The Hollow no longer wept.
In the eerie stillness after the battle, the wind had forgotten how to breathe. Evelyne stood amid broken stones and scattered memories, staring at the shimmer of dust left behind by the creature they had unmade.
Alaira sheathed her blade but didn't move away. Her fingers brushed Evelyne's wrist, grounding them both in silence. It was the kind of touch that asked no questions—only promised presence.
"Do you hear that?" Evelyne asked.
Alaira tilted her head. "Hear what?"
"Exactly."
The world wasn't silent. It was muted. As if the very fabric of existence was holding its breath.
Evelyne knelt beside the remains of the containment sigil. The threads of time were frayed—visible to her eyes now, twitching like nerves. Where once fate was tangled and alive, here it was numb.
She touched a broken shard of Echo glass. It didn't hum.
No pulse. No resonance.
"I used their names," Evelyne murmured. "The ones we lost. I gave them shape. And now—something else knows them."
Alaira's eyes darkened. "Oblivion."
Evelyne nodded. "It wasn't just watching. It was waiting. Until I opened the door."
She stood, brushing ash from her coat. "We didn't just attract it. I fed it. I taught it we could be more than forgotten."
"Then we un-teach it," Alaira said.
Evelyne managed a smile. "That's a very 'you' thing to say."
"It's worked so far."
But even Alaira's steady tone couldn't hide the undercurrent of unease. Not after what they had seen—what they had fought. The hunger wasn't just consuming memory now.
It was learning.
The Library of the Lost had once been a refuge. Now it stood under quiet siege.
Evelyne paced the western wing, where the air shimmered unnaturally. Books fluttered without wind. Pages turned themselves. In some corners, entire shelves had begun to unwrite—not burned, not torn, but erased, sentence by sentence.
Chron met her near the Atrium of Paradox, his ever-shifting form steadied into something vaguely humanoid today.
"You touched the unremembered," he said without preamble. "They touched back."
"I needed them," Evelyne said.
"I do not question your need," Chron replied, "only the cost."
A great clock behind him ticked—slower than before. Off-tempo. Broken.
"The creature in the Hollow was just a whisper," he continued. "A displaced scream given shape. What comes now… does not scream. It consumes."
Evelyne folded her arms. "Then we give it nothing to consume."
Chron turned, leading her through twisting corridors. "Easier said than survived."
At the center of the Library was a chamber known only as the Mirror of Threads. It reflected not faces—but futures unchosen. Inside it, Evelyne saw a dozen selves.
One cloaked in royal regalia, cold-eyed and alone.
One burned and broken on a battlefield.
One who never met Alaira.
One who lived quietly in a village that had never needed saving.
Each turned toward her.
Each spoke her name.
And behind them, she saw it: a creeping shadow that devoured each image the moment her gaze strayed. A smear of black. An absence with no shape.
Oblivion.
She backed away. The mirror cracked—not physically, but along the narrative axis.
Chron's voice was quiet. "It is not a being. It is the inevitability of forgetting. The entropy of stories. The last silence."
Evelyne clenched her fists. "So how do we kill something that doesn't exist?"
"You don't. But you might anchor something stronger."
Later, she found Alaira in the upper archives, perched between floating staircases that rearranged themselves at random. She was leafing through an old war manual from a realm that had never existed—its pages mostly blank now.
"Bad news?" Alaira asked without looking up.
"Always."
Evelyne sat beside her. They stayed like that for a moment. Books shifting around them. Lights flickering in a place that didn't obey the rules anymore.
"Chron says we can't kill it," Evelyne said.
"Then we don't."
She looked up, meeting Evelyne's gaze. "We outlive it."
Evelyne blinked. "That's... oddly optimistic."
Alaira tilted her head. "No. That's stubborn. There's a difference."
They both laughed—softly. Tiredly.
Then Evelyne's expression sobered. "If Oblivion is coming for us… then what we build next has to matter. Even if no one remembers it."
Alaira reached out, threading their fingers together.
"Then we remember each other."
That night, the dreams changed.
Evelyne no longer dreamed of the Rift. She dreamed of a stage with no audience. A world where no one read their story. A place where she and Alaira walked hand-in-hand across a sea of forgotten names.
And even then—
Alaira whispered:
"I still see you."
She awoke with tears on her cheeks.
But also—resolve.
By morning, the Library had lost four more wings to unmemory. Timeworn pages fluttered like dying butterflies.
The council of Echo-walkers had already begun their exodus. Some would flee to other stable fragments of reality. Others would sleep, cocooned in stasis, hoping to awaken when the timeline was safe.
Evelyne watched them go without judgment.
She would not run. Nor would Alaira.
Together, they would make their stand in the heart of story itself.
Not to save themselves.
But to prove that meaning endures.
As they prepared to enter the Library's core—where Oblivion had begun to seep in—Chron gave Evelyne a final gift:
A memory that was not her own.
She held it gently, like a candle in the dark.
"What is it?" she asked.
Chron bowed. "A tale no one ever told. Unwritten, unspoken. Yours now."
Evelyne tucked it into her satchel.
She would burn it later.
Not for warmth.
But as a beacon.
Outside, the sky cracked open again.
But this time, no creature crawled through.
Only silence.
And the promise of erasure.