Chapter 31: The Forbidden Name

The hidden library clung to the side of the mountain like a secret carved into stone.

Its entrance was a narrow crevice, veiled by wards that shimmered like ghostlight. Caelen and Elira stood before it in the twilight hush, wind whispering across Aerthalin's wounded cliffs.

They had followed the whispers here—across broken towns, ancient ruins, and blood-soaked fields. Each step driven by one truth: to defeat the End That Feels Nothing, they had to understand him.

Elira placed her palm against the door's runes, fingers steady though her breath shook. "This is it," she said. "The last sanctuary of the temple's keepers. If any truth remains, it waits behind this door."

Caelen's scar flared.

His curse stirred like a beast sensing its kin.

"Then we go in," he said.

The wards parted at their presence, melting like morning mist. Inside, the air grew still—thick with forgotten sorrow.

The library opened around them, vast and dim.

Shelves carved from silver-rooted trees arched skyward. Books bound in leathers that remembered ancient hands lined the walls. Light filtered from glowing stones, pale as moonlight.

At the center, hunched at a table of runed stone, sat a lone scholar.

His skin was ink-stained parchment, his face a mosaic of time-worn scars. He wrote in silence, his quill scratching a slow, steady rhythm into the stillness.

"You should not be here," he said, without looking up.

His voice was brittle. Dry as old leaves.

"We seek Eredan-Mir," Elira answered. "We need to know what he is—what he was."

The quill snapped.

Ink bled across the page like a wound.

"That name…" the scholar whispered, voice tight with fear. "To speak it is to summon him. It is forbidden."

Caelen felt the man's terror ripple through the curse—bone-deep, older than words.

"We can't fight what we don't understand," Caelen said. "You know that."

The scholar turned. His eyes, though clouded, fixed on Caelen's scar.

"You are the Ashbound," he said quietly. "Then perhaps you can survive what I show you."

He moved to an ironbound chest etched in warning sigils and opened it with trembling hands.

From within, he drew a tome the color of bruised skies. Its pages flaked at the edges, and its clasp bore a seal of broken wings.

He laid it on the table and opened it with reverence.

"Eredan-Mir was once a healer," the scholar began. "A man of light. He bore witness to centuries of suffering—war, plague, genocide. He felt every scream. Every final breath."

Caelen's breath hitched.

"He tried to end pain," the old man continued. "He sought a way to sever feeling from flesh. But what he made… was worse. He created the Hollows—souls stripped of sense. His own heart twisted until it became a void."

Elira's voice broke through the silence. "He wanted to help…?"

"At first," the scholar said. "But mercy turned to madness. He came to believe that numbness was salvation."

Caelen stepped back.

The room spun. The curse whispered temptations—peace, stillness, freedom. But now, he saw the end of that path. Not healing. Oblivion.

"He's going to the temple," Caelen said. "To finish what he began."

The scholar's face darkened like the sky before a storm.

"He is closer than you think."

Caelen and Elira left the library in silence.

Behind them, the name Eredan-Mir echoed in the mountain stone.

Ahead, the temple waited.

But the void had already begun to move.