The Library no longer remembered itself.
What remained was a cathedral of half-thoughts and hemorrhaged time, stretched across the decay-veins of Hollowwise's eastern bone district. It had once been called the Lexicon Citadel. Now, it went by no name, because no mind intact enough to utter it would willingly return. The entrance yawned open beneath a crown of collapsed columns — its keystone was a rune-seared glyph in recursive Root-Script: "Let That Which Is Forgotten Remember You."
Cael stepped across the threshold.
The air shifted.
Not wind, but recollection — ambient memory residue clinging to his thoughts like static ghosts. His boots struck marble dust where thousands of minds had once gathered to transcribe the future. Now, only echo remained. And echo, by nature, was never whole.
He passed under a canopy of shattered knowledge — shelves twisted into root-like tangles, their spines fractured, their contents leaking ink like blood. Not ink, exactly. Cognitive ichor — a thought-harvested fluid used to bind memory-skin pages, extracted from the minds of those who had died remembering too much.
The first whisper came from the walls, not the pages.
"Cael…" It said. Not a voice. A suggestion.
His own name, bouncing off the flaking consciousness of the building. It recognized him. Or someone it thought was him.
The Library had once recorded everything. Now it merely hallucinated.
He passed a room that bled dreams through the ceiling — the Dreambind Annex, where archivists had once copied entire nightmares into book-form, binding them in sleep-skin and reading them during waking hours for prophetic clarity. The dreams were no longer sealed. They spilled into the air, overlapping with current thought like oil on water.
He moved faster.
Deeper into the Citadel's marrow, where only the Cognitor-ranked could legally tread. Past warnings etched in Thoughtglass: "UNSTABLE MEMORY VOLUMES BEYOND THIS POINT." He ignored them.
Because in this place, memory was both map and mirage.
And he had come seeking himself.
The shelves began to shift.
Not physically — not entirely — but cognitively. Their order rearranged according to the shape of his mind. He understood the phenomenon immediately: Cognitivores. Parasites woven into the Library's spatial code. They sensed his mental architecture and rethreaded the layout of the stacks to align with his unresolved thoughts. A self-mirroring maze. A test.
He let it happen.
Let the Library shape itself around the question he hadn't voiced aloud: Who was I?
It led him to the Atrament Journals.
Thousands of volumes. All handwritten. All stamped with variations of his name — some inked in ritual blood, others scrawled in nerve-dust or engraved on bone-parchment. Every one claiming to be authored by Cael.
He reached for the closest.
The leather cover pulsed.
Not metaphor — literal. The cover was made from an organic memory-skin that breathed with residual cognition. Touching it was like shaking hands with a severed piece of his own soul. He opened it.
The ink crawled across the page.
First line: "I failed them all."
He read.
A narrative unspooled — Cael, a warborn tactician who turned on his own Guild to protect a village of non-cognitives during the Gray Reckoning. He betrayed his oaths. Burned his Sigil License. Became a hunted traitor.
He felt it. The sincerity. The grief.
It was him.
He turned the page.
Second journal. Different handwriting. Different author-stamp.
First line: "There was never a village. That was the lie I told myself."
This version of Cael described the same events — but inverted. Not a savior, but a manipulator. He had orchestrated the Gray Reckoning's escalation, forced the Guild's hand to justify a personal vendetta, used the village as bait for a mnemonic weapon test.
Again — it felt true.
Each journal contradicted the last.
Some described him as a Cognitor Saint who sacrificed his own mind to seal the Thoughtplague of Irides — a miasma that turned entire districts into echo-chambers of insanity. Others painted him as its architect, the one who unleashed the Thoughtplague as a field test for recursive cognition bombs.
Some journals ended mid-sentence. Others looped — their final paragraphs identical to their first, trapping the reader in a recursion spiral. One dissolved in his hands entirely, bleeding ink like tears before bursting into mnemonic flame.
He stood surrounded by voices, all claiming to be him.
They couldn't all be lies.
They couldn't all be truths.
Then came the one that should not have existed.
A black journal. No title. Bound in reversed time-skin — the hide of something that had died before it was born. Its touch was cold not in temperature, but in implication.
He opened it.
It contained no words.
Only images.
Sketches of himself, in places he had never been.
Cael seated on a throne of neural thorns, issuing judgments to kneeling saints with their tongues cut out.
Cael kneeling in front of a child's corpse, eyes hollowed, a dagger made of language buried in his own chest.
Cael watching a city burn, unmoved.
Cael crucified on a lattice of runes, smiling as his thoughts bled out.
He flipped faster.
The final image was of him — today — in this Library, holding the black journal, staring at this very page.
He snapped the book shut.
The Library laughed.
Not audibly. Cognitively. A pressure in the back of his brain, like the mirth of something ancient exhaling through neural dust.
He dropped the journal.
Looked around.
Nothing had moved.
Everything had moved.
He realized he could no longer be sure which of the journals were memory, and which were infection.
Unreliable narration had not begun with the books.
It had begun with him.
[Forget-Me] had already proved that his mind could be rewritten, pieces of his selfhood traded for power.
What if those memories — the ones the Rune took — hadn't been the first?
What if his entire life had been rewritten dozens of times?
What if the version of Cael standing here now was merely the least contradictory iteration?
And still… he kept reading.
Because he needed answers. And the Library whispered one thing in all tongues: To know who you are, you must remember what you did when you were no longer yourself.
Another journal.
This one written in third person — a narrative voice not his own. Almost mocking.
"Cael, the Echo-Crucified, was the thirty-ninth iteration to step into the Library. Each believed themselves the first. Each failed differently. The current subject is demonstrating elevated self-awareness, but we project cognitive collapse within six thousand glyphs."
Footnote: "If Subject Cael reads this line, he has passed the Third Reflection Threshold."
He blinked.
It hadn't been there a moment ago.
The ink was reactive. Reading it had changed it.
He shut the journal.
Around him, the shelves reformed.
This time, not in response to a question.
But to a memory.
He remembered a door.
He did not recall opening it.
But it opened now.
A hidden wing, sealed by a gate inscribed with Thought-Knots — forbidden glyphs used only in ancient Guildmind trials. They pulsed, sensing his presence.
He stepped through.
Inside: a chamber filled not with books, but with minds.
Suspended thought-cores.
Trapped consciousnesses — people who had uploaded fragments of themselves into crystal for archival.
He approached the nearest one.
It pulsed as he neared.
A voice filled his head — his own — older, colder.
"I was the first Cael to break the seal."
It spoke of a truth hidden by all iterations: that the Rune system itself was parasitic. Not gifted to mankind. Not discovered. But seeded.
Not cognition weaponized.
But infection engineered.
Thoughts that reshaped the host, slowly.
Runes were not tools.
They were symbiotes.
Every invocation allowed them deeper access.
[Forget-Me] had not only taken a memory.
It had implanted something else.
This was the true reason the Guild demanded unwavering loyalty. Why higher Cognitor Ranks underwent mandatory cognitive purges after each Rune Tier was attained.
Because too many invocations, and the mind was no longer your own.
You became… something else.
Something shaped by the Runes.
Cael stumbled back.
The chamber pulsed. Other thought-cores began activating.
Every one a version of him.
Some screamed warnings.
Some begged.
Some laughed.
One simply whispered: "Let it happen."
The Library was not crumbling.
It was blooming.
Into what, he did not yet know.
He fled.
Back through the halls of echoing selves, past the journals that now burned with anticipation, past the walls that wept ink.
Out into the night.
The stars above Hollowwise blinked — not with light, but with something else. As if something beyond them had opened a single massive eye, and saw him.
For a brief moment, Cael remembered something.
Or perhaps… un-remembered.
A thought rose in his mind, unwelcome and precise: Maybe I was never Cael.
Maybe that was the lie the Rune whispered when it first fused with me.
Maybe my name is simply the one left behind after all others were devoured.
The Library's laughter lingered in his thoughts.
He would return.
Not because he wanted to.
But because the version of him that had made the decision already had.
And the journals… were waiting.
To be continued…