*Day 3 - Below Crysillia*
Thom'duhr heard the world end through five floors of stone.
First: silence. The kind that made his ears ring. He'd been cataloguing forbidden texts in the deep archives when every sound just... stopped. Even his heartbeat seemed to pause.
Then: the song. Dragon harmonics that turned reality into suggestion. Even down here, even through tons of rock, the vibration hit wrong. His teeth ached. His bones hummed frequencies that shouldn't exist.
Then: the crystallization.
It started in the ceiling. Drops of stone became diamond. Perfect. Clear. Sharp.
Thom'duhr grabbed three things: his research journal, a text on soul-rendering he shouldn't have been reading, and an oil lamp.
The transformation rolled down the walls like slow lightning. Shelves of ancient books became prisms. Scrolls became rainbow dust. The knowledge of ages became—
Beautiful. It was beautiful. Thom'duhr hated himself for thinking it, but the destruction had an aesthetic that made him want to document it even as it tried to kill him.
He ran deeper. The archive had sub-levels. Sub-sub-levels. Places even the librarians forgot existed.
Behind him, the crystallization followed. Not fast. Steady. Inevitable.
Third sub-level. The transformation slowed. Fourth sub-level. It stopped.
Thom'duhr waited. Counted heartbeats. Sixty. Six hundred. Six thousand.
The world above had gone quiet.
He tried the stairs. Crystal. Solid crystal from the third level up. Trapped.
The oil would last maybe six hours. The air... he didn't know. Deep archives had ventilation shafts, but if those had crystallized too...
Stop. Panic later. Survive now.
Thom'duhr did what Thom'duhr always did: he researched.
The forbidden text about soul-rendering was intact. So were others. Books that shouldn't exist. Texts about the Distillatori. About reality-manipulation. About things that predated the Crystal Song.
He read by dying lamplight.
*The soul is currency. Consciousness itself can be condensed, traded, spent.*
*The Distillatori were not destroyed. They evolved. Where once they rendered openly, now they render in shadow.*
*Soul-coins resonate. Each one sings to its siblings. Track one, find them all.*
Maps. Diagrams. A sketch of something called the God-Eater. Machines that shouldn't exist. Shouldn't be possible.
Were being built. Right now. While the world died above.
Thom'duhr memorized everything. Scholars don't fight. They remember. They preserve. They—
The lamp died.
Darkness. Complete. Absolute.
Thom'duhr didn't scream. Screaming wasted air.
He felt his way to the ventilation shaft. Pressed his ear against it.
Heard: nothing.
Felt: air. Moving. Barely, but moving.
The shaft was partially clear. Enough to not suffocate. Not enough to escape.
So Thom'duhr sat in perfect darkness and recited what he'd memorized. Over and over. Soul-coins. Resonance. Tracking methods. Distillatori. God-Eater. South. Desolation. Vorgoth.
Names. Places. Methods.
Three days.
Three days in darkness with only his memory and the taste of crystallized air.
Three days knowing everyone above was dead.
Three days becoming something else. Not brave—Thom'duhr would never be brave. But necessary. A living library of how to fight things that turned souls into currency.
On the third day, he heard scratching above.
The crystal was cracking. Not much. Hairline fractures.
Thom'duhr found a metal bookend. Started hitting the crystal stairs. Rhythmic. Patient. Each strike barely did anything, but anything was better than nothing.
Six hours. Twelve. Twenty.
His hands bled. The bookend bent.
Crack.
Bigger crack.
Hole. Size of his fist. Then his head. Then—
Thom'duhr crawled through crystal that opened his skin in hundred places. Emerged into what had been the library's main floor.
Everyone was dead.
Not just dead. Transformed. The head librarian stood eternal at her desk, face peaceful, body geometric. Students sat at tables, studying nothing forever.
Thom'duhr threw up. Then gathered what he could carry.
Not food—he'd find that. Not water—he'd find that too.
Books. The ones that had survived. The ones about tracking Distillatori. About soul-coin resonance. About the God-Eater.
Because Thom'duhr might be a coward. Might freeze when violence came. Might be useless in a fight.
But he knew things. Important things. Things that might matter.
He left the library through a hole where a wall used to be. Crysillia stretched before him—broken, beautiful, dead.
South. The texts said south. The Desolation. Where the Distillatori hid.
Thom'duhr started walking. Slowly. Carefully. Not like that half-elf girl he'd see later, all motion and fury. Thom'duhr moved like a scholar—deliberate, thoughtful, scared.
But moving. Toward something. Toward answers.
Toward people who might be able to use what he'd memorized in the dark.
Because that's what scholars do. They preserve knowledge until someone brave enough comes along to use it.
Thom'duhr wasn't brave.
But he was necessary.
And sometimes that was enough.
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*End Chapter 6.5*
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