The screaming stopped when the ink dried.

Kael stared at his hands. The Penumbra Codex lay open on the vault floor, its pages now blank. His nosebleed had stained the edges crimson, and his head throbbed like someone had taken a chisel to his skull. But that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part was the silence.

Libraries were never silent. Even in the Black Vault, there were whispers—the hum of cursed artifacts, the creak of spacetime bending under the weight of too many secrets. Now, there was nothing. Not even the sound of his own breathing.

He stumbled into the hallway. The gas lamps were dark. The air smelled wrong, like static and burnt sugar.

“Mara?” he called.

No answer.

His boots echoed too loudly as he climbed the stairs to the main archive. The door to Section 13 vanished behind him, replaced by a smooth stone wall. Not a good sign, he thought. Last time a section disappeared, it took three Cartographers and a bucket of holy fire to bring it back.

The main hall was empty. No Mara. No interns. Just dust motes floating in shafts of moonlight. Moonlight? But the library had no windows.

He pressed a palm to the nearest shelf. The wood felt… thin. Like paper. When he pulled his hand back, his fingers left indents, as if he’d pressed into clay.

“Oh gods,” he whispered.

He ran.

The streets of Liran’s Hollow were gone.

Not destroyed. Not collapsed. Gone. Where the town square should’ve been, there was only a flat gray expanse, like the world had been cut away with a scalpel. The edges frayed into static, bleeding faint whispers:

“Kael, buy the chamomile, not peppermint—”
“—don’t forget your medicine—”
“—happy birthday, little brother—”

Lyra’s voice. Always Lyra’s voice.

He fell to his knees. The cobblestones beneath him wavered, dissolving into paragraphs of text. He glimpsed his own handwriting—descriptions of the town, his childhood, the rusted swing set in Lyra’s backyard. The words frayed, eaten by the Codex’s ink.

“What did I do?” he said, but the static swallowed the words.

A shadow fell over him.

“You rewrote the story,” said a voice like grinding glass. “Bad move, kid.”

Kael turned. A man stood behind him, tall and gaunt, wearing a coat stitched from what looked like starlight and barbed wire. His eyes were mismatched—one blue, one black and pulsing. In his hand, he held a sword that wasn’t a sword. It was a jagged shard of nothing, its edges devouring the light.

“Jarek the Unbound,” the man said, tipping an imaginary hat. “Professional headache for gods, Cartographers, and… whatever you are.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, nobody ever means to erase their hometown. But here we are.” Jarek crouched, eyeing the dissolving cobblestones. “Veil’s fraying faster than I thought. You’ve got maybe an hour before the Cartographers send Cleaners. They don’t like loose ends.”

“Cleaners?”

“Think of ’em as cosmic janitors. They’ll scrub this place so clean, even you won’t remember it existed.” Jarek’s grin was all teeth. “Unless you wanna stick around and become a footnote.”