The voice—Liam's voice—was a phantom limb of grief, an ache for a world she could no longer touch. For a half-second, sorrow obliterated fear. Then the sheer wrongness of it crashed back in. Liam was dead. He'd died of a congenital heart defect three years before her own experiment had atomized her. This was not him.
This was a parasite wearing his memory.
Elena's terror sharpened into a cold, analytical fury. Her mind, her greatest weapon, scrambled for a framework. Hypothesis: auditory and visual hallucination induced by bio-energetic strain. But the cold was not a feeling; it was a physical state, a thermodynamic violation. The darkness wasn't an absence of light; it was an active absorption of it.
"Who are you?" she thought, the words a desperate, silent prayer. Her throat was locked too tight to speak.
The spectral figure tilted its head, a gesture of unnerving, non-human curiosity. The voice returned, but this time it was different. The warmth of her brother's memory was gone, replaced by a cascade of cool, synthesized tones layered over whispers of static. It was the sound of a thousand libraries being indexed at once.
The words were data, stripped of emotion. Archive? An AI? Here? The concept was so staggeringly out of place that it almost made her laugh. It was like finding a microprocessor in a fossil.
"You… chose me?" Elena finally managed to whisper, her voice a ragged tear in the silence. "For what?"
The void where the entity's face should be shimmered. An image, a torrent of information, flooded Elena's mind. It wasn't a vision; it was a data-dump that bypassed her senses entirely.
She saw a star chart, but the stars were bleeding. She saw equations—the beautiful, elegant source code of reality—riddled with errors, dissolving like text on a wet page. She saw a wave of shimmering, gray nothingness expanding from a point in deep space, consuming galaxies, erasing causality, un-writing existence itself. It wasn't loud or explosive. It was the chilling silence of a file being deleted.
"Me?" The word was incredulous. "I'm a scribe in a medieval backwater. I'm nobody. I have nothing."
A flash of another image: a man in archmage robes screaming as his own hands turned to dust. A woman whose eyes glowed with cosmic power before she simply winked out of existence. The message was clear. This was a test, and the failure state was annihilation.
"What do you want me to do?" Elena demanded, her fear now a cold, hard knot of purpose. If this was a problem, it could be solved. Every problem had a solution.
The spectral form of the Archive drifted closer. Its formless hand reached out, not to touch her, but to hover inches from her forehead. A jolt, cold and sharp as a needle of ice, shot through her skull. It wasn't painful, but it was invasive, a violation on a fundamental level.
Another burst of data, but this time it was a single, tightly-compressed packet of information. It bloomed in her mind's eye: a complex, multi-layered glyph that spun in three-dimensional space. It was a fusion of circuit diagram, arcane rune, and geometric proof. It felt ancient and impossibly advanced.
As the last word echoed in her mind, the entity began to dissolve. The oppressive cold receded, and the sliver of moonlight returned, cutting through the gloom. The darkness unraveled like smoke, and in a final whisper of static, the Archive was gone.
Elena was left alone in the silent Undercroft, trembling. Her nose was still bleeding. A throbbing ache pulsed behind her eyes where the glyph had been branded onto her consciousness. She slumped against the stone wall, her legs giving out.
The Entropy Storm. An AI from a lost civilization. A secret buried beneath her feet.
It was insane. It was impossible. It was the most compelling challenge she had ever faced.
A sound from above—the distant scrape of a boot on stone—snapped her back to the present. The night watch. Borin, most likely, making his rounds.
Panic surged through her. If she was found here, with a forbidden grimoire, practicing unsanctioned magic… they wouldn't ask questions. She would be lucky if they just killed her quickly.
Scrambling to her feet, she scooped up the grimoire and her copied pages. The ink drop she had levitated was now just a dark smear on the parchment. Evidence. She tucked the books under her tunic, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She had to get back to her room.
She moved through the labyrinthine cellar, her senses on high alert. Every drip of water, every skittering rat sounded like an approaching executioner. She reached the bottom of the stairs leading back to the main library hall and paused, listening.
The footsteps were closer now, slow and heavy. They were in the Great Hall, moving between the desks.
There was no other way back.
Taking a deep, silent breath, Elena cracked open the cellar door a hair's breadth. Through the gap, she could see the vast, shadowed expanse of the hall, lit by the drowsy, pulsing light of the ever-flame crystals. Borin was at the far end, his heavy form a silhouette against the far window. His back was to her.
Now or never.
She slipped through the door, a ghost in the darkness. She stayed low, using the massive desks and towering shelves of scrolls as cover. The stone floor was freezing against her bare feet, but she didn't feel it. All her focus was on the lumbering shape of the senior scribe.
He stopped, turning his head as if he'd heard something. Elena froze behind a lectern, her body rigid. Had she made a sound? Did he sense her?
Borin grunted, scratched his beard, and then continued his patrol, his footsteps receding down another aisle.
Elena didn't breathe until he was out of sight. She darted the last few feet to the acolyte dormitories, slipped through the door, and didn't stop until she was back in her own cell-like room, the door bolted shut behind her.
She leaned against the rough wood, her body shaking with adrenaline and exhaustion. She was safe. For now.
She slid down to the floor, her mind racing. The Archive's appearance had shattered her understanding of this world. It wasn't just a backward, pre-industrial society with broken magic. It was a graveyard. A ruin built on top of a civilization so advanced they had created reality-spanning AIs. And that civilization had fallen. Or been destroyed.
She closed her eyes, focusing inward, and called up the image of the glyph. It was still there, imprinted on her memory, a perfect, intricate key.
"Find the lock," the Archive had said.
Where? How? She had no tools, no resources. She was just a scribe.
Then, a detail she had overlooked in her panic clicked into place. The glyph wasn't just a complex shape. As it rotated in her mind, she recognized patterns within its structure. They were architectural. Flow-lines. Energy conduits. It wasn't a picture of a key.
It was a blueprint.
And with a jolt of ice-cold realization, she recognized one of the central nodes in the design. It was the distinct, five-sided arrangement of the foundation stones directly beneath the Scriptorium's central nexus—a place she passed every single day.
The Archive hadn't just given her a warning and a tool. It had given her a map. The lock wasn't somewhere in the Scriptorium. The Scriptorium was the lock.
And deep in the foundations of the very place that held her captive, a forgotten power was waiting to be unlocked. A power that might save reality, or be the very thing that got her killed first.