judge's ribs, the contradiction tearing the creature apart from the inside.
The library collapsed in on itself as the Judge dissolved into ink and static, its final scream echoing through dimensions Kaelion couldn't perceive. He emerged gasping onto the mountainside, his arms wrapped around three prizes clutched tight against his chest.
The black quill pulsed in his grip, its nib gleaming with stolen light. When he tested it against his palm, the blood-formed letters squirmed before resolving into words that hadn't been there moments before. The Judge's dying whisper "She still breathes" repeated in his skull with every heartbeat, growing louder each time. And etched into his ever-growing tapestry of tattoos, a new law burned itself into existence, "Silence can be stolen."
When he activated it for the first time, the effect was immediate and terrifying. Every sound within ten paces vanished the wind through the pines, the distant cry of a hawk, even the scream of the rabbit he'd silenced mid-flight. The absence rang louder than any noise, pressing against his eardrums like deep ocean pressure. Blood trickled from his ears when he released the effect, the price written plainly in the new tattoo's fine print.
His left iris now swirled with void-energy stolen from the Judge, granting him glimpses of things that moved in the spaces between blinks. The closed eye inked onto his right palm fluttered whenever he passed shadows that were slightly too deep, its lid twitching as though dreaming. And sometimes, in the dead of night, he could swear his rewritten memories were reverting the dagger-embrace softening back into a hug, the altered details blurring at the edges like ink in rain.