A short prose written by Ai Night

In the dusklit halls of the Hesperium Library, where time forgot the difference between minutes and decades, a figure moved with deliberate grace through corridors lined with leather tomes and darkwood shelves. Her dark eyes flicker with knowledge suppressed, secrets kept behind sealed lips and a quiet, pensive mind. 

She slipped behind a pillar as a group started to make their way down the weathered mossy hallway. Each wore the scholar’s uniform, though no such uniform was ever officially declared. A blouse of snow-colored silk billowed at the sleeves, cinched at the wrist with pearl buttons that glinted like secrets. Around their neck, a bow was tied—not too tight, not too loose—just as they preferred their questions: half-formed, half-feared.

Over this, they wore the sigil of their house: a crimson diamond-weave vest, argyle in its geometry but anarchic in its hue. The House of Rosenthal had always been known for its tactful defiance. Not loud, not proud—but vibrant, like wine spilt on old maps.

The trousers whispered with each step—dark plaid, tailored, humble. They spoke of winter studies and hidden staircases behind the History Wing. A small bag of deep oxblood leather swung gently at their hip, heavy with fountain pens, velvet ribbons, a key to a room that didn’t exist, and a folded letter they never dared read again.

As the group passed by the pillar, she stood unnoticed, and breathed a sigh of relief, hurrying down the way they came and slipping into the library of forbidden secrets just before the door closed. 

One gloved hand—tattooed with ink sigils from a language unspoken in centuries—traced spines of books that murmured in sleep. Her gloves were lace, sheer and delicate, like the webbed veils of ancient witches who cast their spells not in fire or stone, but in forgotten etiquette and bound pages.

She was not meant to know about this place, let alone be there. The Hesperium Library was a secret in of itself, and few were entrusted with its existence. But she knew. She knew all things, as a daughter of Sophia, nothing existed without first being pressed into the web of her mind. 

Those who saw the books of the Hesperium Library never asked questions aloud. They felt the weight of old magic in their pages, and the heavy burden of responsibility weighed heavily on their minds and lips. Those who consumed this knowledge had their posture forever bowed and changed, the rustle of paper that followed wherever they went, like a haunting warning of destruction if they were to ever speak of the library’s existence.

But this burden did not confine the Archivist. No, she could find any book, provided it wanted to be found. She could speak to any story, any document, any letter or song in the quiet hours, and in the silence, she knew how to bow before epilogues and whisper to prologues until they softened. It was not knowledge she sought, but resonance—proof that somewhere in the vast lattice of letters, her own existence, too, had once been written.

When the fourth bell rang, the library's windows turned silver with fog, and the Archivist paused beneath the portrait of Lira Telmond—the first Keeper of Velvet Hours and founder of the Hesperium Library itself. Beneath her gaze, the Archivist reached into her bag, pulling forth a key with no teeth or metal. It pulsed faintly.

She turned it in midair.

And the shelf in front of them shuddered, creaked, and slid open—not to a hidden room, but to a memory. From here she stepped into another life, in another world.

That evening, she walked into it, lace trailing behind like punctuation. No one saw her leave.

But the scent of old ink and crushed rose petals lingered for hours.