The scalpel in Arteo's hand danced with surgical precision along the frayed spine of the sixteenth-century atlas. In the muffled quiet of his workshop, every sound was an event: the slight tear of decaying paper fibers, the measured breathing of the restorer, the distant ticking of the clock in the office next door. The afternoon light filtered through the dusty windowpane, illuminating the dust particles that swirled like atoms in a miniature universe.
Arteo was not a man of stories. He was a man of objects. The maps he restored did not evoke the call of distant lands or unexplored oceans. They spoke to him of the quality of the paper, the composition of the ink, the mastery of the craftsman who created them. This was his peace: a realm of silence and order, where the chaos of the world was subdued between clamps and specialized glues.
That afternoon, while cleaning the last residue of centuries-old glue from a hinge, his eyes fell upon a raw wooden crate that had been waiting in a corner for weeks. "Warehouse salvage material," the worn label read. With a sigh, he decided to tackle it.
Inside, a predictable disorder: worn technical manuals, popular novels with detached bindings, yellowed magazines. Simple, mechanical work. But at the very bottom, his hand met something different. A smaller, heavier volume, wrapped in an uncatalogued linen cloth. He pulled it out.
It was a titleless book, bound in an abnormally smooth, black leather, poreless, like a reptile's skin. It had no visible stitching; the pages seemed to be fused into a single compact block. The most unsettling thing, however, was the temperature. The book was cold. Not the cold of a damp cellar, but an active, penetrating chill that bit his fingertips even through the calluses of his experienced hands.
A seasoned restorer would have set it aside, marked as an anomaly. But Arteo, the man who repaired containers while ignoring their contents, was seized by an impulsivity foreign to him. He had to understand its structure. He turned on his workbench lamp and tilted the book, examining the impossible binding. There was no single point of entry, no seam to slip his blade into to inspect the interior.
Frustrated, he pressed his palm against the cover, as if to absorb its secrets through touch.
It was a mistake.
An icy claw gripped his wrist, a cold that was no longer physical but existential. The chill radiated up his arm, shattering his breath. The workshop, his sanctuary of order, began to fade. Colors dissolved into shades of gray, sounds became muffled as if something enormous was sucking the air out. He saw his hands, his faithful working companions, turn translucent. The last thing he perceived was the black book, which now felt scorching hot, pulsating with a violet light before darkness swallowed him whole.
The first sensation was sound. Or, rather, the lack thereof. A silence so dense and profound that it possessed its own mass, pressing against his eardrums and filling his lungs with an unreal stillness.
Arteo opened his eyes, and his brain struggled to process what he saw.
He was standing in a corridor of cyclopean proportions. The walls, if they existed, were lost in darkness. What dominated the space were shelves. Towers of dark, polished wood, carved with runes that pulsed with an inner light, rose towards an artificial night sky, vanishing into unimaginable heights. Illuminating the immense space, lamps encased in brass cages hung from invisible cables, simulating a firmament of false stars.
The floor was of a black stone, polished like obsidian, reflecting the lights in an infinite play of sparkles. The air was still, yet alive: it smelled of centuries of dust, ancient ink, cedar wood, and beneath it all, a metallic, ozone note, like after a thunderstorm.
He took a step. It made no sound. An uncontrollable tremor ran through his hands. He still clutched the black book, which was now warm and vibrating slightly, like a beating heart.
"This is a dream," he murmured, and his words were swallowed by the void without a trace. No echo. Nothing.
He walked, disoriented. The labyrinth of shelves was both incredibly orderly and utterly mad. The volumes were lined up with maniacal precision, yet there was no logic to their arrangement: a gigantic tome, bound in what looked like bronze, was flanked by a tiny, thin crystal book; a volume of human skin (he was certain of it) lay next to one made of living leaves that moved slowly.
Then, in a small clearing between the shelves, he saw the first form of life. A creature just over a meter tall, composed of crumpled paper, linen threads woven into sinews, and patches of colored sealing wax that formed sharp eyes and a small, thin mouth. A Binder. With fingers sharp as paper-cutting blades, it was meticulously stitching the torn binding of a large book, its body emitting a slight rustling sound.
Arteo froze, his breath caught. The creature raised its head. Its sealing wax eyes stared at him without expression, without animosity, without curiosity. It merely registered him, like another piece of furniture. Then, it returned to its work, ignoring him completely.
An icy shudder, different from the book's, ran down his spine. He quickly walked away, feeling for the first time the claustrophobic weight of the immensity.
The corridor narrowed, changing atmosphere. The air suddenly became sharp, charged with a frigid dampness. The lights took on an unsettling bluish hue. The books here were more uniform, bound in a midnight blue leather so dark it looked like holes of nothingness on the paper of the shelves. Without anyone telling him, he knew he had entered a place where stories were made of fear. There was no need for a sign that read "Corridor of the Chill"; he breathed it in.
In the distance, a shadow detached itself from a shelf. Tall, sinuous, different from the Binder. For a moment, in the faint light, he thought he saw the silhouette of a thin man, holding a long bone pen that shimmered. His features were blurred, as if he had been drawn in pencil and then partially erased. The figure looked at him, and Arteo felt an impression of judgment, of ancient annoyance. Then, the shadow simply vanished, dissolving into the air, leaving only the sound of a page being ripped.
"...and he never knew it was his brother..." "...too late, the poison had already taken effect..." "...the door was locked from the inside..."
Whispers. He heard them inside his head, not with his ears. Broken voices, fragments of dialogue, suppressed sobs. Lost Voices, echoes of incomplete or too-powerful narratives to be contained. They floated in the air like narrative spores.
He ran now, consumed by a growing panic. He turned a corner and emerged into a circular, slightly brighter atrium. In the center, on a pedestal of pristine white marble, lay a single book. It was magnificent: bound in crimson velvet with intricate gold clasps that formed a rose pattern. But it was also, viscerally, wrong.
A thin blanket of frost rose from the cover. The air around it was so frigid that Arteo saw his own breath condense. And then, the emotion. A wave of despair so pure, so absolute, hit him like a punch to the gut. It wasn't a metaphor; it was physical nausea, a weight on his chest that stole his breath. He staggered, forced to cling to a shelf to keep from falling.
He reached out a trembling hand, forcing himself to brush the frigid cover.
A vision exploded in his mind, vivid and cruel: a warrior in bloodied armor, kneeling before a dirt grave in the pouring rain. His sword, broken in half, was stuck in the mud beside him. His silent, desperate lament echoed in the cemetery's emptiness.
Arteo withdrew his hand as if burned, his heart pounding in his ears. He grabbed another random volume from the nearest shelf. It was heavy, made of porous gray stone, and a pang of claustrophobic anxiety hit him upon touch. Another: small, made of warm, reassuring wood, but when he opened it, he saw that the pages were stained with rust... or perhaps blood. The words described an intimate betrayal, a broken promise.
Then, his gaze fell on a different volume. Golden, bright, radiating warmth. A glimmer of hope? He touched it. A wave of forced, claustrophobic, and artificial happiness washed over him. It was the joy of the prisoner told to smile. The happy ending was a lie, imposed by force, and the repressed tragedy pulsed beneath the surface like an infection.
He took another, and another. Endings of battles lost due to betrayal. Loves broken by a misunderstanding. Heroes falling into darkness because of a single, fatal mistake. Hopes extinguished in the mud, or worse, distorted into a parody of happiness. There was not a single true ending. Not one.
The reality of the situation hit him with the force of a tide. He was not in a library. He was in a cemetery. An infinite ossuary of finished hopes, a monument to narrative failure. Every volume was a tombstone, every page crystallized suffering.
"No," he groaned, his voice a thread of sound in the vastness. "No, it's not possible."
He leaned against a shelf, his head spinning. His mind, accustomed to cataloging and repairing, refused to accept the horror of that place. "I have to get out. I have to go back to my workshop, to my silent books, to my predictable life." But every path he took, every corridor he explored, led him only to new shelves, new tragedies. He was trapped in a web of infinite pain.
His strength left him. He slid to the floor, his shoulders resting against a metal-bound volume that emanated an Antarctic cold. He closed his eyes, desperately trying to cling to the memory of the warm sun in his workshop, the reassuring smell of glue. But the images were blurred, distant, overwhelmed by the penetrating chill of a thousand, ten thousand, a million unhappy endings pressing against his consciousness.
It was then that despair truly reached him. It was no longer panic, no longer fear. It was a black, total resignation, the realization that he had ended up in a prison from which there was no escape. He had spent his life tidying the external world, and now he had been cast into absolute chaos. He surrendered. He stopped fighting.
And it was precisely in that moment of complete surrender, when his mind had settled into resignation, that the Voice arrived.
It wasn't a whisper like the Lost Voices. It didn't resonate in the air. It didn't come from any direction because it was inside him. Calm, clear, terribly neutral. It had no timbre, no gender, no age. It was the sound of ink flowing onto a page, of parchment unrolling.
"Arteo."
A name. His. Not a title, not an accusation. A realization, perhaps a test.
"Son of Silence."
He stiffened, his eyes wide in the darkness before him. The Voice did not speak a language, yet he understood. The words formed directly in his comprehension.
"You who polish the caskets but do not look at the jewels."
It was a truth so profound, so personal, that it made him feel naked. He, who had always seen books as objects to preserve, not as stories to live. The Voice did not seem to accuse him, but to observe him, like a master evaluating a promising but misguided student.
"The Forgotten Library claims you."
He looked at the gray stone book he had picked up earlier, still on the floor beside him. His despair was a physical emanation, a spiritual stench.
"Your tools are dull. Sharpen them with the ink of compassion. Your workshop is now the soul of men."
A beam of cold, pure blue light materialized from nowhere, enveloping the gray book. On its cover, letters began to form as if an invisible pen were writing them with ink of light: The Song of the Blacksmith and the Swift Lad.
"The endings are broken."
The light intensified, growing, enveloping him. The world around him—the infinite Library, the shelves, the darkness—began to blur, to dissolve into a vortex of unspoken words, broken images, betrayed emotions.
"Repair not the binding, but the meaning."
He saw fragments: the orange glow of a forge, a messy-haired girl with eyes full of life, a broad-shouldered young man with a gaze charged with a dream too big for a gray village. He felt the heat of the fire on his skin, the smell of incandescent metal in his nostrils, the taste of fear in his throat. The book's words were seared into his retina, the characters' emotions became his own, the blacksmith's pain a cramp in his stomach.
"Or the tragedy you breathe will become your tomb."
The last thing he saw, before his being was torn away from the Library's reality, was the book's cover opening not like two pages, but like a bottomless abyss. Then, he was sucked inside, toward the cold, the pain, and the promise of a story that was not his, with the weight of an impossible task crushing his soul and the words of another already burning in his mind.