The final stroke of the pen left a stillness in its wake. Sarah’s hand remained where it was, hovering over the page, trembling not with fear but with a sudden, shocking lack of purpose. For three years, her fingers had known only the constant, minute motions of lettering. Now, they were unemployed, a current without a channel. She flexed them, and the phantom sensation of the pen remained gripped in her muscles.
She forced herself to stand, her joints protesting the movement. From her window, the Stack dominated the sky, a pillar of petrified thought so vast it created its own weather system. But her gaze fell lower, to the street below. The cobblestones of Scribe’s End were not made of stone. They were books. Glossy, unweathered, and perfectly preserved, their titles faced the sky in a mosaic of failure. Millions of them, the unworthy, the rejected, formed the very ground the town walked upon. Every step on the way to the market was a tread across someone’s abandoned epic or failed philosophy. To succeed was to join the sky. To fail was to become the road.
A soft knock came from the door. "They're waiting," Leo said, not needing to ask if she was finished. The silence was answer enough. "Try not to look as though you're facing a firing squad. It makes Mother nervous."
Sarah picked up the manuscript. The transfer of its weight to her hands was a familiar comfort, but she knew it was the last time she would feel it. "It feels like a part of me," she whispered, her voice raspy from disuse.
"It is," Leo said simply. "Now you have to see if it can stand on its own."
In the parlor, the air was thick with curated calm. Her mother was meticulously rearranging a set of porcelain figures on the mantel. Her father stood before his own small section of the bookshelf, his hand resting on the spine of his most famous work, a history of the pre-Stack era. He was not reading it; he was touching it like a talisman, remembering the feeling of the light. Elara and Finn stood by the oak table, their faces pale.
No one spoke as Sarah approached. She placed her book on the table’s worn surface. The moment her fingers left the leather, a profound lightness, a terrifying emptiness, shot up her arms. She had let it go. She stepped back, her hands now feeling useless and alien at her sides.
The minutes stretched, each one a lifetime. The ticking of the clock was the only sound, a mechanical heartbeat in the silent room. Sarah’s own heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, wild thing. She looked at her father, who had his eyes closed, and at her mother, whose hands were now frozen over the porcelain shepherdess. They were not just waiting for her; they were reliving every trial of their own, every book offered up to the silent judgment of the Stack.
It began not with light, but with a change in the air’s pressure. A low thrum resonated from the floor, a vibration that hummed in the bones. The dust motes dancing in the slivers of light from the window did not glow; they froze mid-air. An ozone scent, sharp and clean, pricked at their nostrils.
Then came the groan. It was not a sound from the house, but from the world. A deep, tectonic shearing, the splintering shriek of stone and petrified paper grinding against each other. The whole house lurched, a violent, sickening heave that sent one of her mother’s porcelain figures tumbling from the mantel to shatter on the hearth.
A column of pure, silent, golden light erupted around the book on the table, not touching it, but caging it. It flared once, a miniature sun that bleached all color from the room, and then vanished.
The house settled with a final shudder. The thrumming stopped. On the table, the book remained. But through the window, they could see the aftermath. At the base of the Stack, a new scar of fused, glassy rock marred the ancient bedrock. And nestled within it, its spine flush with the stone, was her book.