Lena woke drowning in ink.
Thick, black liquid flooded her nostrils, her throat, her lungs—but she didn't choke. The ink breathed for her, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn't hers. When she opened her eyes, the darkness wasn't empty.
Words floated around her like corpses in a frozen lake:
LIAR
KEEPER
FORGOTTEN
Then—
A voice. Not the Witness's.
Hers.
"You took too long," it sighed.
Light exploded. Lena gasped as she was spat onto a cold marble floor, the ink sloughing off her skin like a second shadow. The room was circular, its walls made of towering bookshelves that stretched into oblivion. At the center stood a pedestal—and on it, the original Liber Mortis, its cover now stitched with her hair.
The Last Witness lounged against the pedestal, idly flipping through its pages.
Except it wasn't the Witness anymore.
It was Alistair.
His mouth was sewn shut with gold thread. His eyes were hollow pits. When he saw Lena, he smiled around the stitches, the skin at the corners of his lips tearing.
"Welcome to the Library of the Unwritten," he said, his voice coming from the book itself. "Where stories go to be reused."
---
The First Truth
Lena scrambled backward, her hands slipping on the marble—no, not marble. Teeth. The floor was made of fused molars, each one engraved with a name:
KAREL BOHDAN
MARGUERITE DURET
MIRA SOKOLOV
Alistair (the Witness? The book?) tilted his head. "You still don't understand. The Liber Mortis was never just a prison."
He snapped his fingers.
The bookshelves shuddered, their volumes rearranging into a grotesque tableau:
- Jenna's skin stretched over a copy of Crime and Punishment, her mouth sewn to the word "GUILTY."
- Dan's spine fused to an architectural manual, his ribs splayed like blueprints.
- Dr. Varrick's face pressed against the glass of a jar labeled "FAILED EXPERIMENT #37."
Alistair stroked the book's cover. "It's a press. A machine that grinds up old stories to print new ones."
He stepped closer, his breath reeking of burnt paper. "And you, Lena, are the fresh parchment."
---
The Second Lie
Lena's scars burned. She looked down—
—and screamed.
Her skin was translucent, revealing text beneath:
LENA CARTER - KEEPER #38
STATUS: INCOMPLETE
CORRECTION REQUIRED: Y/N?
Alistair sighed. "You were supposed to sign your name. Become the new vessel. But you resisted."
He grabbed her wrist, his fingers fusing to her flesh like wet paper. "Now we have to edit you."
The bookshelf behind him split open, revealing a long hallway lined with mirrors. In each one, a different version of Lena stared back:
- Lena at eight years old, whispering names to the book as Alistair watched.
- Lena at twenty, slitting Jenna's throat with a bone quill.
- Lena at sixty, her mouth sewn shut, her eyes hollow as she wrote deaths in a ledger.
The real Lena gagged. "Those aren't me."
Alistair's stitches popped, one by one. "Aren't they?"
Then the hallway lunged for her.
---
The Third Incision
The mirrors swallowed her whole.
Lena fell through fractured memories—each one a lie the book had written for her:
- A childhood where her mother read her bedtime stories from the Liber Mortis.
- A first kiss with Dan that ended with his lips melting into ink.
- Mira's corpse handing her a pen and whispering, "Finish what we started."
The pain was unbearable. Like someone was unspooling her mind, thread by thread.
Then—
A hand grabbed hers.
Mira.
Real Mira. Not the Witness, not the corpse—her Mira, with her white-streaked hair and ink-stained fingers.
"Fight it," she hissed. "The book recycles, but it can't create. Every story has a plothole."
She pressed something into Lena's palm:
A single word, torn from the original book:
"REMEMBER"
Then the memory shattered.
---
The Blood Edit
Lena jolted back to the library. Alistair loomed over her, a bone quill poised above her chest.
"Last chance," he whispered. "Sign your name. Or become raw material."
Lena's fingers closed around the word Mira had given her. It burned.
She remembered:
- The Collector's mask cracking to reveal her own face.
- The last page hidden in Mira's bones.
- The truth the book had buried:
The shadow god wasn't trapped.
It was hungry.
And it wanted out.
Lena smiled.
Then she shoved the word into Alistair's chest.
---
The Aftermath
The effect was instant.
Alistair stiffened, his body seizing as the word "REMEMBER" burrowed into his ribs. The gold thread in his mouth melted, his lips peeling back to reveal—
Nothing.
No tongue. No teeth. Just a yawning void.
The library screamed. The bookshelves collapsed, their volumes bursting into clouds of ash. The original book thrashed on its pedestal, its pages flapping like wounded birds.
Lena crawled toward it, her body breaking apart at the seams.
She had one last choice:
Burn it.
Or become it.
Then—
A hand grabbed her ankle.
Alistair (the Witness? The book?) looked up at her, his hollow eyes pleading.
"Don't," he rasped. "Without it, we all unwrite."
Behind him, the last mirror showed the truth:
A world without the book.
A world where Lena Carter had never existed.
---