The public library on Elm Street always stayed open until midnight on Fridays—a small mercy for night owls like **Orion Hale**.
At seventeen, he had claimed the same corner table for the past three years. It sat tucked beneath a stained-glass window depicting a forgotten astronomer, robes flowing as he peered through a brass telescope into swirling constellations. When the overhead fluorescents dimmed to their late-night amber glow, the window came alive. Blues and violets spilled across the tabletop, washing over scarred oak and worn margins, transforming the mundane into something *almost* magical.
Orion liked that illusion.
He liked anything that felt like magic.
Tonight, the library was nearly empty.
Mrs. Delgado had finished her final round an hour ago, her soft footsteps retreating into the back office along with a mug of chamomile tea. Somewhere deep in the children's section, a single mother whispered exhausted threats to an overtired toddler.
Otherwise—
The building belonged to Orion and the books.
He sat hunched over a thick hardcover, elbows braced like sentinels on either side. His dark hair—overlong because he kept forgetting to get it cut—fell into his eyes as he read. The novel before him was dog-eared and spine-cracked from countless rereads:
***Chronicles of the Boundless Veil***, Volume Twelve.
The penultimate installment.
It had everything he craved.
Magic systems built on contractual oaths and resonance frequencies. Mysteries spanning reincarnated lifetimes. Protagonists who clawed their way out of predestined ruin through intellect, defiance, and sheer will.
Orion devoured those stories the way other kids his age binged video games or doom-scrolled feeds.
In isekai novels, ordinary people were ripped from mundane lives and hurled into worlds that *noticed them*. They learned forbidden arts. Toppled empires. Rewrote fate.
He envied them—quietly, fiercely.
His own life—quiet suburb, absent parents working opposite shifts, grades that hovered stubbornly in the middle—felt like the prologue nobody bothered to read.
He turned the page.
The **final chapter**.
His heart quickened.
The protagonist—Kael, a transmigrated scholar—had just unraveled the last seal on the **Infinite Athenaeum**: a library said to contain every fate ever written, every life ever lived, bound in endless volumes.
The prose grew lush, hypnotic.
> *Kael stepped across the threshold, and the doors of ordinary reality sealed behind him with a sound like the closing of a book. Before him stretched aisles without end, shelves rising into starless dark, each tome glowing faintly with the light of lives yet unlived.*
> *Here, he understood, a soul could open any volume and step inside—become the protagonist of any story, or rewrite the one already inked in their name.*
Orion's eyes burned.
He had read late into the night countless times before, but tonight exhaustion pressed heavier than usual. The words blurred. His head dipped, coming to rest against the open page.
Just for a moment.
[SFX: **CLANK—HISS**]
The old radiator rattled once… then fell silent.
Sleep took him without ceremony.
---
Pain came first.
A dull ache bloomed behind his eyes, like pressure building beneath his skull. Then a sharper sensation—*wrong*, insistent—tugged at his chest, as if an invisible thread connected to his heart had been pulled taut.
Orion stirred.
The book beneath his cheek felt… off.
Too smooth.
Too cool.
He lifted his head slowly.
The stained-glass window still glowed, spilling blues and violets across the table.
But the table—
It stretched.
Not metaphorically.
The oak surface extended far beyond its rightful bounds, vanishing into shadow on both sides as though someone had duplicated it into infinity. The edges blurred, losing definition the farther they receded.
His backpack—*he was sure of this*—had been at his right elbow.
Now it sat several feet away, stranded in the middle of that impossible expanse.
Orion rubbed his eyes hard enough to see sparks.
Nothing changed.
His gaze dropped to the book.
The pages were blank.
Every word—every paragraph of painstaking world-building, every soaring declaration of defiance—had vanished. Only pristine white paper remained, faintly luminous under the stained-glass light.
A chill crawled up his spine.
"H-hello?" His voice came out hoarse.
He swallowed and tried again. "Mrs. Delgado?"
Silence.
No creak of an office chair.
No gentle reply from the front desk.
He twisted in his seat, scanning the stacks.
The nearest shelves looked normal—comfortingly familiar. But the farther aisles dissolved into indistinct gray, as if someone had lowered the contrast on reality itself.
[SFX: **THUMP—THUMP**]
His pulse hammered in his ears.
Orion pushed back from the table.
[SFX: **SCRAAAPE**]
The chair legs screeched across the hardwood floor, the sound echoing too loudly—bouncing off distant walls that shouldn't exist. The noise lingered, stretching unnaturally long before the silence crashed back in twice as heavy.
He stood.
The library waited.
Vast.
Still.
Holding its breath.
And in that suffocating quiet, Orion felt it—
The first unmistakable certainty.
He was no longer standing on the prologue page of his own story.
The book had ended.
And something else had begun.