The silence was a weight. It pressed on Alani’s ears, a physical thing heavier than the scream that had come before. The world had held its breath, and in the quiet, she felt the stone floor beneath her palms. It was cold. Not the living cold of deep earth, but the dead cold of a thing that had forgotten it was stone. Her connection to the living world, to the slow, deep memories of soil and rock, had been her anchor in the storm of a dying star. It was a thin rope, but it had held. She pushed herself up.
The Great Library was a tomb of dust and stillness. Bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves. Some, the blank-eyed soldiers, were still and empty. Others, her companions, twitched with the echoes of the blast. Her gaze found Sineus. He was on his knees, head bowed, hands pressed to his temples. The seer had taken the full force of the wave. She crossed to him, her boots crunching on fallen plaster.
— Up, — she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. — We have to move.
She put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but looked up. His eyes were unfocused, lost in a reality she could not feel. But his purpose remained. He blinked, the focus returning like a distant light finding its way through fog. He looked toward the dais where the clay cylinder lay, then scrambled to it. He fumbled with the container, his hands shaking, but secured the Heart of Truth within his tunic. The seed of hope was a small, hard weight against his chest.
— The path, Alani. Which way? — Sineus asked, his voice strained.
She closed her eyes, shutting out the ruin. She listened past the ringing in her ears, past the memory of the star’s scream. She listened for the world beneath the stone. The library was a wound. The main halls were wounds. But there. A thread of quiet. A memory of water. The forgotten waterway she had sensed in the council chamber. It was a faint pulse of life in a dying body.
— There, — she said, pointing toward a collapsed section of shelving against the far wall. — Behind the scrolls.
Fedor Sokolov was already on his feet, his face pale but set like iron. He swayed, but his axe was back in his hand. He saw Levan Dadiani, the Khevsur warrior, push himself to a sitting position, his ornate armor looking dull in the thick dust. The warrior’s pride was gone, replaced by a hollow, terrible clarity.
— Kira… she’s not moving, — Fedor grunted, nodding toward the dais.
Kira Zaytseva lay beside the silent bell controls, as still as the catatonic soldiers. Her face was slack, her skin the color of old parchment. Fedor moved to her, lifting the archivist into his arms with a grunt. She was a fragile weight. Levan staggered to his feet and moved to help, taking some of the burden. The two warriors, one a northern rock and the other a shattered mountain, carried the woman who had saved them.
A low groan echoed from the center of the library. A scrape of dark metal on stone. Kurov was stirring.
— Now, — Alani urged, her voice sharp.
She led them to the wreckage of the shelves. Behind a fallen case of scrolls, a dark opening was revealed. It was a service conduit, barely wide enough for a single person, smelling of damp earth and deep quiet. It was the path she had felt. The path of water. Sineus went first, then Alani, then Fedor and Levan carrying Kira between them. They plunged into the tight darkness, leaving the broken library and the recovering warlord behind.
The passage was a cool, damp throat in the rock. The air was clean, washing away the ozone and the scent of fear. Water trickled down the stone walls, and Alani trailed her fingers against it, feeling the simple, honest memory of rain and river. It was a balm against the lingering echo of the star. They moved in silence for what felt like hours, climbing steadily upward through the guts of the canyon.
They emerged through a narrow fissure, blinking in the harsh, late afternoon sun. They were hundreds of meters up the canyon wall, on a narrow ledge overlooking the Sunken Scriptorium. The wind was sharp and clean. For a moment, there was only the sound of their own ragged breathing. They had made it. They were out.
Then, Alani felt it. A new tearing. A focused, deliberate unmaking.
Down below, Kurov stood in the grand plaza before the Great Library. He was alone. His rage was a palpable force, a heat that rose even to their high perch. He had been denied his prize. He raised his blade—not a Sekach Pamyati, but something older, darker. He was not attacking the empty bodies of his soldiers. He was attacking the Scriptorium itself.
He swept the blade through the air. It made no sound. But where its edge passed, reality frayed. The grand archway of the library shimmered. The ochre stone turned translucent, like sun-worn glass. Alani could see the shelves, the dais, the bodies within, all overlaid for a single, horrifying moment.
Then the archway dissolved. It did not crumble into dust. It was unwritten from the world, leaving a smooth, edgeless void where it had stood for a thousand years.
Kurov moved to the next building, the Hall of Lost Worlds. He swung his blade again. The facade flickered. The memories holding the stone together were cut, one by one. The structure thinned, becoming a ghost of itself. Then it, too, was gone.
They had the Heart of Truth. But their victory was a hollow, bitter thing.
They could only watch as he began to unmake the world.
