The library smelled like dust and dying ink. Kael Veyra coughed into his sleeve—a wet, rattling sound that left flecks of blood on the fabric. Three months left, the doctors had said. Funny, how they’d looked at him like he was a tragedy. He’d been dying since the day he was born.

He ran a thumb over the spine of A Treatise on Celestial Cartography. The leather was cold. Alive, almost. Libraries were like that—full of ghosts. His sister Lyra used to say books were just tombs for stories nobody wanted to tell. She’d been dead for six years. Mostly.

“Stop it,” he muttered. The memory of her laugh echoed anyway.

The library’s gas lamps flickered, casting shadows that moved wrong. Too sharp. Too many teeth. Kael ignored them. He’d worked here since the coughing started, since the Council of Cartographers deemed him “safe enough” to archive forbidden texts. Safe. What a joke. The Cartographers policed the Veil—that brittle curtain between realities—but they were too busy burning worlds to notice the rot creeping into theirs.

“You’re late, Veyra.”

Mara, the head archivist, loomed over his desk. Her brass eyepiece glinted, its lens etched with runes that let her see through lies. Or so she claimed. Kael wondered if it worked on the rot gnawing at her left hand, blackened fingers clutching a ledger.

“Apologies,” he rasped. “The Chronophage Abyss section was… restless.”

Mara snorted. “Restless. Right. Just finish cataloguing the new arrivals. And burn anything that whispers.” She tossed him a key. “Section 13. Don’t dawdle.”

Section 13. The Black Vault. Where the Cartographers stored relics from dead realms. Kael’s chest tightened. Last week, a book there had unraveled an intern into a puddle of vowels.

The vault door groaned. Cold air slithered out, smelling of static and burnt hair. Shelves stretched into darkness, stacked with horrors: a jar of screaming light, a crown made of frozen time, a mirror that showed your soul as a word.

Kael’s hand trembled as he pulled the Penumbra Codex from the shelf. He hadn’t put it there.

Bad idea, his survival instinct hissed. Too bad survival was off the menu.

He opened it.

The first page was blank. Then, ink bloomed—not words, but his handwriting. A shopping list from last Tuesday. Bread, milk, insulin, Lyra’s favorite tea (chamomile, not peppermint). His throat tightened. The ink dissolved, replaced by new text:

“Chapter 1: How Kael Veyra Erased His Hometown.”

A drop of blood fell from his nose, smudging the page. The words rearranged.

“Correction: How He Will Erase It.”

The shelves began to scream.