"Hey! You in there!?" Lyric's voice lifted what was left of the veil that kept reality's light from his eyes. They were in what looked like an alley, and the boy stared blankly at where they were standing in the road just moments before.

"The hell was that about..." Kyoya finally sat upright. A gradually fading headache seemed to have been left over, confirming to him that he wasn't merely imagining things. Color and tone slowly began to return to his surroundings, allowing the boy's senses to finally cool down.

"You tell me! We were just having a normal conversation in the street, and then you fell to a kneel and clocked out!"

Despite her voice stammering for a few moments afterward, the Seraph soon managed to calm herself. Amidst shaking hands, the signs of panic appeared to be working themselves out. "Takera's sake... What even happened?"

Any answer eluded him entirely.

"I got nothin'. I just know it hurt a lot." He put pressure on his temple, to the onset of no such strife. Whatever came about him had come and gone, thankfully. The deeper details—those sudden sensations—he chose to keep.

"Gracious... I've only known you a few hours, and here I thought you were gonna croak on me."

"Psh, nah. I've got a bit more mileage than that." Kyoya's offering of a shabby thumbs-up brought the beginnings of her smile back. To him, the irony of this role reversal was a spectacle in itself. "Speakin' of... are we still on for that archive business?"

"If you can put one foot in front of the other, I'd like to."

She took a hard pause after that. "I've got something... new on my mind."

That offbeat seriousness resumed flowing throughout her statement. He wasn't entirely sure how to feel about those changes in her tone quite yet, as for the greater majority of her company, she seemed almost carefree. And now, it was almost as though her whole personality had flipped.

"New, huh?"

"Don't think too hard—I'm already doing enough of that. C'mon."

She led him further up the road, a right turn some hundred yards up presenting them with the destination Lyric seemed so fixated on.

It was a mystery to him, how he hadn't noticed such a striking difference in appearance until it was in his face. The Archive was fashioned completely differently than any of the surrounding buildings, being built of cracked and darkened brick. It was a structure from generations long before his own, still standing strong against the tests of time.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

A massive wooden door was all that stood between the pair and whatever secrets they sought.

However, patience was suddenly something that found itself lacking in Lyric's case. She didn't ease the door open, instead pushing it to give way with such force that they left sparks in tow—all with only one hand, as hissing electricity fizzled out in the wake of her stride.

Kyoya couldn't pin down what it was that brought about this shift in tempo. The ever-so-pleasant sensation of a knot soon welled up in his throat. Yet, this time, it was accompanied by something like excitement.

Raw, concentrated adrenaline coursed through him one heartbeat after another. His surroundings became increasingly vivid as they proceeded deeper through this mossbound labyrinth of limestone and literature. The pair swatted away cobwebs of gargantuan proportions with each progressive step.

"The vibe of this place just feels weird... Is it just me?" Kyoya finally spoke up. At this point, he was no longer able to pin down his senses reliably enough to relax.

"There's awfully few folks who come in here to read, since the library's stuff is so much more modern. This update season didn't start till about yesterday, so it'll be drab."

There was a faint, buzzing hum carrying from somewhere in front of them, it's origin mirroring every turn Lyric took. It was such an incessant sensation, one that pervaded his body and seemed to reverberate throughout. "Do you feel it?"

A sharp glance over her shoulder prompted him to stop.

"Whatever it is, I definitely feel it."

"Then I was right to think you've got more going than you let off... Who'd have thought: The Hope being the only one with any hope of pulling this show together." Lyric didn't follow that statement with so much as a breath, immediately returning to their traversal of the Archive.

"The Hope?" Kyoya mused. "She can't possibly be talking about...?"

Once they'd ascended a flight of stairs, leading into a much more well managed section of the building, that hum revealed it's source.

An enormous mural stood before them. It was flat on the eastern wall, 20 feet tall and 30 wide. The piece depicted a handful of people in a chaotic, mishmashed setting with haphazardly made symbols strewn about, not unlike heiroglyphs.

One element of the image in particular, though, struck him.

Nine figures stood atop some sort of slope, with jagged, blackened silhouettes ascending that same summit. Colors began assigning themselves to individual heads on the peak, but they seemed to scramble soon afterward, jumbling into a mess of lines and hues.

"What am I looking at...?" Kyoya's total inability to make sense of this began gnawing at him. However, the return of that splitting jolt soon tore into his head. Then, those scrambled figures erupted into swirling masses of nothingness that disappeared entirely from the mural.

Just as quickly as the affliction had come over him, it left again. He didn't even have time to react to the pain before it was gone.

Lyric stood with a planted glare at the mural. It re-drew itself into the very same depiction that was plastered on the canvas when they'd walked in, with the girl crossing her arms once it was complete.

The boy spoke with newfound closure, the last traces of indecision taking their leave. "I still don't know what just went down."

Even if he was mostly in the dark, there was an unforeseen ease in this vision. Unlike every premonition he'd experienced before, these at least weren't terrifying—in that alone, they were an improvement.

If Lyric, in all her mysterious allure, could prove to be the only means of answering the questions that kept arising, there'd need to be a decision.