Three years.

  Three years of endless rain, of black skies, stretched thin across a world unraveling thread by thread. Three years of whispers that never sleep. And Alaric Fintear—once a scholar, once a husband, once a man—has spent every breath since then buried in the corpse of a library that refuses to forget.

  The Grand Archive of Ivery was once the heart of knowledge in the known world, a temple of radiant intellect built atop the very spine of civilization. When the gods still ruled, it was said that even they consulted the halls of the Archive for the oldest truths. Silver-veined marble formed its great pillars; ink-laced stone paved its countless corridors. In the center of it all, the Dome of Revelation pierced the sky like the eye of a prophet.

  Now, it crumbles under the weight of silence.

  The silver has tarnished—mold blossoms like rot-veined flowers across scrolls and shelves. Tapestries once depicting celestial lineages now sag and curl, embroidered suns melting into their backgrounds like forgotten myths. The smell is perpetual damp—old paper, mildew, decay, and a sharp coppery tang that’s never quite gone away since the rain first turned black.

  Alaric knows every inch of it now. Every leaking crack. Every pile of collapsed knowledge. He navigates by lanternlight, though the flame is dim and stubborn as if the air itself resists fire.

  He doesn’t speak much anymore. Only sometimes, to the cracked bust of Saint Thelvar in the western atrium, or the empty air in the poetry wing. Mostly, though, his voice lives inside parchment.

  Tucked away in a dust-choked alcove, he has a journal. The ink runs when the humidity gets too thick. Some pages are stained black from where the rain managed to bleed through the stone. Still, he writes.

  Journal Entry | Year 3, Day 984

  I can’t hear the bells of Ivery anymore.

  I used to. At least once a week. A distant chime buried under wind and whispers. But it’s gone now. Maybe the tower finally collapsed. Or perhaps something else silenced it.

  The rain sounds different lately. Less angry. More like… it’s waiting. I don’t like that.

  Rax—

  I think I saw you again today in the reflection of the fountain basin. But your face was upside down. And wrong. It smiled too much.

  I almost answered it. I think I will, next time.

  He closes the journal and tucks it under a loose floor tile, as he always does. The tile fits over it perfectly—too perfectly, really, like something left there for the book.

  But he doesn’t let himself dwell on that.

  Alaric wanders. Through the Lecture Vault, where hundreds of dust-caked chairs face a splintered stage. Through the Illuminary Wing, where half-faded murals glow faintly when the rain’s pulse grows heavy. Through the storage passages where scrolls, fossilized now, crumble at a breath.

  The only room he avoids is the Dome. The ceiling’s too fragile. Hairline fractures lattice the glass like silver veins beneath the skin, always leaking. Rain trickles through constantly, one drop at a time, pooling at the center of the mosaic floor where a depiction of the old sun god still gazes upward with blind golden eyes.

  Sometimes the drops land in patterns that sound like speech. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes it sounds like the beat of long drowned drums.

  Still, something draws him there tonight.

  He doesn’t remember deciding to go.

  Only that his feet have taken him halfway across the Archive before he realizes it, past shattered prayer statues, past the half-burned gallery where flame-eaten portraits hiss in the wet, toward the blackened rotunda beneath the Dome.

  Something is… off.

  The rain sounds wrong.

  It’s softer now. Gentler. Like a lullaby hummed in a mother’s voice you don’t remember, but still ache for.

  Alaric stops at the doorway.

  He listens.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  The rain patters in slow, deliberate rhythms, and underneath it—faint and curling through the air like steam from a dying candle—he hears words.

  Not voices. Words.

  “He cried in the corner the first ------ to his father.”

  “He thought ------ bridge beneath the wisteria tree.”

  “He never told Rax about ------ behind the ink shelf.”

  “------ lies when he says he ------”

  Each phrase lands like a pin driven straight into his skull.

  “Rax dreamed of leaving this city. You wouldn’t let him.”

  He stiffens. His breath catches.

  That one—that one wasn’t real. That wasn’t something anyone else should know.

  The Archive doesn’t know it.

  The world doesn’t know it.

  Only Alaric. And Rax.

  And Rax is—

  “Gone,” the rain finishes. Three voices homogenized into one.

  The word ripples across the puddles like a stone thrown into still water.

  He takes a step back.

  The sound beneath the rain… it’s not wind.

  It’s breathing.

  Shallow, wet, enormous breathing.

  The pressure changes. Like the sky’s lungs have shifted.

  A sudden gust pushes through the cracks in the Dome and the Archive groans in response—a tired, ancient sound that’s too alive to be just the settling of stone.

  He looks up.

  The veins in the Dome have spread.

  Hairline fractures have split wide like wounds. Glass has started to weep. Not leak—weep. A thin thread of black ink drips down the silver frame, trailing in the shape of something unwritten.

  Something in his chest tightens. It’s as though the air around him is waiting for a decision.

  The Dome isn’t going to last much longer.

  And for the first time in years—he feels fear.

  Real, sharp, animal fear.

  Something is about to happen.

  Alaric stumbles back from the Dome’s threshold, eyes wide and heart drumming with something he hasn’t felt since the first day the rain began: the suffocating pressure of dread.

  He turns.

  His feet move before his mind can catch up.

  Away from the Dome. Away from the dripping voice. Away.

  The corridor seems darker than before, as though the whispering rain had crept ahead of him and turned the torches down. His lantern flickers in protest, casting his shadow out in all directions, stretching and snapping like it’s trying to flee faster than him.

  He runs toward the east wing—toward the atrium beneath the Archive.

  The halls narrow as he goes deeper, the arched ceilings growing lower, suffocating. Rain drips steadily down the cracked walls, tracing thin vertical paths like bleeding veins. He can feel it—smell it now—metallic and ancient, like blood left too long in the air.

  And the whispers follow.

  “Why didn’t you scream when he fell?”

  “You locked the door behind him. He was still alive.”

  “This is the price of forgetting the sun.”

  “You didn’t bury him.”

  “Shut up,” Alaric rasps. “Shut up—shut up—shut up—” His voice breaks, worn with disuse.

  He presses his palms to his ears, but the words are inside his skull now, echoing through the cracks in his mind. Every syllable is a blade catching on old scars.

  The underground atrium yawns ahead—half-forgotten and untouched since the rain began. It had been a sanctuary once, a circular garden built into the roots of the Archive, surrounded by tall stained glass walls and carved statues of long-dead scholars. No windows. No rain.

  He spills into it like a wave crashing ashore, tripping down the black steel spiral staircase.

  The silence here is heavier.

  Thick.

  Smothering.

  Even the lantern’s light seems reluctant to reach the far walls. The air is cold—colder than the rest of the Archive. Alaric draws his tattered coat closer, eyes scanning the darkened benches, the twisted roots poking through the stone floor like the fingers of something buried alive.

  But even here—the rain finds him.

  Thin streams crawl down the spiral stairwell behind him. They slither over the walls like ink seeking parchment. They pool in the seams between stone tiles. They watch him.

  And they whisper still.

  “You should’ve let him go.”

  “He would’ve lived if you hadn’t loved him.”

  “You weren’t enough.”

  Alaric reels back, hands trembling.

  The voice is Rax’s now—but not. Too sharp, too cruel, laced with something broken. Something other worldly. A hiss that shouldnt come from human lips.

  The statues that line the room—stone visages of sages, poets, and prophets—seem to lean closer. Their blank eyes drip obsidian tears. One has a mouth now. He swears it didn’t before.

  “You never burned the body.”

  “Stop it!” he yells.

  The rain falls harder.

  From the stairwell, a new stream breaks loose, trickling like a snake along the handrail, and then down the wall.

  Alaric backs away. His heel catches on a root.

  He slips.

  The lantern crashes from his hand.

  Glass shatters. Oil splashes.

  The flame bursts, then dies.

  He’s left in darkness.

  And the whispers... laugh.

  They echo in the atrium, like water through a hollowed skull, bouncing off the tile and root, statue and shadow. They speak in tongues now—some familiar, some never meant for mortal mouths. Each word feels like it claws at his ears. At his sanity.

  He crawls, hands slipping in cold wetness, breath ragged.

  Then he breaks.

  He curls beneath the broken bench of an old reading nook, arms over his head, gasping like a drowning man. The cold seeps into his bones. The rain creeps closer, puddling near his face.

  He begins to sob, quietly. In a voice that’s rusted and rarely used.

  “Rax, I’m sorry. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to—I just wanted—”

  The whispers slow.

  Not silent.

  Just… watching.

  Then—

  Crack.

  The sound above isn’t thunder. It’s something worse.

  It’s the sound of the Dome’s last breath.

  And Alaric feels it in his spine.

  Crack.

  The sound reverberates again—above and beyond the Dome—but Alaric does not move.

  He can't.

  His limbs are frozen. Breath shallow. Every nerve is aware of the rain inching closer through the cracks in the tile, thick and slick like oil. The darkness seems to rise from it now—not cast by flame or shadow, but birthed.

  Something is there now, Alaric isn’t alone.

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  The spiral stairwell exhales.

  The stream of black rain pouring from above halts, mid-descent.

  It hovers.

  Suspended.

  Then it begins to twist. Not like water should. Not like gravity allows.

  The black stream coils upward, spinning into a long rope of shimmering void. It thickens, reshapes. A glint of wet, scale-like sheen catches the faint light of the shattered lantern’s last ember.

  It becomes a serpent.

  Long as a carriage, sleek and limbless, its body shudders in silence as it ascends. Its eyes are empty. Pits of glimmering nothing. And yet they lock onto Alaric with a knowing glint. A terrible, impossible knowing.

  He tries to scream.

  Nothing leaves his throat.

  The serpent slithers across the air, not touching the floor or wall, and slides down around him like a noose being drawn.

  It coils around his chest.

  Then his arms.

  Then his throat.

  The pressure isn’t crushing—yet.

  But it’s enough.

  Enough to keep him still.

  Enough to make him listen.

  “Do you remember the bruises?” it whispers—directly into his ear, though it has no mouth.

  “The ones you told your tutors were from falling on the stairs? Your father’s temper had nothing to do with it, of course.”

  His vision spasms, color dancing at the corner of his vision.

  He remembers—too clearly—the cold basin he was thrown into. The blood on the edge of the marble lip. The silence afterward.

  “Or how about the bottles you hid beneath the floorboards, even while Rax slept beside you?”

  “You kept them in the drawer with your wedding rings when you stopped wearing yours.”

  Alaric shakes his head violently. “Stop. Stop—”

  But the serpent doesn’t stop.

  It constricts.

  “The bridge,” it hisses.

  “The one that overlooked the river where the ivy grows. A tree of sunset colored wisteria draped over the cliff. You stood there for two hours, trying to choose between leaving and letting go.”

  Tears rush down his cheeks—hot against the cold. He gasps, but the coil at his throat tightens slightly.

  He cannot breathe.

  “And the forest,” the serpent croons.

  “You almost didn’t come back. You cut too deep that time.”

  His body collapses into shudders.

  Memories flash like lightning—wet leaves under his knees, his hands shaking, the red against the bark of an old yew tree. Rax calling for him, begging through the trees.

  The serpent coils tighter, its skin slick like oil, cold like old water beneath a tomb. Alaric tries to twist away, to resist—but the moment he tenses, it draws tighter around his throat and chest. Each breath becomes a theft.

  “You wanted Rax to leave.”

  The words slip into his ear like poison.

  “You knew you’d ruin him. You knew what you were. When he stayed, you loved him. But deep down, you hated him for it.”

  Alaric trembles. His lips part, trying to speak, but all that escapes is air. Choked, ragged air.

  He sees Rax again—smiling, arms wrapped around him on the balcony of the Archive’s east tower. He remembers the light in Rax’s eyes, the warmth. The way he’d say Alaric’s name like it was something worth holding.

  And yet—he also remembers the night he turned away from that warmth. The night he locked the study door and slept alone on the floor.

  “You wished your father had succeeded.”

  Alaric flinches.

  “You prayed he would stop. That he would break you cleanly, so you didn’t have to carry the fractures.”

  The hallway walls seem to pulse around him, distorting with every whispered memory. Marble becomes flesh. Torchlight flickers like blood under the skin.

  He remembers the marble basin. His reflection, too young and too silent. His father's voice, calm and cruel, like a blade held just beneath the skin. He remembers how much easier it seemed to give in.

  The serpent leans closer.

  “You envied the dead.”

  The words curl around his lungs, a cold breath that smothers the fire inside him.

  “When they screamed, when they clawed their eyes out, you watched from the tower and wondered what it would be like to not feel anymore.”

  “You didn’t cry for them. You envied them.”

  “No,” he rasps, but it’s empty. He did envy them.

  He remembers standing at the glass with trembling hands, staring down at the city as its people screamed under the first black storm. Only after he escaped. He didnt try to help. He didn’t scream with them. He watched. And he wondered.

  “You loved someone before Rax.”

  The serpent’s tone turns gentle now. Prying.

  “You told him he was your first. That no other heart ever touched yours the same way.”

  “He asked, and you lied.”

  That lie still echoes in the vaulted chambers of his memory.

  There was someone before. Years before. It had ended in silence. Alaric had buried that part of himself like the other pieces of his life he couldn’t bear to keep—deep, locked, unspoken.

  He had looked Rax in the eye and said, “No. You’re the only one.”

  And Rax had smiled.

  “You see him in the mirror sometimes,” the voice whispers.

  “Not Rax. Your father.”

  The serpent constricts again, not enough to crush—but enough to hold him still.

  “In your voice, when you argue. In your hands, when they shake with anger. In the way your silence cuts deeper than screams.”

  Alaric lets out a choking sound. His fingernails dig into his palms. The pressure of the serpent makes it hard to breathe, but even harder to exist inside his own head.

  “You don’t know who you are without pain.”

  “You don’t want the rain to end. Because if it does, if the world begins again… you’ll have to begin too.”

  “And you don’t remember how to live.”

  A breath escapes his throat—fragile and thin as glass.

  His knees buckle, but the serpent holds him upright. Keeps him tethered to the moment.

  He can feel the cold rain along the walls intensifying, the scent of rot and old books thickening.

  It loosens.

  It evaporates.

  The black coils unravel into smoke—no, not smoke. Ash.

  It drifts upward, dancing lazily toward the cracked glass in the ceiling above.

  Where it touches the thin streams of rain running along the walls and floors, the blackness ignites.

  Not with warmth.

  Not with light.

  With colorless flame.

  The veins of rain along the tile seams catch like fuse lines, burning with a flickering, unnatural luminance. Pale, ghost-like fire dances around the perimeter of the atrium, following the shape of its spiral inscriptions and sunken glyphs from forgotten languages.

  The air grows still.

  Heavy.

  Sick.

  And then he hears it.

  Not the whispering.

  Not the serpent.

  Not even his own heart.

  He hears the Dome.

  The groan of something ancient and sacred giving way.

  Stone grinding against metal, glass sighing before it screams.

  But he does not move, yet he stands.

  His body rises without command, like a puppet drawn upward by invisible strings.

  His feet shuffle toward the stairs.

  Upward.

  Step by step.

  He ascends toward the source of the firelight that bleeds through the upper levels—toward the heartbeat of the Archive's great center. The cold floor turns warm. Then slick. Then… wet.

  He reaches the top.

  The atrium doors hang ajar, splintered and bent. The rain has become something else, something violent and destructive.

  Beyond the doors, the world is burning.

  And still, the black rain falls.

  It pours through the fractured heights of the Grand Dome above, which bows now like a ribcage about to shatter. Cracks run through its support beams like lightning bolts across stone. Glass panes splinter one by one, the stained depictions of gods and saints crying black tears as they break.

  And Alaric steps into the center.

  His boots sink into the rain pooling across the marble—up to his knees now, the liquid thick and slow, like ink drawn from a dying pen.

  The whispers return.

  But softer now.

  Personal.

  “You’re the last one, Alaric.”

  “And even you don’t know why you’re still here.”

  He closes his eyes.

  Lifts his head.

  The great shard of the Dome cracks with a shriek like a dying world.

  The sound begins as a shiver—a tremor just below the threshold of hearing, like glass humming beneath a scream. Alaric lifts his eyes.

  Above him, the dome groans again. Cracks like spiderwebs sprawl outward from its crown, branching across the stained glass as if the sky itself is splintering.

  The rain intensifies.

  From beyond the fractures, the black torrent swirls in chaotic spirals, almost playful, as though the storm has become aware of itself—watching.

  Then it starts.

  A single pane gives way with a sharp crack, and suddenly a shard of violet-tinted glass plummets, spinning through the air.

  It catches the light—if it can even be called that—refracted from the strange fire creeping through the cracks in the floor. For a heartbeat, it shines like a fallen star.

  And then it shatters against the marble.

  The sky collapses.

  The entire dome erupts in an explosion of cascading glass, thousands of stained pieces raining down like a kaleidoscope turned violent. Fragments slice through the air in arcs of red and gold, indigo and green. They catch the flickering light in flashes like lightning frozen mid-stroke. The entire space is illuminated in a burst of false sunrise—a sunburst made of ruin.

  Alaric flinches, arms thrown over his face to save himself. But the glass doesn’t touch him.

  The air warps around him—reality folding just enough to miss his skin by inches. As if the storm wants him whole.

  Then come the whispers.

  Not the distant ones from before. These are screaming.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “You looked into us.”

  “You did not break. You were supposed to break.”

  “You wanted to know—now you do.”

  They surge in his ears like a swarm of wasps, their voices layered over one another in a thousand tones—male, female, childlike, ancient. Some sob. Some shriek. Some simply laugh.

  “Why do you stand?”

  “Why do you breathe?”

  “You let him fall.”

  “YOU LET HIM FALL.”

  The words slice through his thoughts, but there's one voice that rises above all others—a voice familiar, suffocating. It is the serpent, coiling around him, pulling closer.

  “You wanted to die. You should’ve died. You had your chance, Alaric. You never took it. You didn’t dare to leap, to end it all. Now look at you. This is your punishment.”

  Alaric staggers, gasping for air as the whispers tighten around him like a noose. His throat burns as though he is choking on the words themselves.

  “You should’ve jumped that day on the bridge. You remember, don’t you? You should’ve ended it all. You were already dead inside.”

  His knees tremble beneath him. The cold marble beneath his hands begins to blur, and he stumbles backward, his breath ragged.

  “You thought you could hide it, didn’t you? Your thoughts. Your darkness. Rax never knew, did he? You kept it from him. You kept the bottles hidden, your secret misery tucked away like it didn’t exist. You couldn’t even tell him what was wrong. You’re a failure, Alaric. You let him die. You couldn’t save him, and you couldn’t save yourself.”

  The air feels thin, the weight of those words pressing down on him until it feels as though his ribs will collapse inwards.

  “How long, Alaric? How long before you finally admit you don’t deserve to be alive? You didn’t fight for Rax. You didn’t fight for anything.”

  The serpentine voice hisses and coils tighter. It wraps around his chest, suffocating him, making it impossible to breathe.

  “Do you hear it? The screams of your past. The voices you tried to bury. You didn’t deserve him. Not Rax. Not anyone.”

  The rain beats louder against the walls. His skin prickles with cold. The black water rises at his knees, seeping into his boots, but it feels like it’s climbing his spine, claiming him.

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to fall. Now the world will burn with you. You’re nothing. You never were.”

  The walls of the atrium bend inward, as if closing in around him, and Alaric’s fingers curl into the slick tiles of the floor. The whispers are now a scream in his head, tearing at his sanity, ripping the fragile shreds of his resolve apart.

  “Do you remember the forest? When you almost let it consume you? You took the blade, didn’t you? You almost went too deep. You almost finished what you started.”

  The serpent coils tighter still, a weight around his neck now, its venomous voice a whisper that vibrates in his skull. The voices are mad, frantic, desperate.

  He can’t breathe.

  “You’re nothing more than a coward. The gods abandoned you because they saw the truth. You couldn’t even stop yourself from falling apart. You couldn’t save him. You couldn’t save anyone.”

  A sharp breath catches in his throat as the serpent seems to crawl under his skin, curling deeper into his thoughts. The tile beneath him begins to heat, and Alaric jerks, horrified, as tendrils of black flame lick at his fingers, curling upward, scorching his hand.

  “You’re no better than the gods, Alaric. You let them fall. You let everything fall. You wanted this. You deserve this.”

  The serpent begins to fade. Its tendrils dissipate into the air as smoke, twisting through the room like a wisp of dark memory. The flames sputter, yet the black rain continues to pour.

  But with each passing second, the pressure inside Alaric’s head intensifies.

  The whispers turn angry, jagged. The air vibrates with their fury.

  “This is your fault. YOU failed.”

  The floor beneath him cracks, and Alaric, barely able to remain conscious, tries to lift himself to his feet.

  “You didn’t care enough. You let him go, and now he’s gone. Forever.”

  His vision blurs. The pain, both physical and mental, seems unbearable. His knees buckle beneath him, and he crashes to the floor, gasping for air, grasping at the wet marble as the storm closes in.

  The whispers suddenly converge into a single, unified roar.

  “YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HIM. YOU COULD HAVE SAVED YOURSELF. THIS IS YOUR PUNISHMENT!”

  Then—

  Silence.

  The world halts.

  The whispers stop as though cut from existence in one cruel slash.

  The flames freeze in midair. The rain stops midfall.

  And Alaric stands in the eye of it all, as time suspends itself.

  The dome above shudders, creaking in one final gasp.

  Then the rest of the grand dome falls.

  The glass rains down in brilliant, terrible arcs. Thousands of sharp shards of stained glass and stone cascade in a violent explosion, shattering into a million fragments, each a sharp star of light that dances across the sky. Each piece gleams, catching the dying light of the black fire beneath the shattered dome.

  The sound of glass shattering and the crash of stone fills the air, a deafening roar that echoes through the chamber. The whispers that had once tormented him—those maddened voices—are now replaced by the deafening crash of destruction.

  It is as if the heavens themselves are collapsing, unraveling, tearing the world apart.

  And as it happens, Alaric feels the black rain drench his face. His body stands frozen in place, like an unwilling statue amid the storm. The pieces of glass, caught in the dying embers of the fire, form a sky of falling stars—shining, radiant, deadly.

  He’s knee-deep in the water as it floods the chamber. The black rain drips from the jagged shards of glass, catching fire as it touches the floor.

  Everything slows.

  The world seems to pause as Alaric, standing in the center of the ruin, watches the dome crumble. It happens in agonizing, excruciating slowness—each piece of the sky falling, as if the world were surrendering.

  Then suddenly, everything halts.

  The whispers cease.

  The rain arcs through the air, frozen in its descent.

  The storm continues—but no sound follows.

  Under the fallen dome, in the center of the sanctum now drowned and glowing, Alaric stands alone.

  Beneath the fallen rain.

  And for the first time in three years—

  The whispers are gone.