Chapter 4: The Library of Lost Things
The week that followed was a prison of routine and silent scrutiny.
Kaelen's world narrowed to the soot-stained tower, the tense meals shared with his squad, and the relentless, frustrating sessions with Inspector Vale. He was barred from all field operations, his presence deemed too volatile. Garrison's dismissive grunts and Silas's icy, analytical stares became the background music of his confinement. Only Riven offered any flicker of interaction, though hers was the sharp curiosity of a naturalist observing a dangerous new species.
Each morning, Vale would arrive with his measuring instruments and endless scrolls of questions. The sessions took place in a cleared space by the cold firepit.
"Again," Vale commanded, placing a simple wooden block on the floor. "Define it. Alter its state. Start small."
Kaelen would open the grimoire, the cover's reluctant sigh now a familiar sound. The mirror-page would reflect the block. The void-presence would watch. Kaelen would focus his will, trying to impose a new definition. Not wood. Ash. Not solid. Pliable.
Most attempts ended in failure. The block remained stubbornly block-shaped. The few times he succeeded were unpredictable and draining. One moment, the block would soften like clay; the next, it would simply become more wooden, its grain hyper-defined, as if he'd intensified its "block-ness" instead of changing it. Each success, however minor, was followed by a pounding headache and a wave of nausea.
"It's not consistent," Kaelen groaned after a particularly futile session, massaging his temples.
"Of course it isn't," Vale said, not unkindly, but with scholarly fervor. "Mana follows predictable laws—amplification, elemental affinity, symbolic logic. Your power... it operates on narrative logic. On meaning. The block isn't just a collection of fibers; it is an object with a history, a purpose, a place in the story of this room. To change it, you must overwrite that story with a more compelling one. Your will must be the author."
He pointed a finger at Kaelen's chest. "Your 'dwarf core' is irrelevant. Your mana is a side channel at best. This," he tapped the grimoire's cover, "runs on conviction. And right now, your conviction is a sputtering candle. You doubt yourself, you fear the power, you are drowning in the opinions of these louts." He gestured vaguely at Garrison, who was hefting massive stones in a corner. "Your narrative is weak."
The truth of it stung. Kaelen had spent his life being told he was less. That narrative was etched deep.
His only reprieve came in the afternoons, when Vale would take him to the Curator's Guild's sub-basement annex, a place known as the Penumbral Stack. It was a library, but unlike any in the shining upper city. Here, the air was cool and still, smelling of dust, old parchment, and the faint, metallic tang of contained magic. The light came from ever-burning phosphor moss in glass orbs, casting long, dancing shadows.
This was the Library of Lost Things. Not just books, but repositories for objects of power deemed too unstable, too poorly understood, or too heretical for the main archives. Shelves held sealed urns that hummed, swords frozen in blocks of magical ice, masks that seemed to weep tarnished silver tears.
"This is where knowledge goes when it becomes inconvenient," Vale explained, his voice hushed with reverence. "The history the empire has chosen to forget, or to hide. Your grimoire... it has cousins here. Fragments. Echoes."
He led Kaelen to a secluded reading desk, upon which sat a single, ancient folio. Its cover was plain grey leather, cracked with age. "This is the 'Apocrypha of Unmaking,'" Vale said, his fingers hovering over it without touching. "A compilation of every surviving reference, myth, and eyewitness account of phenomena that match your power's signature—ontological manipulation, reality editing, conceptual warfare."
Kaelen stared at the folio. "They've seen this before?"
"Glimpses. Shadows." Vale opened the folio carefully. The pages were not paper, but a strange, flexible membrane. The writing shifted as Kaelen looked at it, translating itself from archaic scripts into something he could barely grasp. He saw sketches of barren, glassy plains where cities once stood, described as "The Unspoken Word made manifest." He read accounts of mages who didn't cast spells, but "wrote local truths," their opponents simply ceasing to believe they could breathe. Most of the accounts ended the same way: the "editors" were killed by overwhelming force, or they vanished, or they dissolved into screaming paradoxes, their own narratives turning inward and consuming them.
One passage, written in frantic, spidery script, was circled in faint red ink:
"The power does not reside in the world, nor in the mana that fuels it. It resides in the space between perception and fact. The wielder must become a void through which a new truth can be spoken. But the void is hungry, and it cares not what it consumes."
Kaelen felt a chill that had nothing to do with the library's air. The voice in his grimoire had used that same word: void.
"There were groups," Vale murmured, leaning in. "Cults, mostly. Philosopher-assassins. They believed the world was a flawed text, and they held the pen to correct it. The most famous, the most feared, were the Blank Page Legion."
He turned to a chilling illustration: a faceless figure in simple robes, holding not a weapon, but a stylus. Behind it, reality itself was depicted as parchment, curling and being written over.
"The Legion was eradicated three centuries ago in the Silencing War. Their grimoires—what few they had, for the power is mind-breakingly rare—were supposedly destroyed. Their histories were scoured from public record. They are Unclassified not just in grade, but in category. To even speak of them is to invite suspicion." Vale fixed Kaelen with a serious look. "This is the heritage you may have stumbled into. Not a noble lineage of elemental kings, but the bloody, erased history of world-breakers."
The weight of it pressed down on Kaelen. He wasn't just an underdog. He was the heir to a forbidden, terrifying legacy. "Why show me this?"
"Because you must understand what you hold," Vale said gravely. "To fight your nature is futile. But to understand it... that is the first step toward control. The Blank Page Legion failed because their narratives became solipsistic, unmoored from any shared reality. They went mad. Your challenge is to forge a will strong enough to author change, but disciplined enough to respect the story you are a part of."
Over the next few days, Kaelen devoured the Apocrypha. He learned of the Legion's techniques: "Word-Binding" (defining an object's properties), "Sentence-Severing" (cutting the link between cause and effect), and the dreaded "Page-Eating" (the total unmaking of a target from existence). The costs were always catastrophic mental strain and a progressive detachment from consensus reality.
He also found passing references to a counter-force, a group or a principle called "The Stabilizers" or "The Keepers of the Canon," but details were frustratingly absent, erased even from this secret archive.
One afternoon, as Kaelen pored over a diagram of a "Conceptual Anchor"—a mental exercise to prevent one's own sense of self from unraveling—Riven found him.
"Vale's filling your head with ghost stories?" she asked, sliding into the chair opposite him. She picked up a paperweight from the desk—a smooth river stone—and began flipping it over her knuckles.
"History," Kaelen corrected, though his voice lacked conviction.
"Same thing, for people like us." She caught the stone and held it up. "Look at this. To a normal mage, it's an object. Maybe they could heat it, levitate it, transmute its surface. To you, it's a... what did Vale call it? A narrative node."
Kaelen nodded warily. "It has a story. Formed by water, taken from a river, used to hold papers."
"And you can change that story." She leaned forward, her amber eyes intense. "But stories have consequences. Change the stone's story to 'explosive' in a room full of fragile scrolls, and you've made a mess. The Legion, from what I've heard in whispers, forgot about consequences. They thought they were the authors. But every author needs readers, sparky. A story no one else can live in is just a prison."
Her metaphor struck him. It was a different perspective from Vale's clinical analysis or Silas's fearful caution. It was pragmatic, grounded in the messy reality he'd already experienced.
"Why are you helping me?" he asked.
Riven's smirk returned. "I'm not. I'm assessing an asset. Garrison sees a broken tool. Silas sees a walking calamity. I see potential energy. But potential is useless unless it's directed." She stood up, tossing the stone back to him. "The others want you to learn control so you don't blow up. I want you to learn control so you can blow up the right things."
After she left, Kaelen sat in the quiet gloom of the Penumbral Stack. The conflicting voices swirled in his head: Vale's scholarly warnings, Silas's cold logic, Garrison's blunt dismissal, Riven's sharp opportunism. And beneath it all, the ancient, hungry whisper of the grimoire, urging him to define, to unmake, to author.
He needed clarity. He needed to know what he was, outside of their definitions.
That night, back in the tower, he waited until the others were asleep. Garrison's seismic snores, Silas's unnerving silence, Riven's barely perceptible breathing from her hammock. He took his grimoire and crept not to the courtyard, but to the tower's root cellar—a cold, earthy space used for storage.
He opened the book. The void stared back.
"I need to understand," Kaelen whispered. "Not theory. Not history. Me. What is this power for?"
The lights in the void brightened.
"IT IS FOR THE UNMAKING OF LIES," the voice responded, its dryness filling the small space. "THE GREATEST LIE IS THE ONE THE WORLD TELLS YOU ABOUT YOURSELF. YOU WERE TOLD YOU WERE NOTHING. UNMAKE THAT LIE FIRST."
"How?"
"YOU HAVE READ OF ANCHORS. CREATE ONE. NOT FOR THE WORLD. FOR YOURSELF. DEFINE YOURSELF, SO FIRMLY THAT NO OTHER NARRATIVE CAN TAKE HOLD."
Kaelen thought of the conflicting narratives. The failure. The weapon. The liability. The asset. He pushed them all aside. He thought of the raw, stubborn feeling that had kept him training with a dwarf core. The will that had made him stand on the Selection dais. The fear-forged instinct that had made him act to save a child.
He looked into the mirror, past the reflection of his own uncertain face, into the twin stars of the void.
He began to speak, not aloud, but with every fiber of his will, pouring it into the grimoire.
I am Kaelen.
I am not my mana.
I am the will that persists.
I am the hand that edits, but I am not the void that hungers.
My power is a responsibility, not a right.
I will learn. I will control.
I will not be erased by my own story.
As each line of self-definition solidified in his mind, something changed. The grimoire in his hands grew warmer, not with heat, but with a resonant vibration. On the mirror-page, his reflection didn't change, but it seemed to become... sharper. More real against the consuming darkness behind it. The chaotic, painful feedback he usually felt when using the power was absent, replaced by a steady, humming focus.
In the corner of the cellar was a rusted, broken shovel head—a useless fragment.
Kaelen turned the page's reflection to it. He didn't try to change it into something grand. He simply defined its current state, its truth, with absolute conviction.
You are broken. You are discarded. You are sharp, heavy metal.
He then imposed a new, simple, logical narrative.
Your shape can be directed. Your sharpness can be focused.
He focused his anchored will, not on a vast alteration, but on a precise edit. He imagined the broken edge of the shovel curling, refining, honing into a single, razor point.
In the reflection, the metal flowed like thick ink.
In reality,with a soft shink of reforming metal, the jagged break smoothed and curved inward, shaping itself into a vicious, foot-long spike. It was no longer a broken tool; it was a deliberately crafted spearhead.
No headache. No nosebleed. Just a clean, cool exhaustion, like after intense concentration.
He had done it. Not with chaotic emotion, but with disciplined, self-defined will. He had authored a minor, deliberate change.
The void in the grimoire seemed... satisfied.
"THE FIRST TRUE PAGE IS WRITTEN: THE PAGE OF SELF," it intoned. "YOU HAVE BEGUN TO HOLD THE PEN. DO NOT DROP IT."
The grimoire closed softly. Kaelen picked up the newly formed spike. It was cold and real in his hand. A small thing, but it was his creation. Not a deletion, but a revision.
He didn't hear the faint scuff of a boot on the stair behind him.
Silas stood on the bottom step, having witnessed the entire process. The frost in his eyes wasn't just reflection; tiny ice crystals were actually forming on his lashes. He saw the focused intent, the clean result, the lack of catastrophic backlash. His journal was in his hand.
He did not write 'walking calamity.'
He wrote, his script tighter than ever: 'Subject has achieved Stage 1 Conscious Definition. Growth rate is exponential. Threat assessment revised upward. The Anchor he has created may make him more stable, or it may make his eventual paradigm shift more absolute and devastating. The Blank Page legacy is confirmed. Recommend immediate escalation of observation to Guild High Command.'
Silas melted back into the shadows before Kaelen turned.
Kaelen held the spike, feeling a fragile new strength. He had taken the first real step on a forbidden path. He had defined a piece of himself. But in a world that feared the unknown, where his own squad kept logs on his every move, and where a erased legion's history whispered from the shadows, a single anchored page might not be enough to withstand the storms to come.
For in the highest spire of the Curator's Guild, a different alarm finally finished its analysis. The pulse of "Unmaking" from the Lower Districts had been traced, cross-referenced with the Penumbral Stack's access logs. A missive, sealed with wax the color of dried blood, was dispatched by spectral courier. It was addressed not to Inspector Vale, but to the Office of Imperial Sanction. The subject line was clear: "Blank Page Echo Detected. Request Directive: Containment or Purge?"