The next weeks were the education of my life.

Not the kind you get in classrooms.

The kind you get from nearly dying repeatedly until the nearly stops surprising you.

The dimension had a rhythm once you learned to read it. 

The Stalkers hunted at what passed for dusk — a gradual brightening of the bio-luminescent flora that I came to think of as the warning light.

The smaller predators moved in the deep growth near the ground and could be avoided with height. 

The largest creatures — things I never got close enough to classify properly — seemed to have territories they didn’t leave, which meant the mapping I did in the first two weeks was more useful than anything else I did to stay alive.

I slept in the trees.

Ate what I could identify as safe through trial and significant error — the three days after I ate the pale blue fruit that turned out to be violently toxic were not days I look back on with anything like fondness.

I moved constantly, never staying in one place long enough to become familiar to whatever lived nearby.

I was exhausted in a way I hadn’t known exhaustion could work. 

Not the tiredness that sleep fixes. 

The deep kind.

The kind that lives in your bones and your eyes and the specific weight of waking up every morning in a place that is trying to kill you and choosing to wake up anyway.

I nearly died properly on day nineteen.

I’d gotten careless — not through stupidity, through the particular danger of competence, which is that you start to trust it.

I’d been moving through a section of the Rift I thought I’d mapped well enough and I hadn’t noticed the silence until it was too late.

The creature came from above.

Not a Stalker — something different. 

Smaller, faster, built for ambush rather than pursuit, dropping from the canopy with a shriek that split the air and claws that opened four lines across my left shoulder before I hit the ground rolling.

I came up with the small blade in my hand — the one I’d brought and barely knew how to use — and what followed was less a fight and more a desperate negotiation with mortality conducted at close range.

What saved me was the bag.

I swung it — heavy with resources, crystallized Melnos compounds dense and solid — and caught the creature across the side of its head with enough force to stagger it. 

It screamed again.

I screamed back — not strategy, pure animal response — and ran and didn’t stop running until the sound behind me faded completely.

I collapsed against a tree trunk half a kilometer away and pressed my hand against the shoulder wounds and sat there shaking for longer than I’d like to admit.

The cold thing in my chest observed all of this without comment.

‘Get up,’ it said eventually. ‘She’s waiting.’

I got up.

I just kept on moving, deeper and deeper into the rift.

Not really knowing exactly where I was going and what my plan was, all I could think about was staying alive, and returning to my mother.   

At this point, I had spent twenty three day in the gate, and was getting a bit frustrated. 

I moved slowly thought the bio-luminescent clearing, until I spotted it. 

A library. 

I almost missed it entirely.

I’d been walking for six hours straight — longer than usual, pushing further into an unexplored section of the Rift because the areas I knew were getting dangerous in new ways and new ground at least offered the possibility of surprise working in my favor.

My shoulder had stiffened overnight despite my attempts to clean and bind the wounds with strips of my own clothing.

My boots had started separating at the left sole two days ago and I’d wrapped them with something vine-like from the forest floor that held for approximately four hours before needing to be replaced. 

I was hungry in the specific grinding way that meant I’d been under-eating for too long.

My eyes felt like they’d been rubbed with sand.

I was, in the most literal sense, at my limit.
 
And for a sixteen years old -- it’s worse than you think.

I almost walked past the library because it didn’t look like anything.

From the outside the library looked like a structure that had grown rather than been built — organic and angular simultaneously, so thoroughly covered in the same bio-luminescent growth as everything around it that it took my exhausted eyes several passes to register that the lines were too regular. 

Too intentional. 

That the archway at the front — barely tall enough to walk through without ducking — was an archway and not a natural formation.

I stopped.

Stood completely still.

My first thought, absurdly, was that it was a trap.

That something in this dimension had evolved to look like architecture, because architecture attracted the kind of creature that walked upright and got curious.

My second thought was that I didn’t care.

I was twenty three days into a dimension that had tried to kill me in eleven different ways, and I was exhausted beyond the reach of caution. 

If this was a trap at least something would have to come out of it to spring it and I was tired of waiting for the next thing to try.

I walked to the archway and ducked through.

And stopped.

The air changed first. 

That was the thing I felt before anything else — the quality of it shifting the moment I crossed the threshold, the thick bio-luminescent atmosphere of the Rift replaced by something cooler, stiller, older. 

Like the inside of a place that had been sealed for a very long time and remembered what air was like before the world changed.

Then my eyes adjusted.

The space was wrong.

Architecturally, physically, fundamentally wrong — larger on the inside than the outside in a way that my spatial reasoning registered and immediately rejected.

The ceiling was lost in a darkness that the ambient light of the shelves below never quite reached.

And the shelves — they went up. 

And up.

And further up, row after row of them extending into the dimness above me, lined with objects that resolved slowly, impossibly, into books.

Not dozens. Not hundreds.

Thousands.

Bound in materials I’d never seen before, colors that didn’t quite have names in any language I knew, some of them glowing faintly with a light that wasn’t bio-luminescent — warmer than that, deeper, like light with memory in it.

Scrolls alongside volumes alongside things that weren’t quite either, shapes I didn’t have categories for, all of them arranged with a precision that suggested not just organization but care. 

Like whoever had placed them had known exactly what they were leaving behind and wanted it to last.

I stood in the archway with my ruined boots and my bound shoulder and my half-empty bag and I looked at all of it.

My throat closed.

Not from fear. 

From something I hadn’t felt since before the gate — since before the hospital, maybe since before my father left and the world revealed what it actually was. 

Something I had almost forgotten existed.

Wonder.

Pure and involuntary, and completely undefended, because I was too exhausted to defend against anything and because nothing in twenty three days of surviving the un-survivable had prepared me for this — a library in the dark of a dimension that should have been empty, filled with more knowledge than I could fathom, waiting in the silence like it had been waiting for a very specific amount of time and had just heard the right footstep.

I took one step inside.

Then another.

My hand reached out and touched the nearest shelf — not to take anything, just to confirm it was real, that I wasn’t hallucinating from hunger and exhaustion and the accumulated weight of too many days alone.

The material — smooth, cool, dense with something that wasn’t quite wood grain but suggested it — was absolutely solid under my fingers.

Real.

I let out a breath I had been holding since day one.

“What are you?” I said.

The library didn’t answer. 

But the quality of the silence changed — and I had spent enough time in a place that communicated through sound and absence to recognize that change as something.

I walked further inside.

⸻

I looked through the books on the shelves I could reach.

They were fascinating, I didn’t understand most of what was written on them.  

I was sixteen, and in a very uncomfortable situation, I had no processing ability at that point.
 
But what I noticed was, most of the books were some sort of ability books. 

I understood that quickly — within the first hour of moving through the shelves, pulling volumes, holding them, returning them.

Most of what filled this library was something else entirely. 

Knowledge I couldn’t yet access, history written in languages I’d need years to approach, records of things that predated any system I had reference for. 

There were entire sections I couldn’t make sense of at all — materials that responded to my touch with impressions so vast and complex they resolved into nothing, like trying to cup the ocean in two hands.

Whatever this place was, it had not been built for a sixteen year old from Eurova with torn palms and a shoulder wound.

It had been built for something much longer and much larger than me.

But there were fifteen books that were different.

They were the ability books.

I found the first one by accident — a slim volume on a low shelf, its cover a deep electric blue that seemed to pulse faintly in the ambient light. 

When I touched it the impression wasn’t vast or unreasonable. It was immediate. Specific.

Something quick and bright and crackling that my body recognized before my mind did.

I set it aside and kept looking.

By the time I’d found the fifteenth — a heavy volume bound in something the color of still water — I understood that these fifteen had been placed here differently from everything else. 

Not randomly distributed across thousands of shelves.

Gathered. 

Close enough to each other to be found by someone looking, far enough apart that finding all fifteen required time and patience and the willingness to keep going.

Someone had curated these specifically.

Someone had left them here for a reason.

I didn’t have the answer to that question yet. 

I still don’t have all of it. 

But I set the fifteen books in a careful arrangement on the floor of the library and looked at them for a long moment — at the electric blue, the ember red, the still-water Grey, twelve others in colors that didn’t quite have names — and I thought: are these really what I think they are?.

Then, from the corner of my eyes, I saw a glowing crimson light.

It felt as if it was calling my name. 

It was a very strange looking red book. Very different from the other fifteen.