Oren woke from a dreamless sleep. For a long moment, he simply existed, floating listlessly in between the state of sleep and consciousness, before he was pulled out of it by the sudden realisation that he was hearing something.

Quiet pops echoed in his mind, and it was his sleep addled state that stopped him from realising what it was immediately. But only for a second. Oren’s eyes shot open at the Mediator’s signal, and pushed himself up from his bed.

“It took you a while to wake up,” a voice said immediately. “What happened?”

It was a testament to how deep his sleep had been that he didn’t immediately recognize the woman sitting beside him.

“I’m not certain,” he said. “I may have been put in a magically induced state of sleep by the Otherworlder.”

The woman nodded, and he slowly recognized her as Laush, his fellow Mediator.

Immediately, he felt his mind snap back to attention. The fact that she hadn’t taken the opportunity to stab him in his sleep could only mean that he hadn’t been deemed a traitor to the Mediators. The ghost of a smile flitted across his lips.

“What are my instructions?” he asked.

—

I don’t know how long I ended up staring into the distance, long after Bran disappeared from my sight, but it must have been a while.

I was cold, tired, and hungry. My anxiety and restlessness made me assume that eating or sleeping would be close to impossible, but being cold was something that I could fix.

I didn’t want to fix it. Intellectually, I knew I was liable to catch a cold if I stayed out there on the front porch, as the unusually cold summer rain sprayed a light shower of mist on my already clammy skin, but I didn’t want to. It would be so easy to go back in the house, change into some dry clothes, and huddle up in my bed with the blankets drawn over me, but that was part of the problem.

Being comfortable would only hinder me. I didn’t want to make it even harder to leave with Jamie when the time came.

But what was I doing out here?

I sighed.

I knew I wasn’t helping Jamie by slowly freezing myself to death for no purpose, but it was frustrating to know that there was really nothing I could do right now to help him. The urge to get up and wander through the village to find him had long since faded from my mind, since I had no idea where he could be. It was a better idea just to stay put.

But I hated that.

Even though I was doing nothing, and had been stagnant for however long I’d been sitting there on my front porch, a nervous energy ran through my veins, begging to be doing anything instead of just twiddling my thumbs as I waited for Jamie to come back.

I resisted the urge to get up and pace, knowing that it would only make things worse.

It was only when I heard the quiet creaking of tortured leather that I realized that I was on the verge of ripping my dad’s book in half. I thought of throwing the book as far as I could into the muddy roads, as if it had just personally offended me, but I dismissed the intrusive thought.

Lashing out randomly wouldn’t do me any good. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The book crinkled in my hands, but didn’t rip like I secretly hoped it would.

After a few more breaths, I opened my eyes.

Releasing my vicegrip on the book somewhat, I turned it over to stare at it. The title stared back at me, written plainly in boring block letters, “The Chronicles of a Witness,” and underneath it, the author’s name, “Eti.”

It looked so innocent on the surface. Though I knew the book was the most famous book in Astranta, and probably throughout the entire world, I couldn’t help but think it was a little cruel that the cover looked so innocuous without even a warning of the horrors that it contained.

I wondered if that was intentional. Maybe the publishers didn’t think that they would be able to sell the book if people knew exactly what it was about? It definitely didn’t end up being a big problem, since the morbid curiosity of the general population drove them to buy it anyway. It was kind of messed up if I thought about it for too long, given that most of the general population had at least one member of their family pass away after being affected by the Plague King’s namesake.

I sighed as I thumbed the cover, not knowing whether I should read it or not. I still wasn’t sure what my dad wanted me to get out of this. Even though I had joked around with Bran that it was his way of pushing me towards a writing career, the more obvious answer was that he wanted me to read it and become so horrified of what an Otherworlder was capable of that I would abandon Jamie.

The urge to throw away the book rose up inside me once more, but I suppressed it again. I felt my lips curl into a deep frown before I thumbed open the cover.

If anything, knowing more about Otherworlders would help Jamie in the long run, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t like I was afraid that my conviction would waver if I read this. I’d been through death and had come out strong. A book wouldn’t scare me.

At the sight of the first page, I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It was just a publisher’s page, detailing who the scribe had been, as well as how many generations of transcription the version had gone through and the date of the book’s publication. Apparently my dad’s copy of the book was written by a man named Renard, from Redstone, and it was a second generation copy that was written twenty five years ago.

How my dad could afford a second generation copy of any book confused me. While we were no means poor, a second generation copy of a book was a luxury. Though they obviously weren’t nearly as exclusive as first generations, since you needed a special licence to have access to the original copy of any book to transcribe it into a first generation copy, second generation books were often still very expensive, since the scribe would often have to pay a fortune to obtain the first generation copy to transcribe off of.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I was more used to seeing ninth or tenth generation copies, where bits and pieces of text were lost as the scribes that made them became lower and lower in skill, but a second generation book would likely have close to zero mistakes.

Maybe there was just such a high demand for the book that more second generation copies were made?

Before I could think about an answer to that question, I grimaced and glared at the book. I was distracting myself.

I steeled myself before I turned the page.

Then I turned the page.

Then again.

And again and again.

I eventually gave up flipping the pages one by one and fanned through the entire book like it was a flipbook, but the only scene animated by the book was one of nothingness.

I opened the book again, to a random page, just to confirm that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.

They weren’t. The page was blank. The entire book was empty.

For some reason, my blood ran cold. I could think of a hundred different reasons as to why the book was blank, but I instinctively knew that all of them were wrong. Feeling a shiver down my spine, I nearly fell sideways as my legs grew weak, as I only just realized that I was standing up.

I walked quickly back into my house, my fingers threatening to tear into the blank pages of the book in my grip.

The door slammed open, startling my dad and my mom, who was apparently awake now, but I couldn’t find it in me to care.

I lifted the book up and pointed at it with an accusatory finger.

“Why is this blank?” I asked.

My voice was wavering for some reason, and from the concerned look on my parents’ faces, I could only imagine what my expression looked like, but I didn’t care to change it.

“Why is this blank?” I asked again, jabbing a finger against the book, almost tearing out a page.

“Lena?” my dad said, raising his hands like he was trying to calm down a wild animal. “What are you talking about, honey?”

“This!” I said, thrusting the book forward. When I saw the way that my mom flinched away at my sudden movement, I tried to calm myself down, slowly lowering the book, but feeling it shake in my grip.

“Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and steady. “Did you accidentally give me the wrong book? This one’s blank.”

My dad stared at me, barely even giving a glance towards the book in my hands. “Lena,” he said, his voice slow and careful. “It’s not blank.”

At his words, I felt my throat close up and heard my heart pounding in my ears. I didn’t know exactly why I was reacting this way, but just because I didn’t understand it didn’t mean I could ignore the utter sense of wrongness that I was feeling at that very moment.

I shakily offered the book to him with the page open. “Can you read this out loud for me? You don’t have to read it all. Just a little bit.”

“Lena,” he said, not even looking at the offered book as he stared into my eyes instead. “Are you okay?”

I bit back the irritated shout that threatened to jump from my tongue. “Please, dad,” I said, between clenched teeth. “Just humour me, okay? Just read me a passage.”

My dad’s eyes flickered momentarily towards my mom, and when I followed his gaze, I could see that she was frozen in place, with her only movement being how her eyes rapidly bounced between me and my dad. I tore my eyes away from her to look back at my dad.

“Please,” I said, pushing the book closer to his face, almost hitting him with it.

My dad didn’t answer me, but he reached up and took the book from my hands. Slowly. Like he was afraid of how I would react if he moved too quickly. It took an uncomfortable amount of willpower to let him take the book from my hands, but I was eventually able to uncurl my fingers away from it.

He patted his breastpocket, but his reading glasses weren’t there. I was glad he decided against looking for them. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have snapped if he took any longer to read from the damn book, and I could only assume that he knew that.

Narrowing his eyes, he looked at the open book in his hand.

He opened his mouth.

Immediately, the concerned and confused expression on his face dropped. His mouth hung open, slightly ajar, as his head hung down, like it had suddenly grown twice as heavy. In the corner of my eye, I noticed my mother suffering a similar fate. The wrinkles in her brow softened and the stiff downward curve of her mouth disappeared, almost turning into a smile. The sudden change gave off the illusion that she had suddenly found a sense of peace and contentedness with herself.

But their eyes. My dad’s eyes were glazed over, as he stared forward in the general direction of the book in his hands, focused on nothing. The fear in my mom’s eyes had all but faded away, along with everything else.

I was no stranger to those eyes. I’d seen them many times before. They were the eyes of the unprocessed carcasses that found their way to the large bloody table in the back of my dad’s shop, the eyes of Medric after his battle with Jamie.

My parents were dead.

And then, just as suddenly, they weren’t.

“There,” my dad said. The furrow to his brow returned, like it had never left. He closed the book gingerly, like he was afraid that it would bite him. “I read it out loud.”

“That was horrid,” my mom said. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, warming herself against a sudden breeze that wasn’t there. “You gave that to Lena to read?”

“I thought it would be educational.”

“Traumatising, more like. You only read out a page and I’m already going to have nightmares.”

“Better to have nightmares in your sleep than nightmares while you’re awake. Lena. Please. Won’t you reconsider… Lena?”

I simply stared silently at my dad, watching him move in blissful ignorance of what had just happened to him. Though I could hear his voice, and I could understand what he was saying, I couldn’t say anything back to him.

I held out my hand.

“Dad?” I said, my voice impossibly small, even to my own ears. “Could I have that book back?”

I wasn’t sure if he heard me properly. A sudden look of deep concern entered his eyes as he stared into mine.

“Lena? Are you alright?”

Rather than asking the simple question, it sounded more like he was pleading with me, begging me to give him the answer that he wanted.

“The book, dad,” I said instead. “Could I have it?”

He didn’t seem like he wanted to, but he must have seen something in my expression that made him concede. Too focused on staring at him, I didn’t notice him putting the book into my hand until I felt my fingers automatically curl around it.

“Lena,” he said. “Please.”

He might have had more to say, but I couldn’t hear him. I had already turned around and walked out of the house.

The world around me blurred as I lost focus of where I was going, but my feet marched me forward all the same.

I vaguely heard someone screaming into the wind as I ran, desperately calling out someone’s name.

“Jamie! Jamie!”

I vaguely wondered who could be wailing so fearfully like that, this late at night. I pitied the poor soul, whoever it was.

My breath quickly grew ragged. My throat quickly started to feel strained.

I ran.