The revelation was a cold splash, shocking me out of passivity. The comforting crutch of a "system" was gone, shattered. The narrative of "isekai" was a childish fantasy. If this is total reality I need to act fast. Hope was a liability. Only action, only intelligence, could be my armor.
The first and most glaring hole in my defenses was ignorance. I know nothing about this world. I had a language, a name, a family title. I had overheard snippets of politics, seen glimpses of magic. It was nothing. I didn't know the history, the geography, the power structures beyond my own walls. I didn't know what "Extreme Nightmare" truly meant in the context of this reality. Was it a world at constant war? A decaying empire? A land ruled by monstrous entities? The not-knowing was a void more terrifying than any known danger.
To achieve that I needed to take a risk. Calculated, but a risk nonetheless. My nocturnal training had perfected my silence and my sense of the household's rhythms. It was night. The twin moons, Valus (the cream) and Liora (the rose), were high, casting a gentle, bicolor glow through the high windows. The great house of Theodore was a creature of daylight and formal dinners. The deep night belonged to silence and shadows.
I was pretending to sleep. My breathing was deep and even. When the maid's own breathing from her pallet near the door settled into the slow rhythm of deep slumber, I moved.
My body uncoiled from the mattress with a fluidity born of thousands of repetitions. I stood up from the crib and jumped down from it, causing no pain, the result of my hard work. My landing was a whisper, knees bending to absorb the impact, my feet positioned for perfect balance. I was a three-year-old phantom.
The door to my chamber was heavy, but its hinges were impeccably maintained. I pulled, putting my shoulder into it, and it swung open with only the faintest sigh of moving air. I quickly opened the door and looked here and there.
The corridor was a canyon of moonlight and deep shadow. It was empty. The air was still, cool, carrying the faint scent of waxed wood and the distant, cold fragrance from the garden far below.
First, I needed to be experienced with this place. I need to know every corner of it. My own wing was a mystery. It was time to draw a map, not in parchment, but in the perfect parchment of my mind.
Slowly I started walking around the place. My bare feet made no sound on the thick, runner carpets. I moved with a predator's caution, pausing at every intersection, listening for the breath of guards, the rustle of a robe. There were none. The absence of nighttime patrols was its own kind of unsettling. Did they feel so secure that guards were unnecessary inside the spire? Or was the security of a different, more magical kind? I thought of Lyra' throwing star. Perhaps the walls themselves watched.
On the left side of my room, there were the stairs which lead to the garden. A grand, curving staircase of pale stone, disappearing downward into deeper gloom. I don't need to go to a garden late at night. The open space offered no cover, no information. It was a secondary objective.
I moved right. The corridor extended, doors spaced at regular intervals along the inner wall. Guest rooms? Storage? Siblings' quarters? On the right, there were many rooms.
I slowly checked one by one. The first door was unlocked. I pushed it open a crack. The room within was shrouded in sheet-covered furniture, a ghostly tableau in the moonlight. One was empty. A disused guest chamber. The next door revealed a stark, functional space. Racks held weapons—not ceremonial, but tools of war. Slim, elegant rapiers with basket hilts. Curved daggers with gemless pommels. A few light crossbows. The air smelled of oil and sharpened steel. One was filled with weapons. An armory, modest but serious. I noted its location and closed the door.
But time was a fragile resource. I could hear the subtle shift in the sleeping maid's breathing, a cycle nearing its end. There was not enough time. I retreated, a shadow flitting back to my crib, slipping under the blanket just as the maid stirred, turned over, and settled again.
So I decided to look into the rooms one by one the next night.
The following night, I was more efficient. My mental map expanded. The next few doors revealed a music room with a strange, harp-like instrument, a solarium filled with alien, glowing plants, and another vacant guest suite. The doors at the far end of the wing were locked. I pressed my ear to them—silence.
My exploration culminated at the end of the corridor, where it opened into the grand gallery overlooking the banquet hall below. At the end of it, there was the same place where the naming ceremony happened. The long table gleamed emptily in the moonlight. I looked down from the railing, my mind superimposing the memory of being a centerpiece on that cold wood.
A crushing disappointment settled in. There was no sign of a Library. I had passed perhaps two dozen rooms. None held bookshelves. None had the feel of a study. I desperately needed a book. Not a child's primer, but real texts: histories, bestiaries, genealogies, magical theory. The key to the world was written down somewhere. It had to be.
Third night. All of the rooms were clear. I had checked every accessible door in the residential wing. Apart from the locked ones, which likely belonged to my siblings. I had inventoried it all. And still, no books. The unsettling pattern deepened: Not a single person roamed here. I wonder why. No guards, no servants on night errands. The silence was absolute, profound. It felt less like security and more like… abandonment. As if this wing was a beautifully preserved exhibit, and I was the only living thing in it after dark.
The maid pops up in the morning. Her arrival was as punctual as the dawn, her demeanor unchanged. What is happening here? Was the nocturnal emptiness by design? Was I being isolated, or was this simply the way of the High House—privacy enforced by unspoken law and implicit threat?
In the end, I couldn't find the library.
Frustration gnawed at me during the daylight hours. I trained with a vicious intensity, pushing my small body to burn off the anxious energy. The next night I mapped the place in my head, reviewing every room, every turn. There were no libraries in the place. The conclusion was inescapable for this wing.
It must be somewhere… I checked… everywhere. But I hadn't. I'd only checked my tier. The house was a vertical structure—a central spire with multiple levels. I lived near the top. Below were the public and ceremonial floors. Below that, the kitchens, the servants' quarters, the real workings of the house. And there was the garden level.
In the next few days, I was in deep thought of where the library is. Or is it actually there or not? Could a noble house, a High House of a seemingly sophisticated culture, lack a library? Unthinkable. Knowledge was power. The Theodores would hoard it as they hoarded weapons and beauty.
Is there a place I haven't checked? Garden?. The idea seemed absurd. But why would a— Libraries were indoors. Protected from the elements. Yet… this was not Earth. The rules were different. What if their "books" were not paper but living vines, or crystals that held memory? The garden was the only part of the estate I had written off without inspection.
No, let's check then say.
The descent was the greatest risk yet. The following night I went downstairs. The grand staircase was a vast expanse of vulnerability. I stuck to the shadows along the outer wall, moving down one deliberate, silent step at a time. The world expanded. The ceilings grew even higher, the spaces more monumental. I passed the entrance to the banquet hall, then a portrait gallery where the painted, golden-haired ancestors seemed to watch my tiny, trespassing form with citrine-eyed indifference.
It was a long voyage. My legs, strong as they were, began to ache. The air grew slightly warmer, carrying complex smells from deep within the house—baking bread, herbs, damp stone. The servant regions. I avoided them.
Finally, I reached the ground floor. A massive archway led outside. Ah, how am I going to climb back up? The return journey would be a brutal test of endurance. I pushed the thought aside.
Stepping through the arch, I entered another world. The garden smelled of flowers and fruits, but the scents were alien—sharp, metallic sweetness, a hint of ozone. The plants were sculptural, their leaves edged in faint light, their blossoms glowing with soft internal luminescence. The twin moons provided ample light, painting everything in silver and rose.
Besides the garden was a small wooden house. It was quaint, almost humble compared to the soaring stone spires. A gardener's shed? It seemed the most likely place for nothing important. But I was methodical now.
I didn't feel any fear even though I was wandering alone at night with no one here. The observation was clinical. My heart rate was elevated from exertion, not terror. Must have been due to noble blood. Or perhaps it was the simple familiarity of this place, the lack of any immediate predatory presence. The garden felt neutral. Empty.
I quickly mapped the place and moved ahead. Past the garden, hugging the base of the main spire, was a narrower path leading to a secondary structure. I moved into another tower, quite smaller than mine. It was squat, built of the same pearlescent stone but without the ornate carvings. A utility tower? Storage?
Wait, are there no libraries? Despair began to whisper again. This smaller tower seemed even less likely.
Hmmm, at least I should check. The door was simple, iron-bound wood. It was unlocked. I slipped inside.
A spiral staircase wound upward in the center. Unlike the grand staircase, this was tight, functional. I climbed the staircase. There was only a single floor. The climb was short. At the top, a plain wooden door.
I creaked the door open. The room within was small, circular, and spartan. It was a normal room. Bed, a cupboard. A single narrow window looked out over the moonlit garden. It was a cell. A servant's room, perhaps, or a retreat for a guardsman. Barren. Impersonal.
Tch. No library here. The whisper of despair became a cold flood. I had exhausted every obvious avenue. The library was either exquisitely hidden, located in a wing I couldn't possibly access (like my father's private quarters at the spire's peak), or it didn't exist in any form I would recognize.
Dejected, my body now leaden with fatigue, I began the long, punishing ascent. I started a long journey of climbing up my original tower. Each step was a minor agony. My mind churned, a turmoil of frustration and fear. Where is the library? Why is there no book in this damn place?!
Knowledge was control. Without it, I was adrift. I could be the strongest, fastest three-year-old in this planet, and it would mean nothing if I didn't have knowledge. I was being kept in the dark, literally and figuratively. Fed, clothed, monitored, but denied the fundamental tool to understand my own prison.
As I finally reached the corridor leading to my room, my legs trembling, a new and chilling thought occurred to me. Perhaps there were no books because in this world, knowledge wasn't stored on pages. Perhaps it was stored in people. And people, in my experience, especially the golden-haired ones, were not in the habit of sharing. They hoarded. They assessed. They used.
The library I sought might not be a room at all. It might be the cold, calculating mind of my father. It might be the secret my sister had tried to kill on the ceiling. It might be a truth so dangerous it was never written down.
I slipped back into my crib as the first hints of dawn tinged the sky. I was no closer to answers.