The corridors were a tomb of silence when Gray finally slipped from his room. No flicker of torchlight ran through the halls, only the pale, dual gleam of the moons beyond the arched windows, tracing silver pathways across the smooth, cold marble. The entire academy slept, locked in a deep and unnatural quiet.
He started walking, his destination unknown even to himself. Each footstep echoed with embarrassing volume in the profound stillness, making him wince with every other step. The further he moved from the dormitory wing, the colder it became, a dampness settling into the air that hadn't been there hours before.
'Dammit, my instincts are telling me to go back but my mind says otherwise...' He gritted his teeth and continued.
This wasn't a conscious decision. It was a compulsion. Maybe it was a twisted curiosity, a need to understand the nightmare that had felt too real. Or maybe it was the whispering—the faint, broken voices that had begun clawing at the back of his mind the moment he'd woken, choking on the memory of a shattered mountain.
They hadn't stopped since.
At first, they were distant, almost melodic. Just faint, unintelligible syllables carried on the current of his own fear. "Vh'laen… dosk thrynn… ashaar…" But as the night deepened, they gained weight. It was no longer just sound, but a physical pull, a pressure behind his sternum that tugged him forward like a fish on a hook.
It was pulling him to the library.
The grand, oak double doors were ajar when he reached them, a sliver of profound darkness waiting beyond. Gray hesitated, his hand hovering over the carved wood. He hadn't expected it to be open. No one was this careless. Slowly, heart hammering against his ribs, he slipped through the gap, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft, final click that felt anything but comforting.
Inside, the library was a canyon of shadow. The towering shelves stood like silent sentinels, each aisle a dark river flowing into impenetrable gloom. Faint moonlight spilled through the vast glass dome high above, illuminating swirling motes of dust in ghostly pillars. Gray's eyes strained to adjust as he walked, his fingers lightly brushing the cold, polished stone of the stair railings.
"It's best i do this as quickly and quietly as possible." He whispered.
The noises grew stronger, more insistent.
They guided him left, past the history section, then right, through the long aisles of alchemical theory and elemental studies.
Then he turned a corner into a narrower aisle, his mind lost in the psychic pull, and his hip bumped sharply into a precariously stacked trolley of books.
The crash was thunderous in the sacred silence. Leather-bound tomes and scrolls scattered across the floor in a chaotic avalanche of parchment and dust. Gray flinched back, his breath catching in a sharp hiss.
"What was that?"
He froze. The voice, sharp and clear, was the librarian's. It echoed from the direction of the main entrance. She shouldn't have been here. He'd watched her lock her office and leave hours ago. Her footsteps now approached, slow, measured, and deliberate, tapping a firm rhythm against the polished floorboards.
Gray dropped into a low crouch behind the nearest shelf, pressing his back against the cold wood and holding his breath.
'Shit! Ahead was here the whole time?' He didn't hesitate and used his affinity. Creating an orb of darkness and quickly spreading it across his body. A thin, black mist dripped onto the floor. Blending into the shadows.
The librarian's lantern light cut swathes through the darkness, its yellow glow brushing against spines of books, illuminating corners he'd just passed. He could see her faint silhouette—a tall, stern woman with severe silver hair pulled into a tight bun, the flame of her lamp reflecting in the lenses of her sharp glasses.
"Hmm," she murmured, stopping right by the fallen stack. She stood there for a long moment, and Gray could feel her gaze sweeping the area. "Must've been the wind," she finally said, her tone laced with a skepticism that belied her words.
She bent, picking the books up one by one with practiced efficiency, sighing softly under her breath before setting them neatly on the trolley. With a last, lingering look around the aisle, she turned and left, her footsteps fading back toward the entrance.
Gray waited, counting the frantic beats of his own heart until the silence returned, thicker and more profound than before.
"Thank goodness...that was a close one, too close." He stopped channeling his Vyre and turned his attention back to the whispers.
This time, they were not a guide, but a cacophony. They were everywhere at once—swirling around him, rising from the gaps in the floorboards, seeping from behind the walls. They weren't faint suggestions anymore; they were a chorus of a hundred overlapping voices, too low and jumbled to understand individually, but clear enough in their collective urgency to freeze the blood in his veins.
His hands trembled as he rose, following the central pull, the strongest thread of pressure, deeper into the library's oldest heart. He knew where it was leading him now. The Tales and Myths section.
When he reached the dead-end of the final aisle, he saw it.
On the highest shelf, tucked between two crumbling scrolls bound with faded ribbon, was a faint, ethereal blue glow. A book—but unlike any other. Its cover seemed to be made of a material that shimmered like ancient, polished ice, and across it, veins of silver light pulsed with a slow, rhythmic cadence, like a sleeping heart.
He had to stand on his toes to reach it. The surface was shockingly cold, so cold it burned his fingertips, almost too painful to hold. The title was faded, the script archaic and curling, but he could just make out the letters carved deep into the cover.
"The Silent Hymn of Vh'laen." He read it aloud.
The name sent a jolt through him, a physical reaction that made his pulse stutter and his breath hitch. Vh'laen. The word from the whispers.
"This has to be it...surely." He brushed a thick layer of dust away, the particles dancing in the moonlight, and opened the book carefully. The scent that rose from the pages was a mix of profound rot, dry ink, and something else… something metallic, like old blood. The pages were stiff, brittle, threatening to crumble at the edges. The words within were written in a tongue completely foreign to him, the script curling and looping like thorny vines across the yellowed parchment. He couldn't understand a single symbol.
Yet, he could feel them. A low hum started under his skin, a resonance that made his teeth ache.
He flipped through slowly, his eyes scanning line after line of incomprehensible text, until he reached a page near the middle. The script here pulsed with the same soft blue light as the cover. As he stared, the symbols seemed to shift faintly, writhing, bending into shapes his mind almost, almost recognized.
His lips moved without his conscious permission, forming the alien syllables, reading the words aloud in a hoarse, whisper.
And then the pain struck.
"Wha—"
It was a white-hot spike driven directly through his skull, blinding and absolute. His knees buckled instantly. The book fell from his nerveless fingers with a heavy thud as he collapsed, hands clutching his head. His vision warped, the shelves around him tilting and bending. The whispering chorus turned deafening, a screaming, layered madness that felt like it was shredding his sanity.
'Sh—it.This pain is...unbearable...'
He tried to pull his gaze away, to break the connection, but his eyes were locked on the glowing words. They were a vortex, dragging him down.
His throat constricted violently. He gasped, but no air would come. His veins caught fire, a sensation of liquid lightning coursing through them. The strange, dark strain mark along his shoulder and chest, usually dormant, seared with an agony he had never felt, pulsing with a malevolent, dark light.
Then, cutting through the psychic noise, a voice—clear, ancient, and utterly cold.
"Heir of the Hollow… Why do you read what was buried?"
A wave of nausea and dizziness slammed into him. His hands, now clawed against the cold stone floor, scraped for purchase. The ground itself felt like it was tilting, the world collapsing out from under him.
Flickering violently before his eyes, his system interface flared to life, the text jagged and frantic:
[WARNING: CORRUPTION LEVELS DRASTICALLY RISING]
[SEEK SAFETY IMMEDIATELY]
[CORRUPTION RESPONSE DETECTED]
Gray tried to scream, but it emerged as a wet, strangled gasp. His body convulsed, every nerve ending screaming in unison. His heart thundered, a wild, frantic drum against his ribs. The converging whispers solidified, turning into that single, cold voice, now whispering not around him, but from inside his own mind.
"Vh'laen… dosk thrynn… ashaar…"
Then, everything whited out into a silent, agonizing static.
With the last dregs of his will, his arm flailed out, his fingers smacking against the cold cover of the book. He slammed it shut.
The blue light vanished instantly. The noise stopped as if severed by a blade. The silence that rushed in to fill the void was crushing, absolute.
Gray lay on his back, gasping ragged, painful breaths. Sweat poured down his face and neck, his shirt clinging to him, soaked. His whole body trembled uncontrollably. The world still spun nauseatingly, but he forced himself to sit up, his chest heaving.
He wiped a shaky hand across his mouth, his breathing uneven and shallow. Dread a cold stone in his gut as he brought the screen up.
[Corruption Level: 48%]
His stomach lurched. That couldn't be right. A surge that high… was deadly. He felt a cold that had nothing to do with the room seep into his soul.
The book lay a few feet away, inert now, though the faintest trace of silver light still pulsed weakly along its spine, a dying ember. He thought about setting it ablaze, about running and never looking back. But before he could muster the strength to move, a new sound froze him solid.
A whisper of movement. Not a footstep, but the soft, almost inaudible shift of fabric against stone.
Gray went perfectly still. Every instinct screamed in unison. Slowly, mechanically, he turned his head—and saw nothing. Just the deep, pooling shadows between the shelves. Heart in his throat, he pushed himself to his feet, using the shelf for support, forcing his breathing to steady. The air felt different now, charged, heavy with a new and present danger.
Then—
A metallic glint in the moonlight, a flicker of motion from the aisle he'd entered from.
He raised the book on instinct, a pathetic shield.
Thud.
The impact was brutal, jarring his entire arm. The book was torn from his grasp, skittering across the floor and spinning to a stop. Embedded deep in its icy cover, the hilt quivering from the force of the throw, was a dagger. Its blade was thin, dark, and cruelly serrated near the hilt.
Gray stumbled back, his heart pounding a frantic, terrified rhythm against his eardrums.
He wasn't alone. And this was no curious librarian.
From between the shelves, a shadow stepped forward. It moved with a silence that was more unnerving than any sudden attack. The faint moonlight caught against their outline—tall, enveloped in a dark, non-reflective cloak, a presence that radiated a quiet, professional, and utterly deliberate danger.
Gray's eyes widened, his pulse a wild, frantic thing. His Vyre surged in response, a defensive flood, and the Wither strain along his arm trembled, dark tendrils of energy flickering unseen beneath his skin.
The figure stopped just at the edge of the light, a silhouette of pure menace.
Neither of them spoke.
The silence stretched, taut as a garrote wire, suffocating and sharp. Then the intruder's voice cut through it—soft, calm, and laced with a faint, almost academic curiosity that was more terrifying than any shout.
"It seems i have found you, child of the dawn."
Gray didn't answer. His fingers twitched at his sides, dark energy gathering unconsciously, a low hum beginning to fill the air around him.
'Ch—child of the dawn?'
The figure tilted their head slightly, and for the first time, Gray caught the faint glimmer of eyes from within the deep hood. Then they smiled—a slow, cold, knowing smile that didn't touch the rest of their still face.
"Now," the figure said, the words final. "It's too late for you to run."
And before Gray could move, could react, could even breathe, the figure made a subtle gesture with one hand.
The few remaining pools of moonlight in the library shattered into nothingness, plunging them into absolute, impenetrable black.