The universe, Liam discovered, did not end in a void. It ended, for him, in a scream of raw, unadulterated light that tore itself through his very bones. One moment, the familiar, musty air of Professor Aris's study, the next, a sensation like being simultaneously shredded and reassembled, dumped unceremoniously into a place that defied all known physics.
He hit nothing. Or rather, he floated. Disoriented, terrified, Liam struggled to orient himself, but there was no up or down, no solid ground, just… light. Not the harsh, blinding glare of a star, but an opalescent, churning nebula of pure spectrum, constantly swirling, shifting, bleeding colours into one another like a cosmic watercolour. A cacophony of silence filled his ears, a pressure that felt like the hum of a million galaxies unfurling at once.
As his eyes adjusted, or perhaps as his mind simply rewired itself to comprehend the incomprehensible, structures began to coalesce from the ethereal mist. They were crystalline, impossibly vast, tapering into spires that vanished into the incandescent canopy above, or delving into chasms of pearlescent shadow below. These weren't mere buildings; they were geometric impossibilities, humming with latent energy, crafted from what looked like solidified starlight.
And then he saw them – the shelves. Towering, impossibly tall, stretching into the infinite corridors carved from the same crystalline substance. But these weren't shelves of books. These were shelves of knowledge, made manifest. Blocks of condensed light, each an entire living library in itself. Tomes that pulsed with the quiet rhythm of forgotten suns. Scrolls woven from the very fabric of spacetime, shimmering with unread histories. The sheer volume of it was a crushing weight, an infinite lexicon of every thought ever conceived, every star ever born, every secret ever whispered across the multiverse, all neatly, terrifyingly, filed away.
Fear, a cold, sharp thing, pierced through Liam's disorientation. This was not a dream. This was real, and it was infinitely more terrifying than any 'void' he could have imagined. He was in a place of sacred, incomprehensible power. The realm of the Ancient Archivist.
Liam's legs buckled first—his knees giving way like saplings in a storm. His body pitched forward, limp and uncoordinated, before gravity seized him in earnest. He hit the crystalline floor with a thud-
that reverberated through the hollow expanse of the Archive, his shoulder striking first, followed by the dull impact of his ribs and hip.
For a breathless second, he lay there, stunned, his vision swimming with fractured light. Then momentum took over. His body rolled—once, twice—limbs flopping like a discarded doll's, until he finally came to rest on his back, one arm splayed wide, the other crumpled beneath him. His chest heaved, each breath ragged and too loud in the silence.
Above him, the swirling cosmos of the Archive pulsed indifferently.
"you have come" came a vioce that seem cool yet shook the place
Slowly, painfully, he turned his head.
At first, he saw nothing—just the endless, shimmering expanse of the Archive. But then… movement. A shadow where there should be none. A flicker of something wrong in the perfect, radiant geometry of the place.
His pulse spiked.
There, between two towering shelves of crystallized knowledge—a figure.
This one was solid. Dark-cloaked, its edges blurred as if refusing to fully manifest. It stood unnaturally still, watching him with eyes he couldn't see but felt, like twin voids drinking in the light around them
"ahhhh, who... who are yo....you....Where...am.....am....I?" he said stuttering
A figure, once undoubtedly immense, an ethereal titan of knowledge, was now barely more than a whisper of light. The Ancient His form was flickering, translucent, like a faulty hologram on the verge of dissolution. He was siting on a throne like seat, or perhaps just hovering, his vast, spectral hands pressed against a crystalline pedestal that seemed to glow with a dying internal fire. Around him, the light of the realm itself seemed to dim, as if in sympathy, or perhaps, as if being drained, in spite of this the smile on his face didn't change
the entity was dying.
" I am karius the Archivist of this library, you are in a plane called the Nexus The Archive of All which is situated in a secluded plane," Kairus replied
"wait....am i dead?... oh God.....I never finished all of ...my ....thesis,...Professor Aris said—said I was close, but I—I kept rewriting the introduction Couldn't get it right. Stupid. Stupid.....I was going to ask Clara out. Next week. Maybe. If I found the right words...but I never do. Never know the right words. Just—just dead ones. Useless ones."
"Really are all the pepople on your planet as dumb as this?" the archivist said resisting the urge to facepalm
"huh, am i not dead?"
"The knowledge cannot be lost, It must be passed to a new keeper.," Kairus continued ignoring his questions while looking at his face
"No" Liam recoiled. "Not me. I don't know how to do this. Can't even—even remember my grocery list half the time. How am I supposed to guard—guard all of time, Can't even...?"
"You already have when you are able to breach through the key and you were able to get here."
"bu....."
Kairus stretched out both hands, and before Liam could protest, a searing light erupted between them.
Pain.
Not the pain of flesh, but of mind, of soul. Liam arched backward as the weight of centuries—no, millennia—slammed into him. Images, languages, histories, equations, the births and deaths of stars, the rise and fall of civilizations—all of it flooded into him at once, a tsunami of knowledge threatening to crack his skull apart.
Liam's eyes darted to the towering shelves of crystallized knowledge, the scrolls of starlight, the tomes that pulsed like living things. His stomach twisted.
Liam felt it, an instinctive, universal grief. The sheer weight of eons of accumulated universal knowledge, the very essence of the multiverse's history, was threatening to scatter into oblivion with Kairus's last breath. His life force was visibly depleting, each flicker a tiny erosion, each surge of astral light around him a futile attempt to hold back the encroaching dark. He was like a candle flame in a hurricane, the edges of his form dissolving into motes of pure information, ready to disperse into the swirling astral currents.
Liam tried to scream, to call out, but no sound escaped his throat. The pressure in his head intensified, his very mind feeling stretched thin, attuned to something vast and ancient.
With the last vestiges of his strength, Kairus lifted a translucent hand, not physically reaching, but extending across the immeasurable space between them. A wave of pure thought, not a voice, crashed into Liam's consciousness. It was a torrent of images, concepts, emotions – urgency, desperation, the profound agony of loss, and a terrifying, unyielding hope.
You… You triggered the nexus, and you will be the one to guard it
The thought was not in words, but a direct download of meaning into Liam's mind. He stumbled backward, though there was no ground to stumble on, his terror mounting.
Not a portal, young one. A succession. A transfer. The final act…of a dying era.
Liam gasped, a silent, internal scream. He hadn't opened a door; he'd opened a cosmic artery.
My life ebbs. The Lexicon… it requires a guardian. The Knowledge must not scatter. Only one can contain it all. Only one can be the vessel.
The images flooded Liam: the vastness of the cosmos, tiny beings living out their lives, entire civilizations rising and falling, all recorded, categorized, preserved here. And Kairus, the solitary, eternal caretaker of it all, now fading.
The weight of the words, the concepts, was physically crushing. Liam felt as if he were being pressed into the very fabric of the realm. The burden of eons settled onto his shoulders, a responsibility so immense it threatened to shatter his mind. He, Liam, a student, a curious, perhaps foolish, explorer of forbidden texts, was now being asked to inherit the literal universe.
Kairus's form brightened, a final, desperate flicker of his immense power. A last, poignant message resonated through Liam's very being, tinged with a sorrow so deep it felt like the universe weeping.
Preserve… Protect… Learn…
And then, with a silent, agonizing exhalation of light, Kairus dissolved. Not vanished, but scattered. His translucent form fractured into a billion shimmering motes of pure potential, each a tiny spark of solidified knowledge, drifting outwards, absorbed by the crystalline structures, becoming one with the vast, quiet hum of the archive itself. The light around the pedestal dimmed further, plunging that section of the realm into a sepulchral twilight.
Liam hung suspended in the vastness, alone. The weight of his terror had been replaced by a chilling clarity, a horrifying understanding of his new reality. He was the only one left. The Archivist was gone. And the infinite lexicon of the multiverse, humming quietly around him, patiently awaited its new guardian.
The archive was silent now, save for the frantic beat of Liam's own heart, like a lonely drum in the infinite expanse of inherited knowledge. He had nowhere to go, no way back. Only forward, into an unimaginable, terrifying future.