The first book had been simple—pictures, lines, words even a child could grasp. Yet it kept him rooted to existence. He clutched it often, rereading each page until the faint colorings of "Sun" and "Moon" were etched into his thoughts.
But after days of wandering the colossal library, he found more.
Small volumes tucked into corners, spines faded, as though waiting to be found by unsteady hands. They were different from the towering tomes of unreadable symbols. These held *shapes*. *Colors.* *Numbers.* Like the small book, they dripped meaning slowly, drop by drop, until the silence around him echoed with soft, halting whispers.
"…Blue. Red. Green. One. Two. Three."
In the beginning, his tongue stumbled. Letters broke apart in his mouth, clumsy, guttural. But he did not stop. He read them over and over, whispering them into the chill air until they rang clear.
The silence had laughed at him once; now it bent, shaping his words into companionship.
He learned objects. "Chair." "Table." "Wall." He pointed as he said them, grounding sounds to shapes, giving thought to things. Soon it became sentences. Short, fragile strings of words.
"This… is… book."
"That… is… water."
Each attempt wavered, but improvement followed. His head throbbed, but the ache was not unpleasant—it was growth. It was proof.
And in studying those childish books, a new thing occurred: he began noticing himself.
He had a body—bare arms, legs, fingers that shook when too still. His reflection showed one clothed in ragged black fabric. It fit him yet felt foreign, a skin borrowed from something he had been but forgotten.
Then came discovery. A chamber where wardrobes slumbered, their drawers dusty, stacked with clothes untouched for ages. Silks, golden weaves, robes fit for kings. He tried some. They felt wrong—too heavy, too decorated, too unlike what the books had shown of ordinary people.
So he searched deeper, until his hands uncovered simple attire: a loose white shirt, comfortable joggers, soft slippers. He changed, the old dark cloth dropping like a shed layer. The sight in the mirror startled him: he no longer looked like a prisoner of shadows, but something closer to the boy drawn in his first book.
It felt… right.
The next day, while seated at a cracked fountain in the courtyard, child's book across his lap, he spoke into the void almost bashfully:
"Maybe this place isn't empty… if it has knowledge."
For the first time since he awoke, the thought carried warmth.
***
### Ten Years Later
Time passed strangely. Hours blurred into days; days folded into years. Ten years flowed past like quiet rivers, leaving no mark save for the weight of knowledge.
He no longer struggled with words. His tongue danced over them effortlessly, forming sentences, shaping meaning. What once felt like dragging rocks now felt like water slipping through his hands.
He read histories first—stories of empires rising and crumbling, of wars drenched in red, of rulers who claimed heavens and were devoured by earth. Then he consumed sciences—the laws that governed stars, the delicate weaving of cells, the numbers hidden in music and color. He became a vessel, empty yet endlessly filled.
Sometimes he laughed to himself, dry and quiet, upon realizing how *much* humankind had labored to pass on knowledge—while he alone, in silence, devoured their labors without rest.
But books alone were not what the castle hid. He discovered objects in sealed rooms, resting beneath layers of dust:
A square framed with black glass. A box with wires curled like veins. Oddly shaped consoles marked with buttons. Names danced across manuals he now understood—"Television. Computer. Video Game Console."
He did not know what they were meant to do. Books explained their existence as tools of "entertainment" and "connection," words that filled him with curiosity he did not fully grasp.
And yet—though they appeared lifeless—he sensed they were not corpses. He remembered the throne untouched by dust, the fountain that trickled without water, the sky unmoving overhead. This place followed strange rules.
Perhaps these things too merely *slept.*
One evening, he sat before the square screen—the "computer." His reflection glimmered faintly off it, golden-blue eyes staring back at him. Beneath his hand lay a button.
His heart, though it had never beat faster before, felt as though it quickened.
With one hesitant press, the silence broke.
A hum, soft… then light. The black glass brightened, glowing suddenly with colorless white. His face reflected in it, haloed by the glow. For the first time in ten years, the stillness of his world shifted.
He reached forward, awe breathing through him.
***
### Fifty Years Later
Fifty years trickled by, and still he remained.
If ten years had turned him fluent, then fifty carved him into a scholar. He devoured every subject he found. History collapsed beneath the weight of his memorization. Mathematics unraveled and blossomed into patterns that mesmerized him. Sciences became wonders he drew across paper scraps, sketching experiments he could never build.
Arts intoxicated him; paintings and plays he mimed alone, laughing in echo halls. Music he could not hear, but he played its notes upon tabletops, drumming silent rhythms.
And cooking.
Cooking enthralled him because it was human. It was flavor and warmth and gathering. It was family and fire. He studied recipes obsessively and tried to mimic them, but when he reached for ingredients, all he could find were weeds in the courtyard or stagnant water in stone basins.
Grass and water. He placed them together, stirred them as directions commanded, and tasted with eager hope.
It was wrong—revolting bitterness sliding down his throat. He gagged, throwing the mixture away.
Then the book about biology struck him cold: *Humans must eat. Food is survival. Without it, death follows.*
He froze.
He had not eaten. Not in decades.
His hands trembled as he reread again and again. His chest grew tight. Was he dying slowly? Would hunger come suddenly, collapse him to the floor?
Panic gripped him. He scrambled across kitchens long deserted, storerooms filled with dust and mold. Nothing edible remained. Weeks he searched outside the unmoving courtyard, plucking plants, tasting things that left his tongue numb—always spat back out.
But the panic… never borne fruit.
Days passed into weeks. Weeks into months. Months into years. His body never grew weaker. His stomach never cried. He never thirsted. He lived without eating, without drinking, without craving.
When the realization hardened, it left a stone in his chest.
He was not human.
The books told him what humans were, and their bones were unlike his. They fell ill. They starved. They hungered. He did not. He only *was.*
On the night of his fiftieth year awake, he snapped a history volume closed with such force the sound cracked like thunder. Dust swirled up, caught in still light. His reflection in a shard of broken mirror shone back at him: pink hair, blue-gold eyes, sharp, unaging features. His jaw tightened, lips pressed thin.
He stared long and hard at the stranger before him.
His voice trembled but held a raw, seething edge as it slipped into the silence:
"Why do I exist?"
The echo carried far, running through the library halls, sinking into the cold stone. And when it faded, the silence remained heavier than before—as if the castle too withheld the answer.