She turned, and he realized she had been standing in an aisle carved by her presence rather than by space. The shelves seemed to lean aside for her, as though recognizing her authority.
"Hold." She raised a finger. "Look."
He followed her gesture. Most spines were blank, dusted gray. But one bore a half-burned name: [Ema Karr]. The letters shimmered, faded, shimmered again.
He reached for it.
"Carefully," the Archivist said, not stopping him. "Books of the dead can cut."
The volume thrummed in his palm, like a bell struck far away. When he opened it, fractured script rippled across the pages. Words bloomed and dimmed: a childhood on a vanished coast, salt wind in his face, a forbidden sweet, a knife in a stairwell, a promise left unkept.
The memories caught him off guard. For a heartbeat he stood on that vanished shore, tasting the sea and feeling sand beneath his feet. The ache of it pierced his chest.
He slammed the book shut, gasping.
"What—was that?"
"A borrowing," the Archivist said. "Fragments of the fallen linger. Read, and you may take the shape of what they knew—for a time."
His fingers trembled. "I felt like I could move as she did. The knife. The strike."
"You could. But not yours—borrowed. And borrowed entries have barbs."
"Barbs?"
"Read too deep, and the line you take tangles with your own. It will try to write itself into you. It corrupts the page." Her eyes flicked to his book. "Your blankness is a wide-open door. Be deliberate what you let in."
Uneasy, he slid Ema Karr back. The spine pulsed faintly, then dimmed.
"Then I'd better learn fast."
"Wise." She nodded at his quill. "Try something small. Honest. With a boundary. Feel the heat."
He hesitated, then wrote carefully:
I steady my hands when I breathe three times.
Warmth rose—present, but bearable.
New Trait: [Measured Breath] – Tremor calms after a counted breath.
The Archivist leaned closer. "Better. Conditional. Modest. The page approves restraint."
He tried it—one breath, two, three—and the tremor in his hands faded like a receding tide. Control. For the first time, he had a sliver of it.
"And if I wrote something greater?" he asked. "Like—I cannot be harmed by fire?"
"The Archive would laugh. Then prove you wrong." Her mouth quirked. "Better to say: I cool when flames touch me. With a price. It chills me for an hour. Trade makes balance."
Always trade. Always cost. He didn't like the weight of it, but he nodded.
His gaze fell to the margin. The char had not spread. Relief loosened his chest.
"And if someone else wrote in here?"
Her smile thinned. "They take you from yourself. You become what they say." A pause. "Some will try."
He remembered the Ashling clutching its burning book. "Others like it?"
"Others who prey. Not only the hungry. There are hands that hoard." Her voice grew colder. "They call themselves Librarians. They believe possession is authorship."
The word landed like iron in his chest: Librarians.
Before he could ask more, a sound rippled through the silence: a faint rattle, like beads shaken in a jar.
The Archivist's head lifted. Her quill froze. "Listen."
The rattle grew—clicking, scraping, a low sigh of breath moving through broken throats. Then a steady cadence of steps.
"They patrol," she whispered. "Ashlings do not organize, not unless something commands them."
He swallowed hard. "How many?"
"Enough," she said. "Too many for your first page."
The shelves shivered around them. Ash sifted down from above. Shadows thickened at the far end of the aisle—one, two, five Ashlings, and more gathering. Blackfire licked across the shelves, snuffing titles to ash.
His heart hammered. He thought of writing something desperate, anything—I can fight them, I can kill them all. The book warmed under his thumb at the thought, a warning pulse, as though it too rejected the idea.
The Archivist's voice slid into him, sharp as a blade. "Learn this first rule: survival is scholarship. You cannot read if you are ash."
The first Ashling dropped to all fours, its hollow eyes catching the glow of his page. It sprang.
He opened the Chronicle. Heat surged up to meet him, rising like fire.
He pressed the quill to the page.
And wrote.