The Forgetten Shelf
Some books breathe.
Not with air, but with memory-decaying, restless, feral.
They wait in the shadows of shelves no one catalogs.
They bleed beneath fingertips.
Ezra Stone didn't mean to find it.
But the thing about cursed objects is-they find you.
It was buried behind outdated encyclopedias in Library 47.
A section no one claimed. A room the light seemed to avoid.
And there it lay-
A journal bound in something too soft to be leather.
Warm. Almost pulsing.
He opened it.
Because of course he did.
Because boys like Ezra, brilliant and bored, always make the wrong decision too beautifully.
The first line wasn't just ink.
It was a promise.
A warning.
"If you're reading this, they already know."
He read on.
Names. Places. Experiments disguised as education.
Children turned to knives.
A section of the school that never appeared on paper-but always left scratches on the walls.
Arya wrote like a girl trying not to vanish.
Precise. Paranoid. Brilliant.
Her sentences cut like scalpels.
Every entry dripped with dread and memory and something... inhuman.
Ezra felt it too.
The weight. The watching.
The way some corridors inhaled when he passed.
He should have closed the book.
Burned it. Buried it.
But it had already burrowed into him.
Section F wasn't a classroom.
It was a cage.
And the monsters inside it learned how to wear skin like uniforms.
And now,
they were hungry again.
Final Diary Entry (Fragment):
"They said survival is instinct. But instinct is messy-like blood under fingernails. Like the taste of your own name when they force you to forget it. If I disappear, let them know I was never a ghost. I screamed until my throat bled. You just weren't listening."