The descent had not ended. It had simply... dissolved.
Where once there were stairs, now there was only the slow, inevitable seep of memory—rising like groundwater through the cracks of their thoughts. Plato, Lira, and the Third were no longer walking. They were submerged.
The air itself had turned viscous, thick with the scent of wet parchment and the electric tang of synapses firing. Every breath tasted like ink. Every blink left temporary afterimages—words half-formed, faces half-remembered—floating in the humid dark before dissolving like sugar in tea.
Lira's voice emerged warped, bubbles rising through liquid time: "Where are we?"
The Third's response came filtered through layers of meaning, his words condensing on the walls like condensation: "In the Library. But not the kind that holds books."
And then—
The walls breathed.
Pale and membranous, they expanded and contracted with a wet, organic rhythm. Beneath their translucent surface, knowledge circulated like blood—glyphs swirling into equations, equations dissolving into personal regrets, regrets crystallizing into names that fizzed like effervescent tablets before vanishing.
Plato pressed his palm against the nearest wall. The surface yielded like the skin of overripe fruit, warm and slightly resistant.
A face bloomed beneath his touch.
His own.
But younger.
Smiling.
Before the Spiral. Before the Split. Before the weight of the city's grief had waterlogged his bones.
"I don't remember smiling like that," he said. Water trickled from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.
The Library answered in his own voice, but distorted—as if heard from the other side of a waterfall: "That's because you didn't. But you wanted to."
Lira stood before a surface that refused to reflect her. Her fingers left trails in the condensation, but no image coalesced. "Why can't I see myself?"
The walls wept in response. "Because you don't believe in what you became."
Then—
The floodgates opened.
Corridors branched like capillaries, their walls swelling and contracting with each pulse of forgotten history. Doors appeared—not as solid barriers, but as shimmering tension in the liquid air, each labeled in languages that melted upon contact with their retinas.
One door screamed. The sound traveled through the water as vibrations, making their teeth ache.
Another bled music—a lullaby half-remembered from childhood, warped by depth and distance.
A third offered only silence. The Third waded toward it, the liquid memory parting around him like a parting of ways.
Inside: a chair submerged to its knees. A harp with strings like seaweed. And the remains of something that had tried, desperately, to be human—its bones etched with the same glyphs now circling the Third's wrists.
He turned. Water streamed from his hollow eyes. "This is where the Library stores choices no one dared to make."
They drifted apart.
Each door a drowning pool.
Each room a lungful of might-have-been.
The water grew heavier the deeper they went—not with pressure, but with significance, each droplet containing the weight of unwritten futures.
And somewhere below, in the stacks where light never reached, the truth of the city waited—
Not buried.
Not shelved.
But suspended, like a breath held too long beneath the surface.