At some point, the sun began to dip beyond the library windows, it's deem light casting long shadows across their table. Elsie groaned and dropped her head dramatically onto the open book before her. " This is pointless," she muttered, her voice muffled in paper. "I have read these like five times. It's all just curated bullshit. Nothing new. Nothing weird. Nothing that helps."
Serena sighed, she leaned over one of the thicker books in front of her, flipping back a few pages. " Wait, hold on a second."
Elsie lifted her head. " What, did you find something?"
Serena tapped the open page. "Look here. This says the town was originally founded in 1456 right?"
"Yeah," Elsie nodded, sitting up straighter. " That's what every record says."
" Okay, now look at this one." Serena flipped through the pages of the book close to her. " This section talks about the first leadership council of Eldermere. The people who supposedly formed the laws of the town."
"Right..."
Serena pointed to the date beneath a fading sketch of six robed figures. " August 8th, 1567," she read aloud. Her brows furrowed. " That's over a hundred years later. That doesn't make any sense. Why would the founders show up an entire century after the town was formed?"
Elsie blinked. Her eyes scanned both pages again.
"Oh my god," she breathed. " You're right. That's not just a small typo either. That's a whole generation of missing time. How did I miss that? " Elsie muttered, her eyes scanning both pages intensely.
Serena leaned back slowly, "and the book doesn't say anything about what happened between 1456 and 1567. No leaders, no names. It just...skips."
Elsie's voice dropped to a whisper. " Do you know what this means?"
" That something happened in that century," Serena replied." Something they don't want recorded."
Elsie nodded, eyes wide. "Yeah, it seems nothing written about that timeline in the other books is true either, how did I skip this, I'm pretty sure I have never come across this page and I have read this exact book at least twice." Elsie said turning to see the cover.
" Maybe you must have skipped it. It's a large book." Serena muttered.
They stared at each other for a moment, lost in thought. Serena looked down at the image again. The sketch of the first council members was faint but unsettling. The faces entirely blacked out,as if ink had bled across it long ago. They had strange symbols around their necks, ones Serena didn't recognize.
The air in the library suddenly felt colder, goosebumps rising on her skin. Elsie was speaking to her but she could not hear anything. Her eyes glued to the image before her, her hand unconsciously grazing the picture lightly.
A soft click echoed behind them.
They both turned.
Through the glass wall of the computer room,a tall figure had paused mid-step. A girl, slim, dressed in black jeans and a smiple pale blue shirt. Her short brown hair slicked back with a cap on her head, covering her eyes.
She was watching them.
Just as Serena looked at her, the girl smirked slightly, just enough to send a chill down her spine. She turned away, disappearing between shelves.
" Who was that?" Serena asked, her voice tight.
" I don't know," Elsie muttered,brow furrowing. " I didn't get a chance to see her face."
Serena had a strange feeling in her gut.
She knew...the girl was watching them.
She sighed turning back to the image of the first council, her fingers trembling slightly as they hovered above the aged parchment. Their faces frustratingly blurred, faded into obscurity like they had been intentionally blurred out. But something caught her eye, something so subtle she had overlooked it.
The symbol.
Embroidered on the collars of the robes that they wore. So visible despite the age of the ink. The strange shape, intricate and delicate... Wings fanned open, the body arched like a crescent moon.
Serena's breath caught in her throat
Her birthmark.
The same curve. The exact wings.
Her blood ran cold.
She could no longer dismiss this as coincidence. The council doors, the symbol on Ileus' wrist, and now even in a picture dated centuries before she was born.
A gnawing dreadful thought filled her mind, a thought she had suppressed since she arrived here. She had a part in this town's story, one she prayed wouldn't lead to her death.
Her heart pounded hard in her chest as she instinctively let her fingers touch the inked symbol.
The instant her skin made contact with the page
A blinding flash of white light exploded behind her eyes.
The library vanished. The cold wood beneath her fingers gone.
Darkness surrounding her.
Loud, ragged screaming. Echoing like it came from all directions.
A swirl of distorted images flooded her mind, stone walls lit by torches, figures in long red robes yelling, pointing, pacing. She couldn't see their faces, they were obscured, just as in the book but, their voices.... their voices clawed through her skull.
" You betrayed your own kind for the devil!"
" You sold us all for that creature."
" Traitor!"
Serena tried to move, to step away, but she had no body here, she was seeing through someone else's eyes.
" She should be returned to..."
The name blurred out, muffled by a cacophony of hisses and raged insults.
Then she felt a sensation of pain. Not physical but emotional. Raw. As if she were feeling grief, rage and shame all at once. Emotions that did not belong to her but were her, bleeding from her soul.
A hand grabbed her arm in the darkness.
Another faceless figure. Very close now. Towering over her.
" He will know what to do with her..."
A guttural, inhuman growl echoed in the dark. The screams getting louder. Shrill, overlapping screams of many voices. Male. Female. Human... and not.
A new figure stepped forward from the shadows. Larger than the rest. Silent and terrifying. His beautiful grey eyes were the only thing she could see in the darkness.
" She chose him," he said.
The air turned thick with smoke. Fire flickered at the edges of the vision. A deafening thud sounded, followed by a rushing wind as if something massive had spread it's wings in the shadows.
Somewhere, someone sobbed. The sound made her skin crawl. Shapes twisted in the corners of her vision, horns, claws, fangs. The heat was suffocating.
From behind her,a whisper in a woman's voice. Cold but very familiar.
" You'll always belong to him," it said. " No matter how many lives you steal."
And just as quickly as it began
It all vanished.
Serena gasped, nearly knocking over the book as her body snapped back to reality. Her lungs struggled for air, her palms clammy, and her heart thudding as though it were trying to break free from her chest.
The library was still.
The hum of the fluorescent lights above. Pages flipping quietly in the distance.
Elsie was still talking, everything seemed normal, no time had passed presently.
" Serena!" Elsie's voice broke through the fog in her mind. " Are you okay? you look pale." Her hand gripped Serena's shoulder, gentle but firm.
Serena blinked rapidly, trying to ground her vision. "I.. yeah. I'm fine. I just got dizzy for a second."
Elsie didn't look convinced." You sure? "
Serena rubbed her palms together, her lips set in a thin line. " Yeah. Maybe it's just the air in here. Or all the reading."
But it wasn't a dizzy spell. It wasn't a daydream. It was something real, something old and dark and somehow buried inside her.
Her gaze dropped to the image again. Her simply unique birthmark had become something which held an eerie truth.