Before the first word was written, there was silence.
And in that silence, something listened.
No one knows when the Library began. Some say it appeared when the first person dreamed of eternity. Others whisper that it was from the last person's final thought before the end of time.
Whatever the truth is, the Library remained — a monument of memory at the edge of nothing.
Its halls stretched beyond sight, carved from glass and marble, lit by a sky that was neither day nor night. There was no sun here, no moon. Only a pale glow that came from nowhere and everywhere, illuminating shelves that reached into the clouds. Each shelf held thousands of books — some old and trembling with dust, others freshly inked as if just written by unseen hands.
When one listened closely, they could hear them breathing.
The books whispered in the language of forgotten worlds, sighing with the weight of lives that had been lived, unlived, and imagined. If one pressed an ear against a spine, they could almost hear laughter, or crying, or the echo of footsteps from places that no longer existed.
And among these shelves walked a single man.
Elian.
His footsteps were soft, his robes trailing across the marble floor like smoke. He carried no lantern — he never needed one. The light of the Library always found him.
He had no memory of when he first arrived. There were no beginnings here. He only remembered waking — standing before an endless ocean of shelves, as if he had been born from the silence itself.
He had tried, once, to count the books.
Though he stopped after ten thousand. The number had no meaning here anyway.
Every day — though "day" was just a word without time — he moved through the aisles, reading, restoring, and rewriting. The pages repaired themselves under his fingertips. The words that had faded came back to life, like breathing color into a ghost.
That was his duty.
That was what it meant to be an Archivist.
He wasn't sure how many of them existed. Sometimes he caught glimpses of shadows far away — shapes of others like him moving between the aisles — but when he tried to follow, they vanished like mirages.
He had grown used to solitude.
He didn't need company. Or so he told himself.
And yet, every once in a while, when he passed certain shelves, he would pause. His hand would hover over a book he swore he had read before — one that called to him with a quiet familiarity.
It was always the same kind of book: plain, unmarked, its cover soft and warm like old leather.
He never opened them. Not anymore.
Because whenever he tried, the words inside changed before his eyes — rearranging, rewriting, until they spelled one question he could not answer:
Do you remember me?
That day began like any other.
The air was still. The shelves hummed faintly. And Elian walked alone, tracing his hand along the spines of the books like someone passing through a forest made of memory.
But something was wrong.
The Library was... breathing differently.
He couldn't explain how he knew — only that the rhythm of its silence had changed. Like a heartbeat skipping a note.
Then he heard it.
A sound that didn't belong.
At first, he thought it was just his imagination — a trick of the endless halls. But then it came again: a faint thud, echoing from somewhere deep in the northern aisles.
A book had fallen.
He frowned. Books do not fall here. Not unless they were meant to be found.
He followed the sound through rows of towering shelves, past archives so old their dust had turned to mist. The glow around him dimmed, colors bending into softer shades of blue and violet.
And then he saw it — a single book lying open on the marble floor.
It pulsed faintly with light, as though breathing.
Elian approached slowly. He knelt, fingertips brushing the edge of the open page. The ink was moving. Lines of text shifted across the parchment, writing themselves as if the book was thinking, hesitating.
He leaned closer. The air smelled faintly of rain and ink.
The words stopped forming. And in their place, a sentence bled into existence — trembling... desperate:
Do you remember me?
Elian's pulse quickened.
He reached out, touching the ink. It was warm.
And then, for the first time in eternity, the Library shuddered.
Books trembled on their shelves. The light flared — too bright, too alive. Far above him, the glass ceiling cracked, revealing not the sky, but an ocean of swirling light and shadow.
The whispering of the books grew louder — a thousand voices murmuring at once, overlapping in languages that made his skin crawl with familiarity.
"Elian..."
He turned sharply. The voice wasn't from the book. It came from deeper within the Library — soft, distant, like a dream calling from another life.
"Elian... do you remember me?"
His breath caught. The sound was fading fast, like the echo of a memory slipping through his fingers.
He took a step toward it. Then another.
And then the library went silent again — utterly, painfully still.
The only sign that anything had happened was the book at his feet, now closed, its cover marked by a faint handprint that wasn't his.
Elian stared at it for a long time.
He picked it up, held it to his chest, and exhaled slowly. The warmth was gone. But he could still feel something beneath his ribs — something small, and fragile, like the memory of a heartbeat.
He returned to his desk, placing the book beside the others. But he didn't open another volume that day.
Instead, he sat in silence, listening. Waiting.
The Library did not breathe again.
Not until much, much later — when a girl who had no memories of her own would step through its doors, searching for someone she could not name.