The bronze lever was cold under her palm. Kira Zaytseva pulled it down. The final lock on the forbidden memory disengaged with a soft, internal click. The sequence was active. The broadcast was initiated. For a single, suspended heartbeat, there was only the low hum of the control dais and the scent of ozone.
Then the Vechevy Kolokol screamed.
It was not the sound of a bell. It was not bronze striking bronze. It was a sound that tore through the air and the mind at once, a physical pressure that made the stone of the Great Library vibrate. It was the shriek of physics being unmade, a single, sustained note of pure, structural chaos pulled from the heart of a dying star and forced through the throat of the Scriptorium.
A wave of invisible force erupted from the bell tower. It was not light or sound, but a ripple in the very substance of the world, a wavefront of raw, agonizing truth expanding at the speed of hearing. It washed over the entire canyon in an instant.
Kira saw it happen, not with her eyes, but in the sudden, violent collapse of every mind connected to the world.
Sineus went down first. His hands flew to his temples, his face a mask of pure agony as the unfiltered chaos of a collapsing sun slammed into a mind built to perceive every layer of reality. He did not cry out. The sound was stolen from his lungs. He simply folded, a prince crushed under the weight of a memory too vast for any world to hold.
Beside him, Levan Dadiani, the proud warrior of the mountain clans, fell as if struck by a hammer. His armor, now stripped of its stolen shame, offered no defense. His mind, already cracked by one terrible truth, was shattered by a billion more. He collapsed beside the Khevsur warriors who had remained loyal, all of them twitching on the flagstones.
Even Fedor Sokolov, the rock, the man of simple, brutal truths, was brought to his knees. He dropped his axe with a clang that was swallowed by the greater scream. He knelt, head bowed, his entire body rigid as he fought a war against an enemy that had no flesh, no steel, only the crushing weight of everything ending at once.
The gambit had worked. The cost was absolute.
But the effect on Kurov’s forces was different. The blank-eyed soldiers, the men whose own histories had been carved out to make them perfect, fearless weapons, had no identity to anchor them. They had no self to cling to in the face of annihilation. The wave of pure chaos washed over them, and finding no mind to break, it simply wiped the slate clean.
Across the library and out in the halls, they stopped. They stood for a moment, their heads tilted as if listening to a distant command. Then, one by one, they crumpled. Not like men falling in battle, but like puppets whose strings had all been cut at the same moment. Their eyes remained open, but they were empty. Utterly empty. The army was gone, reduced to a collection of catatonic bodies.
Rostislav Kurov himself was not immune. He staggered back a step, his hand coming up to his helm. The armor of stolen despair, the shroud woven from the agony of nations, flickered. It struggled to absorb this new, cosmic pain. It was a shield made to block the focused misery of mortals, not the structural collapse of a star. Cracks of faint, sickly light spiderwebbed across its dark surface. Kurov was hurt. He was disoriented.
He was vulnerable.
High above, in the bell tower, the great Vechevy Kolokol of the Scriptorium could not bear the burden of the memory it was forced to sing. A deep, groaning crack appeared in the ancient bronze, racing from its lip to its crown. The impossible scream faltered, dropping in pitch until it was a guttural moan. Then, with a final, percussive crack that echoed through the canyon, the bell fell silent. The weapon had destroyed itself. It could only be fired once.
The psychic echo of the wave, its purpose served, recoiled upon its source. It slammed back into Kira.
Her mind, the library of her soul, was torn from its shelves. The disciplined order of a lifetime spent in catalogues and indices dissolved into a storm. She saw the face of her first mentor, his kind eyes and ink-stained fingers. She felt the grit of sandstone from the Unfinished Tablet under her nails. She smelled the dry, comforting dust of the Hall of Lost Worlds.
Each memory was a star. Each one was a point of light in the ordered constellation of her identity.
And they were all being pulled apart. A force of immense gravity, the echo of the collapsing sun, tore at the connections between them. Her name. Her purpose. Her duty. The face of the northern prince who had reminded her what it felt like to hope. All of it stretched, thinned, and began to fray.
She was a record being erased. The process was cold, clinical, and absolute. Permanent personality dissolution. The warning on the index had been an understatement.
She fought. Not with strength, but with habit. She was an archivist. She clung to a single data point, a single cross-reference in the storm. Sineus. The Heart of Truth. The mission. It was a thread. A single, fragile thread in a hurricane of unmaking. She held on.
Then the thread snapped.
She collapsed to the cold stone of the dais, a puppet with her own strings cut.
A profound, stunning silence fell over the canyon. The scream was gone, and its absence was a physical presence, a heavy blanket that smothered all other sound. The battle was over.
Dust motes, thrown into the air by the bell’s final shudder, hung motionless in the dim light. The faint, metallic scent of cooling bronze and ozone touched the air.
The silence was profound. A gift of moments. Kurov was vulnerable. And their time was running out.
