Rumors traveled fast.
Kael had passed the First Veil.
Now others were watching.
One of them was Liora Veilhart. Chrono-Magus. Exiled.
She found him in the rain. Pulled him into an alley.
"You touched the Veil," she said. "You saw beyond. What did you see?"
Kael told her.
He didn't know why he trusted her. Maybe it was the way she looked at him—not with awe or suspicion, but recognition. As if she had once seen the same truths, walked the same impossible corridors. Liora Veilhart had been a prodigy of the Astral Academy before her exile—cast out after an experiment collapsed a timefold and erased an entire hour from the city's memory. Her eyes glimmered with fractured time, and her voice always felt half a beat ahead.
She dragged him to Bran Thornblade—a silent knight wrapped in banded iron and grief. Bran was known in legends as the Knight with the Second Shadow—a dark silhouette that moved independent of him. Some said it whispered secrets from forgotten futures. Others claimed it wasn't his shadow at all, but something that followed him from beyond the Veils.
Together, they journeyed into the marshes.
Their destination: The Drowned Library.
A ruin beneath black water. Only opens if you speak a truth you've never said.
Kael said: "I still dream of my mother's eyes. Though I never saw her."
The doors opened.
Inside: silence so complete it hurt. Books floated mid-air. Some wept. Some whispered.
They moved through the Drowned Library, its flooded stone halls bathed in a sickly, bluish-green glow emitted by algae that pulsed faintly along the walls. The air hung thick with moisture and an ancient, metallic scent—like forgotten blood and rusted time. Lanternfish drifted through the submerged ceilings above, casting rippling shadows that danced like ghosts over the crumbling marble and waterlogged tomes. Every footstep sent echoes through the flooded corridors, as if the library itself was whispering back.
They reached the central atrium—a great circular room where drowned chandeliers hung like skeletal remains. At its heart floated a torn page, suspended in a column of still water.
But the moment Kael reached for it, the Echo Librarians attacked.
They weren't human. Not anymore. Long, robed figures with skin like wrinkled parchment and mouths sewn shut with inked thread. Eyes hollow and glowing faintly green, they moved soundlessly across the water.
One lunged.
Kael Phase-Stepped on instinct—teleporting a few feet away—but disoriented, he collided with a floating bookshelf. Another Librarian seized him, and Kael felt something being pulled from his mind—his name unraveling like thread.
Liora shouted a timefreeze glyph—but it only slowed the librarian for seconds. She screamed as her own reflection in a nearby pool aged backward, her body flickering with chronological instability.
Bran stepped forward. His sword hissed like steam. His shadow moved before he did—speaking.
"You were never real."
But the shadow struck, severing the threads of thought the Librarian had latched onto.
They escaped, breathless, soaked, and fractured.
Kael clutched the page.
He read the last line again.
"The Raven watches not to guide, but to warn."
He had opened a door.
And something was stepping through it.