The house above groaned as another timeline fractured in the distance.
Skyler stood in the library.
A place he hadn't visited in years—too dusty, too dark, too filled with echoes. Yet now, the books whispered as he entered. Not from wind… but from recognition.
Each spine flickered faintly in the gloom. Old paper. Glowing runes. Titles from his childhood.
He trailed his fingers along them—The Ash-Born Oracle, The Memory Flame, Echoheart, Chronicles of the Last Witness.
He froze at that last one.
"I used to love this," he whispered aloud. "I thought it was all made up."
He pulled it from the shelf. Pages worn, annotated in red ink… his ink.
He flipped to a chapter marked The Seventh Flame.
The lines jumped off the page:
"The boy carries no past but holds every future. He will forget himself to save the worlds—only to burn when they try to silence him."
"The flame is not power. It is memory. And memory always burns."
Skyler backed away.
"I wrote this," he whispered.
His sister nodded from the doorway. "Yes. In a previous self. This library holds your discarded versions."
"All those novels," she said softly, "were you trying to remember."
Skyler stared at the shelves again.
"You wrote as a child in Timeline 9."
"You transcribed echoes in Timeline 3."
"You screamed into fiction when the gods locked your voice."
The books began to hum.
"Why let me read them?" Skyler asked. "Why not burn them all?"
Orias's voice echoed from the hallway. "Because even flame cannot destroy witnessed truth. It always finds a way to return."
Skyler turned a page—and stopped.
A hand-drawn map.
A list of symbols.
A phrase he didn't remember writing:
"First Seal — Memory Ignition. Burn the false self. Awaken what sleeps."
And below it, a signature. Not his own. Not 'Skyler.'
But:
Veritas Novaah.
The page burst into gentle flame—and didn't burn. It floated upward, flared once, and sank into Skyler's chest like a brand.
Pain lanced through him. His eyes burned.
Visions returned:
A god kneeling before him, eyes hollow
His sister torn from reality
A woman—Aeria—standing at the edge of nothing, whispering, "You are the key to remembering us all."
The flame inside him surged.
Skyler fell to one knee.
Behind him, every book in the library opened at once—pages turning on their own, glowing softly. A chorus of past selves, all screaming through ink and metaphor.
Orias appeared beside him, gripping his shoulder.
"You just unlocked the First Seal."
The glyph on Skyler's hand flared white.
The Book of Recalled Flame opened again in the chamber below.
And somewhere beyond the walls of the house, the first hunter of Witnesses opened its eyes.