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There was no ground beneath her, but Zero stood anyway.
A complete, deliberate absence of anything and everything. Time in here flowed to a stagnant halt, crystallising around her legs, her arms, her hair, a thought, half-formed, and half-finished. It clung to her with a cold sense of stillness.
The void wasn’t black, or gray, or gold or white. It wasn’t even colourless- it was truly nothing. It was the space where colour should have been, like the gap left behind when a page from a book is torn, or the smudged outline of an erased smile on paper. Her mind searched for a shape to give it, a name, a border- and came back empty.
It was soft, in a strange way, mellow TV static pressing against her body, humming just below the threshold of hearing.
Zero had thought her eyes were open, but there in fact was no edge to her vision, no object to anchor her to one position. She might have been upright, or adrift, or nothing at all. She didn’t blink. She didn’t breathe. There was no need.
Here, there was only waiting.
There was nothing but a gradual fog, its lungs breathing in, slow and rhythmic.
It was nothing like the wind- it didn’t rush or stir. The void took its time, a steady inhale, drawn through the many miles of silence.
Every time she moved, it was like sifting and wading through a gigantic wad of wet silk, or standing inside some ridiculous unhatched cocoon. Each step, each twist or twitch of hand resisted her, but not with force. It was yielding, half-there, and the air around her had weight, but no temperature at all. Like she was underwater in a sea that refused to drown her.
And there were no walls, no doors, and nothing for sound to bounce off against. Dark and infinite and slow. But even in silence, there was a hum. Not quite sound- a frequency. Faintly metallic, like a radio caught between stations. The kind of sound that came from broken machinery, or dreams about broken machinery. A tune no one ever wrote, still playing long after the power had gone out, and life had drained out of every note.
Zero didn’t wonder where it came from. She already knew. In the way dreams tell you things you didn’t ask.
At first, she didn’t move, fatigued by the rubble that had crushed her when the Library collapsed.
Or perhaps not fatigued- just carrying it. The weight had never left her, really.
It clung to her skin, soaked into her bones, leaving something much deeper than a simple injury. The memory of stone pressing down on her spine, a resounding, splitting crack of glass and light, the final laboured breaths of the tower as it crumbled. Zero’s limbs didn’t ache. Her chest didn’t rise. But time passed; surely it did. But there was no reassuring beat of a heart, no rise of breath to measure it by. Just the steady pull of the void around her, weightless and slow.
Then, the silence deepened- a freeze frame, or a line of corrupted code paused mid-execution. Not broken, exactly. Just… interrupted.
It formed a shape around her. Not viable or solid, but unmistakably there. She didn’t flinch when it pressed closer.
She was used to silence. It had followed her all her life. Lived in her voice, soft and dull, as if spoken through layers of glass. Lived in her walk, in the way her feet barely made a sound when she walked. In the expression others called blank, though she had never really thought of it that way.
It formed a shape around her, and she didn’t flinch when it pressed closer. She was used to silence.
It had followed her all her life. Lived in her voice, her walk. In the expression that others called blank, though she never really thought of it that way.
To her, silence had never been the absence of something to her. It had been the default. The way water is default to the ocean, or how shadow is default to light.
She remembered people whispering behind her back.
Most of all, she remembered Ereshan not bothering to whisper at all. Words flared in the haze without warning. Not sound, just the shape of sentences, blooming in shards of light across the void.
“You’re so quiet, it’s suspicious.”
“What are you even thinking?”
“You weren’t supposed to be here.”
Zero didn’t react. Didn’t reach for them. She just watched them vanish, like she always did.
Ribbons of light coiled, separated from the fog, flickering in hues of pinkish red and scorched white. One strand dragged lazily through the air, slow and fluid, hovering near Zero’s face before unraveling into the fog again, leaving a ghost of warmth that didn’t quite touch her.
Zero didn’t speak.
There was no one to speak to.
But she remembered. Not because she wanted to. Because the silence made her.
And somewhere in the middle of that haze, Ereshan lived again- in that spiralling colour, in that lingering haze of a sentence that hadn't meant to be kind.
The ground cracked beneath her feet. Not visibly, not physically, but in a way that cut her very being into half. Like gravity had just remembered what it was. She staggered but stayed perfectly still. Her mind shook.
Ereshan’s voice again.
“He picked you.”
There had been a scythe flashing through dust and flame. Pieces of torn paper that rained down like snow. And the look on her face- not a sarcastic grin stretched tight over resentment, not the hard, bitter anger that she wore like armour. Something different, for once.
And then: the code. Not letters or numbers, not anything with inherent meaning. Purely noise, sharpened into shape by time. An infinite line of brainless monkeys putting together languages long since drowned in the sea of possibility.
The activation key. Spoken with precision. Whispered from breath to breath. The very first humans of Memphis to the people of Japeth before finally being transcribed onto paper and handed to her.
The God of the Sun towered over all. The Secret to Immortality towered over all. A Symbol of Military Might towered over all. Aten towered over all, unblinking and restless like the sun in the sky. A light so bright it weighed down her eyes, searing through every line of vision, blinding her to the pink hair that danced so wildly. And yet, somehow- despite these being Ereshan’s final moments- Zero had never seen her look more free.
Zero didn’t know what to name that feeling.
But something in her ached at the memory.
Then the tower collapsed. Her world collapsed alongside it.
The gold light faltered, breaking into slow, shimmering fragments like paper-thin glass. In the far distance, something flickered, a ceaseless burn mark against the horizonless void. Red-pink. The color of a memory.
Without a doubt, there was something terrible about being chosen as the Head of the Library. Even worse, maybe, was being resented for it.
But what lodged in her chest- quiet and glinting and cruel- wasn’t resentment. Above all, something she had never even admitted to herself, was that helpless want, the need to be seen by that person who hated her the most. Whose gaze cut scars into her skin, so deep they reached the flesh of her heart.
Not forgiven, not liked.
Although that, she would have tolerated the most.
Her fingers twitched as sensation returned to it.
A golden flower rested in her palm, six-petaled and delicate, showing only its smoothened copper surface to the world. Now it lay weightless in her hand, as if a real flower plucked mere moments ago. She stared at it for a long time.
Assuredly, its metal surface didn't wither. At least, not until she closed her fingers. It crumpled with no resistance- petals dissolved into fine, futile golden powder that clung to her skin like ash. And she didn't brush it off. The powder stayed- coating her skin like the most brilliant paint.
And there were voices- quiet, distorted, too far to reach her, but not far enough to ignore. Someone called her name, but the syllables melted mid-air, swallowed whole by the void before they touched her ears.
Somewhere, above her, beyond this place, machines ticked and murmured. A heart monitor? She couldn’t tell.
The hum had grown again- low and fragile, like a thread pulled tight.
Zero stayed standing, gold dust on her hand, golden eyes on the pinkish glow far away. Someone was calling her name, but she wasn’t yet ready to leave. She let the silence settle into her bones and watched the horizon burn. And it was enough. At least for now.