Lina landed hard.
The world was no longer a study but a library—endless, floating shelves suspended in black space. Books fluttered like birds above, their pages whispering secrets too fast to catch. Each step crunched on scattered torn paper. The air smelled of old ink and dried blood.
Mikael hit the ground beside her with a grunt. Elise fell silently, crouched, ready. But Ariadne was nowhere in sight.
"Where is she?" Lina asked, voice sharp.
"Watching," Mikael muttered. He clutched his ribs. "This is one of her dreams. She doesn't need to chase us. She is this place."
From the shadows, voices started whispering—fragments of old drafts, forgotten characters, discarded plotlines. They hissed Mikael's name like a curse.
One by one, books snapped open around them, and figures began to crawl out—half-finished characters, twisted and incomplete. A man with no face. A girl made entirely of quotation marks. A boy with blank eyes and a smile written in red pen.
"Welcome to the Library of Leftovers," a voice echoed above. Ariadne stepped out from between the bookshelves, walking across the air as if it were solid. "Every word you abandoned lives here. Hungry."
Elise drew a blade from her own palm—blood becoming steel. "Then we'll burn this place down."
Ariadne's eyes narrowed. "But what if this is the only place your story matters?"
With a gesture, the floating shelves began to spin like a storm. The leftover characters lunged.
Lina stepped forward and shouted, "Stop!"
The world froze.
Everything paused—the shelves, the monsters, the air.
A soft glow came from her hands. In them appeared a single, empty book.
A blank story.
"I don't need your story," Lina said firmly, "and I don't need his either. I'll write mine."
Ariadne's smile returned, thinner now. "So be it."
The shelves crumbled into ash. The world turned white.
Mikael reached out toward Lina as she was pulled away by light.
"Lina!"
But she was already gone.