Ciar Evens didn't believe in fate.
He only copied it.
He sat in the basement of the Manuscript House, where there were no windows, no clock to mark the passing of time. The only light came from a candle melting slowly, like the lives of the people whose endings he wrote every day.
The ink was black.
The paper, pale yellow.
And the endings… all the same.
"He will fall."
"He will be stabbed."
"He will vanish."
No one dies heroically here.
He reached for the next manuscript without care.
It was mechanical work; his eyes read, his hand wrote, his mind absent.
Then he stopped.
The name at the top of the page wasn't just unfamiliar…
It was familiar in the wrong way.
Ciar Evens.
He swallowed slowly.
A name coincidence? No… this was something entirely different.
And at that moment, the basement door creaked open, casting a small flame into the darkness.
Shadows danced along the walls, as if whispering his name… Ciar Evens.
One step followed another—close, steady, making no sound on the stone floor.
Then something stopped before him… a shadow, tall, featureless, as if the darkness itself had taken shape.
Ciar raised his hand cautiously, his heart pounding, but he made no sound.
The shadow didn't move… but it began whispering his name in a voice he had never heard before, a voice like an echo of himself, as if it knew everything he had done and everything he would do.
And then he saw, suddenly, among the shadows… a book.
It was unlike any other in the archive, glowing with golden ink, alive, waiting for Ciar.
The last line on the cover was written in strange script:
"Read, or the Archive will begin reading your soul."
He froze, caught between fear and curiosity, his hand trembling as he reached for the book.
The shadow stepped back… then vanished into the air, leaving the silence pressing against his ears as if the entire world had stopped.
Ciar took a deep breath, his heart screaming, yet he couldn't retreat.
Every step toward the book was a step into something he didn't yet understand…
But he knew one thing:
Tonight would not end the way anyone knew.