He awoke in a place that should not exist.
There was no ceiling, only an impossible canopy of interlaced bookcases stacked upon themselves like a fractal of ruin. The shelves rose into a sky that wasn't sky, into a void of colorless luminescence that pulsed with a heartless rhythm. The floor beneath him was neither stone nor wood but a tessellation of shattered lexicons — their spines cracked, their words bleeding ink like open veins, their pages whispering half-truths with every breath of stagnant wind.
The air reeked of mildew and memory.
He opened his eyes without a name. The only thing he remembered was a single phrase, brittle and absolute, etched into the walls of his mind with the cruelty of revelation:
Reality is a belief no one questioned.
He tried to speak but found no voice, only thought. His body, pale and lean, was clothed in paper-thin cloth that hung like discarded intention. Around him, the books hissed, shifted, wept. One dropped beside his foot, splitting open to reveal not paper but a mouth — ink-toothed and gibbering — that muttered, You were not supposed to wake up. The book spasmed and died, melting into a puddle of grammarless sludge.
The library groaned.
A sound like a million secrets being strangled echoed across the infinite expanse.
He stood, unsteady, like a question mark slowly straightening. No doors. No exits. Only books, endless and ancient, hemorrhaging stories into the void.
He turned. Behind him, a narrow aisle stretched like a corridor of memories he had never lived. The spines of the books bore titles in no language he could recognize, but somehow he knew what they meant. How the First Sin Was Misunderstood. The Anatomy of Thought. That Which Believed Itself Real.
His feet moved without his consent, guided by something older than instinct — an echo of cognition that had not yet formed. Every step stirred motes of fading logic. The books to either side quivered in their shelves. Some watched him with paper eyes. Others whispered names not yet invented. One shelf snapped its own frame and collapsed in convulsions, disgorging tomes that screamed in recursive loops.
He passed them all, silent.
And then it happened.
Reality stuttered.
Like a scratched record, the world jerked, pixelated. Light fractured into script. Space folded, briefly, and he saw — no, remembered — what had not yet occurred.
He saw himself hanging from a noose woven from redacted text, his eyes blank as margins.
He saw himself burning in a pyre made of memory, the flames composed of regret and unread truths, and in the inferno, he screamed words that could not be spoken without unraveling thought.
He saw himself kneeling in prayer before a throne made of pulped theology, sobbing into the hands of a god whose face was a mirror.
The library snapped back.
He staggered, breathless. His chest heaved. The visions clung to him like cobwebs of premonition. He pressed his hand against a shelf for balance, and the book it held whispered, You are remembering the wrong future.
He snarled without sound and stumbled forward. The air thickened. Every breath was a draft of conceptual decay. Somewhere far above, something screamed in reverse. The scream descended, circling, as if falling between dimensions.
His foot caught on a risen stone — no, not a stone, but a book bound in skin. It flopped open as he collapsed beside it. The page stared back, blank at first, then written slowly as if the words bled upward through the paper:
Say it.
He didn't know what. He didn't know why. But something ancient and hollow inside him cracked open. A syllable rose, unbidden, unfamiliar yet intrinsic. It wasn't a word as much as an assertion, a mental shape given vocal form. A glyph without ink. A scream composed of meaning.
He spoke it.
The library convulsed.
Books exploded in gouts of ink. Shelves folded into themselves. Space warped. Time flinched. The whispering stopped — not silenced, but held its breath. He clutched his head as the word vibrated inside his skull like a shard of broken thought.
And then the beast came.
It did not enter. It manifested.
From the broken syntax of the space between shelves, it emerged — not in body, but in contradiction. A thing of logic errors and recursive paradox, its form refused to remain stable. It wore the shape of something that had once been human — tall, cloaked, faceless — but its edges jittered, stuttering through incompatible geometries. Where its eyes should be, semicolons hovered. Its hands were quills that wrote on air, and wherever it walked, the floor rewrote itself in broken narrative.
It spoke, but not aloud.
COGNITION UNSTABLE. ERROR LOCATED. CONTEXT CORRUPTED. IDENTITY BREACH DETECTED.
He crawled backward, trembling, as the beast advanced. Its footsteps echoed like punctuation marks, deliberate and final. Books around him ignited in conceptual flame. Sentences unravelled mid-phrase. Whole shelves screamed and vanished.
He screamed too — not in terror, but in denial.
This wasn't real.
It couldn't be.
He didn't believe it.
And that, perhaps, was the first true lie.
He whispered it, softly, with a trembling breath and bloodied lips, This place is not real.
The world held its breath.
Then it broke.
The library disassembled itself. Pages tore free like leaves in a storm. Ink poured upward into the void. Shelves screamed their last truths and shattered. The Cognition Beast paused mid-step, glitched, and exploded into a thousand unfinished thoughts that scattered like glass across the collapsing floor.
Reality collapsed inward, not into darkness, but into blankness — a raw canvas reclaimed from false belief.
And he fell.
Through meaning, through memory, through madness.
And then —
He awoke.
Again.
To be continued…