The sobbing book lies at his feet, trembling as if it were alive. Its cover, bound in fading velvet, pulses faintly like a heartbeat buried in parchment. The air is dense here, heavy with the scent of rain that no longer falls. The echoes of laughter have gone silent, replaced by the soft, rhythmic weeping of the book itself.
The Archivist kneels. His fingers hover over the trembling cover. Every instinct in him screams to stop to turn away before another memory claims him. But curiosity has already become his faith, and faith always demands a sacrifice.
He opens the book.
The world fractures.
Sound vanishes first. Then light. Then self.
What remains is sensation cold, sharp, endless. He is no longer standing in the Archive. He is inside it, pulled into a stream of visions that slice through him faster than thought. He feels the first death before he can comprehend it. A woman choking on her last breath beneath the weight of stone. Then a man falling from a burning tower. Then a child reaching for a mother who isn't there. Then another, and another, and another.
Each memory lasts less than a second. Each one burns deeper than the last.
He tries to breathe but cannot tell where his lungs are. He tries to close his eyes but has no body to command. The Archive pours through him, relentless and merciless. Every death is a heartbeat, every heartbeat another ending.
He begins to understand the cruelty of omniscience. To know everything is not to be powerful. It is to drown endlessly in the sorrows of creation.
The flood doesn't stop. It accelerates. Whole centuries collapse into him. Plagues. Wars. Lost cities. Forgotten gods. Lovers turned to ash. Voices begging to be remembered. He feels them all screaming through his mind, their final moments carving themselves into his soul.
He wants to scream back, but he has no voice.
The Library feels it too. The shelves tremble as though grieving. The air turns darker, thicker, almost liquid. The light of his candle sputters and dies. One by one, the aisles close. The books seal themselves shut, unwilling to bear witness to what he has unleashed. The Archive is mourning.
He collapses. His knees hit stone that feels like flesh. The sobbing book remains open before him, its pages now soaked in something that looks like ink but smells like blood. Words crawl across the parchment, forming and erasing themselves faster than he can read. He catches glimpses — fragments of dying thoughts, confessions whispered too late, prayers to gods long forgotten.
He cannot move. The weight of it all presses down until he cannot tell where his sorrow ends and theirs begins. His mind fractures. Memory bleeds into identity. He sees faces — hundreds of them — flickering in the air like ghosts. Some beg him to let go. Others whisper for him to keep remembering.
The candlelight from the previous chamber flickers faintly at the edges of his vision, but he cannot reach it. Every movement feels like dragging entire civilizations with him.
A whisper forms beneath the chaos. Not from the Archive this time. From within him.
It says, quietly, you asked for truth.
And truth answers with weight.
His body begins to convulse. The light around him warps, twisting the shelves into grotesque shapes. The books no longer resemble books. They breathe. They sigh. They watch. The Archive itself seems to bend inward, folding over him like a massive organism trying to reclaim its lost piece.
He tries to let go of the book, but his hands are no longer his own. They cling to the pages as though magnetized. He can feel the pulse of each story beneath his fingers — every death still echoing, every ending demanding acknowledgment.
He feels something crack inside him. Not bone. Not mind. Something older. The thin partition between observer and observed finally shatters.
He is not watching deaths anymore. He is them.
He feels the hunger of soldiers dying nameless in wars they never chose. The despair of poets who burned their own words. The silence of children who never grew old enough to speak. Their pain floods him, and for one eternal second, there is no Archivist. There is only the Archive — alive, infinite, mourning itself.
Then, silence.
The light dies completely. The air stops moving. He is left lying on cold stone, his hand still resting on the now-closed book. His mind feels hollow, scraped clean by centuries of borrowed grief.
The Archive shifts. The shelves groan, moving like tectonic plates. Paths close. Corridors vanish. The chamber folds in on itself until there is only darkness and the faint echo of his heartbeat. The Archive has sealed him inside.
Minutes pass. Or hours. Or centuries. Time does not move the same here.
Finally, something changes.
A faint glow appears at the edge of the chamber. A single corridor remains open — narrow, fractured, its walls shimmering as though made of broken glass. Beyond it, he can hear a sound — not laughter this time, not sorrow, but the quiet pulse of something still alive.
He pulls himself up, trembling. His legs are weak. His thoughts flicker like dying embers. But he moves. The sobbing book lies silent now, its voice spent.
As he walks toward the shattered corridor, he realizes he no longer remembers his own voice. Or whether he ever had one.