He hesitated only for a heartbeat.

Then Aurelius stepped through the doorway.

His stride was long and proud, the measured gait of someone who had crossed countless thresholds in countless ages, never once flinching at the unknown.

One step.

The darkness swallowed him—thick, heavy, clinging to his skin like damp velvet. There was no sound, no sensation of wind or walls, only the soft echo of his footfall, as if the world had pulled away from him.

Two steps.

The weight of the void pressed closer. He felt it—not as air, not as pressure, but as a strange absence, as if reality itself were thinning around him. His eyes, so keen in night and shadow, found nothing to latch onto.

Three steps.

Silence.
A quiet so complete that even his own existence seemed muted.

Nothing.

He might have been suspended in nothingness, walking through the memory of a corridor rather than the thing itself. No scent of dust. No draft. No heartbeat but his own.

Then his fourth step landed.

And the world tried to erase him.

It came without warning, without glow or sound—no crackle of power, no rumble of gathering force. One moment there was nothing. The next, a small, controlled void had already launched toward him.

It was not darkness.

It was worse.

Darkness was simply the absence of light. This was the absence of existence. A perfectly smooth sphere of not-space, not-shadow, moving faster than an arrow, silent as a held breath.

Aurelius saw it only because it reached him.

His eyes flared. Instinct overtook thought.

The blood coating the sole of his right boot reacted first. It rose in a violent rush, tearing itself free from leather and stone alike. In a single heartbeat it surged upward behind him, coalescing into a barrier barely thicker than glass.

The void struck.

For the span of an instant, the blood held. Its surface rippled, the sphere pressing inward, compressing the crimson shield like a heavy weight pressing into liquid.

Then it cut straight through.

The blood was not shattered, it was unmade—erased, consumed, devoured without a splash. The void did not slow. Aurelius twisted, trying to move out of its path, but even his preternatural reflexes were not enough.

The sphere tore through his side.

He did not feel a cut. He felt absence. One moment his abdomen existed. The next, a solid chunk of his body was gone—simply removed from reality as cleanly as a page torn from a book.

His body jerked sideways. A choked sound escaped his throat.

He hit the ground hard.

The impact rattled his bones, sent his white hair fanning around his head like a broken halo. For a heartbeat, he couldn't breathe—not because he needed air, but because the shock reached deeper than his lungs.

He looked down.

He could see his spine.

Where his right side should have been there was only a gaping hole. Flesh had not been torn, nor bone splintered. The wound was frighteningly clean, like a chunk of his body had never existed. Frayed strands of tissue hovered at the edges, refusing to bleed properly, as if even his blood was confused about where it should go.

His expression—so calm, so composed for so long—cracked.

Panic.

It flashed across his features in a sharp, unmistakable streak. His eyes widened, his lips parted, and for the first time since his awakening, Aurelius looked genuinely vulnerable.

And that was when his surroundings lit up.

Light bloomed around him, soft at first, then bright enough to reveal the shapes that had been hidden.

Books.

Shelf upon shelf of them.

His breath stilled as he took in the room. Towering shelves of dark wood lined the walls, reaching up into shadows far above his head. Each shelf was jammed with volumes of every size and thickness—some bound in leather, others in strange metals, a few chained shut with intricate locks.

The walls themselves were almost entirely obscured behind the books.

The floor beneath him was tiled, pale stone arranged in a grand circular design that spiraled outward from the centre—intricate patterns of geometric shapes and sigils. A long, royal purple carpet ran down the centre of the room like a river of colour, leading into a hallway-like passage between rows of towering shelves.

A library.

A hidden, impossible library inside a mountain.

He lay at the edge of the carpet, half on the patterned tile, half on the royal cloth. His blood, thick and dark, tried to spill from his exposed wound but hesitated at the air, refusing to fall.

He ground his teeth.

Move.

With effort, he planted his left arm behind him, fingers splayed against the cold tile. His right arm trembled, refusing to obey properly. Pain—muted, but present—throbbed through his torso, radiating outward from the gaping absence where flesh should be.

He willed his blood to move.

The crimson that clung to the edges of his wound responded sluggishly at first, then gained momentum. It pulled inward, condensing, thickening. Slowly, drop by drop, it began filling in the empty space—stringing itself across bone like threads of muscle, weaving a net of living red.

Another void sphere screamed toward him.

This time he heard it—barely. A faint ripple of wrongness in the air, a subtle twist in the fabric of the room. His black eye snapped to the left and caught it: another tiny void, spinning toward him at chest height.

He threw himself sideways.

Tile cracked under his shoulder as he hit the ground. The sphere tore past where his head had been moments before and carved a perfect, silent hole through the nearest bookshelf.

Books vanished.

Not burned. Not shredded.

Vanished.

A clean circle of absence opened in the shelf, through books, wood, and wall alike. Everything inside the sphere's path ceased to exist, as if someone had erased part of reality with a stroke of ink-black paint.

Dust and motes of light drifted into the new round cavity, hesitant, as if wary of following.

Aurelius stared at the hole, heart hammering.

Void.

This was no simple magic. No elemental force. This was a manipulation of existence itself. A twisted mirror of his own bloodcraft—where he shaped a substance into whatever form he desired, this unseen assailant shaped nothingness.

A third sphere came.

He didn't see it. He felt it.

The hairs on the back of his neck rose. His spine screamed danger.

He flattened himself against the floor. The sphere passed inches above his face, close enough that the edge grazed his hair. A lock of white vanished at the tips, length sheared off by existence's absence.

He rolled.

Another sphere tore through the tile where he had been.

Grand, intricate designs were wiped away. Not chipped. Not cracked. Gone. The decorative circle now had a missing wedge where there should have been artistry.

His breathing quickened.

He pushed himself upright as far as his half-repaired body allowed, propping his back against a bookshelf. His left hand pressed over his abdomen, fingers sinking into the thick, half-solid blood trying to rebuild what had been taken.

He extended his right hand.

The blood from his spine-slit, from his lingering wounds, from even the air—tiny leftover droplets from his earlier rituals—answered him.

It rose in thin threads.

They gathered in front of him, twisting into a small, circular shield of crimson.

His fingers curled.

The shield condensed, its surface smoothing until it gleamed like polished ruby. Not enough. He hardened it further, feeding it with more of his own blood, thickening it until it became a disk—a compact bulwark floating before him.

Another void sphere came.

He saw it early this time—a ripple in space, a distortion of light just ahead of the incoming path. It wasn't truly visible, but the absence around it was. A faint outline of wrongness.

He thrust the shield into its path.

The collision was silent.

For a moment, the void pressed into the blood-shield like a finger pushing into clay. The edges of the shield roughened, the surface trembling as portions of it were consumed.

Aurelius snarled under his breath and forced more blood into it, reinforcing the weakening structure.

The sphere wobbled.

Then, for the first time, it failed to pass completely.

Not stopped—never stopped—but diverted.

The void slipped sideways, spinning past him instead of through him, carving a clean, round gap through the top edges of several shelves. Books tumbled from their half-erased supports, some falling into the hole and disappearing mid-air as they crossed the sphere's lingering path.

Shelves groaned. Wood splintered. Dust rained down in a slow cascade.

He didn't have time to admire the result.

A new sphere came from the other side.

He jerked his shield toward it. Too slow.

The void clipped his upper right arm.

An entire strip of flesh vanished from his bicep to his forearm. His fingers spasmed. The shield wobbled, losing cohesion.

Aurelius bit down on a shout.

Pain ripped up his limb, far sharper than before. His bloodcraft fought to compensate, surging to fill the void, but it couldn't fully understand a wound where something had been erased so cleanly.

His expression twisted.

He wasn't calm. He wasn't collected. A raw edge crept into his eyes: frustration, anger, and something uncomfortably close to fear.

He scanned the room.

Sphere after sphere kept coming.

They flicked through the air like sniper shots—small, controlled, brutally precise. Each one followed a deliberate trajectory, aimed to kill or maim efficiently. Whoever was directing them understood both patience and anatomy.

He still saw no source.

No flash. No figure. No incantation.

Just attack after attack.

He ducked behind the nearest bookshelf, using it as cover. Another sphere punched through it, the void erasing a circular segment inches from his head. He felt the tug of nothingness on his cheek, like the brush of a cold, inverted wind.

Books rained down around him.

He grabbed one reflexively.

Thick leather. Old pages. Ink faded with age. He hurled it blindly toward where the last sphere had come from.

The book never hit anything.

Another void sphere intercepted it mid-air, carving a perfect hole through its centre. The two halves fell to the floor, spine and cover cleanly broken, pages fluttering like wounded birds.

Aurelius growled low in his throat.

Enough.

He pushed himself to his feet—barely. His legs shook. His abdomen still throbbed, the blood reconstruction incomplete, but he refused to stay prone any longer. His wings of blood flared open behind him, skeletal arcs stretching wide, their segments tightening into sharper, stronger lines.

He poured blood into them.

The wings glowed darker, crimson deepening until they nearly blackened at the edges. Their form solidified, joints locking like armor. They were still skeletal, but more defined, each segment a honed blade of liquid steel.

A sphere hurtled toward him.

He turned.

The left wing snapped into its path.

The void struck and began eating away at the blood, but Aurelius shoved more of himself into it. The wing thickened, resisting the erasure for several heartbeats. The sphere slowed—enough for him to twist aside, letting it pass by with only a glance against the tip of his wing.

The outermost segment vanished.

Aurelius staggered, not from pain, but from drain.

Too much blood.

He was feeding his defenses with his own essence. It cost him. Even a vampire had limits.

Without waiting for the next attack, he drove one of his wings forward, stabbing it into the empty air ahead of him.

The wing point carved through space, slicing between two incoming spheres. They veered slightly, glancing off the shimmering surface and altering course—one smashed into a shelf, the other into the floor, erasing more of the room but leaving him untouched.

He laughed then.

A short, breathless, bitter sound.

"You're cautious," he muttered into the air. "You hide. You test. You probe."

A sphere sliced toward his legs. He hopped back, the edge carving a neat circular divot from the floor where he'd just been standing.

"But you aren't perfect."

He flared his wings again, spinning once, sweeping them in a wide arc around himself. Blood ripples extended outward, not as shields but as sensors—threads of his essence spreading through the air, searching for disturbances, seeking the source of the attacks through resonance.

For a moment, he felt nothing.

Then—

There.

A faint pull. A ripple in the flow of ambient mana, like a heartbeat echoing through stone.

High.

He snapped his gaze upward.

The library's ceiling was lost in shadow, high above the top shelves. The void spheres had all come from roughly mid-level, from his periphery. But above that… there was a stillness too intentional to be natural.

Another attack screamed toward him from his right.

He sidestepped. The sphere grazed his thigh, taking a coin-sized piece of flesh and fabric with it. His leg buckled. He caught himself on a shelf, fingers digging into wood hard enough to leave dents.

Blood dripped from the new wound, hesitated, then reversed direction to join his internal reconstruction.

His breath came faster now—not for oxygen, but as an unconscious echo of his straining focus.

"You're above me," he said quietly.

The spheres did not answer. Three came at once this time—from three different angles.

He slammed both wings into the ground.

Blood surged outward like a shockwave, forming a dome over him.

The first sphere glanced off and was diverted sideways, scarring a shelf. The second bored partially into the dome, chewing away at it, but it slowed dramatically. The third struck the strained surface and broke through—but the delay was enough for Aurelius to hurl himself to the side.

It caught his left shoulder instead of his heart.

A jagged portion of his upper torso disappeared. His arm went limp. He crashed to the floor in a heap, blood spraying out—and then immediately recoiling, refusing to spill onto the tiles.

His vision blurred.

For a terrifying instant, he could not feel his legs.

No. Not yet.

He clenched his teeth so hard cracks formed in the enamel.

Blood, he ordered.

Move.

The crimson knit itself tighter around his wounds. The hole in his abdomen filled further, threads of blood weaving into false organs, fake muscle, incomplete but functional structure. His shoulder sealed partially, enough for him to regain some movement in his arm.

He dragged himself backward until his spine met a shelf.

His hand pressed against the floor, pushing.

He couldn't stand.

But he could sit upright, back braced against the wooden column, one knee half-raised, the other leg stretched out. His wings drooped behind him, segments flickering unstable. Sweat—cold and unnecessary—beaded faintly at his brow.

His eyes, however, burned.

"Come down," he whispered to the empty air. "If you intend to kill me, at least grant me the courtesy of seeing my executioner."

A moment passed.

The spheres stopped.

Silence returned to the library.

It was not the natural silence of an empty room; it was the heavy stillness of a held breath, of a predator pausing to assess.

Aurelius forced his gaze upward again.

At first, there was nothing. Just shadow and height and distant ceiling lost in gloom.

Then the darkness moved.

It was subtle—a slight thickening of shadow near the far end of the hall, above the central line of the purple carpet. A hazy outline stepped forward from an unseen balcony, descending an invisible staircase of compressed air.

Light caught on metal and silver ornaments.

A figure emerged from the upper gloom, each step deliberate, measured. Not floating, not teleporting—simply walking down through the air as if it were solid ground.

She came into view fully when she reached the level of the highest shelves.

A woman.

Middle-aged, with the look of someone in her early forties. Her hair was dark, streaked with faint threads of silver that caught the lamplight with every movement. Her face was sharp, strong-featured, holding a calm authority that did not need to shout to be heard.

She wore a grand black robe, its fabric heavy and layered, falling around her in elegant folds. The outlines of the robe were even darker than the rest, tracing subtle patterns along hems and cuffs—lines like stylized chains, or runes, or wards. Silver ornaments adorned her chest and shoulders: small, crescent-shaped pins, geometric clasps, threads of shining metal woven into the fabric.

Her eyes were cool.

Not cruel. Not kind.

Simply… knowing.

As she stepped off her invisible path and onto the top of a shelf, she looked down at Aurelius, who sat injured and braced against the wood like a wounded beast cornered among books.

She studied him for a moment, gaze lingering on the partially reconstructed wound in his abdomen, the skeletal blood-wings fading behind him, the faint crack in his composure.

Then, at last, she spoke.

Her voice was smooth, steady, carrying effortlessly through the library's vast space.

"So. The sleeper finally remembers how to knock."

Aurelius stared up at her, breathing shallowly.

His panic did not vanish, but it shifted—mingling now with something else.

Recognition.

Not of her face, not clearly, but of her presence. Of the void-twisted power that hung around her like a cloak. Of the library itself.

For the first time since he had awoken in his cocoon, Aurelius Noctivus felt like he had stepped into a chapter of his own story that had been torn from the book and hidden away.

And the woman on the shelf seemed to have been waiting a very, very long time to turn the page.