The page of the Librarian Max had drawn the symbol on burned like it was soaked in kerosene.

Panicked, Max leaped forward, swatting the burning book with the sleeves of his protective jumpsuit, trying to smother the flames.

The effort had the opposite effect. The fire flared so high it singed Max’s nose hairs, as if gasoline had been hurled on the flames.

Max yanked his head and arms back, snorting, his nose burning. The fire snapped, crackled, and popped, a miniature inferno growing in intensity by the instant.

Max’s heart hammered against his chest as a fresh surge of panic electrified him. Would the fire destroy the Librarian?

His hand shot out, grabbed the Librarian’s heavy front leather cover, and slammed the book closed. Surely that would smother the blaze. No oxygen, no fire. Max didn’t need a science lecture from Waldo to know that elementary school-level truism.

Smoke curled from the book’s pages. After a few seconds, there was a soft whomp. Now the book’s edges were ablaze. The reborn fire burned greedily.

Son of a—

Max was already on the move, rushing toward the fire extinguisher mounted on a wall, a detail perfectly replicated from the real Rebel County Public Library. The red extinguisher felt reassuringly solid in his grasp as he tore it free of its mounting.

“Please work,” he muttered under his breath as he hurried back to the burning book. Yanking out the steel pull pin that kept the extinguisher’s lever from being depressed, he aimed the nozzle at the base of the flames and squeezed the trigger, half expecting nothing to happen. The outside of the library wasn’t real; why would the inside of the extinguisher be any different?

But to his surprised relief, a whoosh of white foam shot out. It blanketed the flames with a hiss, trying to drown out the crackling fire.

He swept the extinguisher back and forth over the large book. The flames licking the book’s edges seemed resistant to the extinguisher. But not immune. The flames finally died under the extinguisher’s relentless assault.

To be safe, Max completely emptied the extinguisher. Once it was spent, he let it clatter to the floor. He stood there for a moment, chest heaving with exertion and adrenaline as he stared at the Librarian.

The Librarian lay closed on the library desk, coated in a thick layer of white chemical foam, looking like a book left out in a snowstorm. Max approached cautiously, fearing the bizarre fire might reignite at any moment. He gingerly wiped away some of the foam with his sleeve, revealing the charred and blackened edges of the Librarian’s blue leather cover.

Taking a hopeful deep breath, Max carefully opened the Librarian, hearing its spine creak softly. The page he had been writing on was a ruin of ash, almost completely destroyed, the only surviving part being a charred strip jutting from the book’s spine. Several succeeding pages bore the scars of the flames that had danced above them, their edges curled, faces blackened.

However, as Max flipped toward the end of the book, he found pages untouched by the fire, pristine and waiting.

Where the heck did the writing quill go? Did it burn up?

Max looked around. He finally found the quill on the floor, a casualty of his startled scramble. He picked it up and dusted it off, wiping its tip clean.

Extinguisher foam quivered atop the inkwell. Using the desk’s letter opener, Max scooped away the foam, uncovering the ink beneath. Despite all the writing Max had done, the inkwell was as full as it had been when Max first found it. The unusual inkwell didn’t even raise an eyebrow. After communicating with a sentient book, an inexhaustible inkwell was nothing to alert the media about.

Dipping the quill back into the ink, Max brought the quill to a blank page at the back of the book, pausing a moment to steady his quivering hand.

What just happened? he finally wrote.

At first Max feared the Librarian was broken. Or maybe dead was the appropriate term. He wasn’t sure how to refer to the destruction of sentience born from the sum total of recorded human knowledge. Perhaps the most accurate nomenclature to describe the destruction of such a being would be the subject of Waldo’s next Gadgetry class.

Finally, Max’s scribbled words quivered, sank into the page, and disappeared. He was so relieved, he wanted to kiss the page.

Your ‘What just happened?’ query is a non sequitur, the Librarian responded immediately. As we discussed, please reproduce the symbol here.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Max frowned, concern supplanting his fear about the Librarian’s demise. Had the fire cooked the Librarian’s brain?

I already drew the symbol. The page I sketched it on caught on fire. I thought you were going to burn up entirely. Don’t you remember?

The Librarian was so slow to respond, Max started to think it wouldn’t.

I have no recollection of such an occurrence, the Librarian finally replied. I can only assume a formidable ward or curse has been placed on the symbol, obstructing its reproduction. Caution should be our guide. Please describe the symbol verbally rather than attempting to draw it again. Relate everything you know about it.

Max considered this, and began writing.

I’ve seen the symbol twice. The first time was during orientation week in Mirrorkin’s chamber, when I was yanked against my will into the dark space I travel through when I shadow hop. You know that’s what my Unreal power is, right? Anyway, despite that being the first time I saw the symbol, something was familiar about it. I couldn’t tell you what. Maybe I had caught a glimpse of it or something like it somewhere before, and that’s why it seemed vaguely familiar. I don’t know.

The second time I saw the symbol was today during Gadgetry class, when a hologram Waldo generated turned into the symbol. As far as I know, I’m the only one who saw the hologram transform into the symbol despite there being a roomful of other people.

Max turned to a fresh blank page.

Anyway, the symbol is mostly pitch black, but with these weird lighter streaks that kind of glow, making the symbol look spooky and alive. The first time I saw it, it looked vaguely like a face, like it was a jack-o’-lantern. But today it turned into an actual face. Not a normal one. More like something you’d dream about after watching a horror movie. Imagine if an artist took the still-wet painting of a blackened skull, and smudged it to where it was almost impressionistic. Then plug cold, dark eyes into the skull’s sockets, eyes that seem to stare right through you. The skull’s mouth opened with a screech and said two words, the same words I heard in Mirrorkin’s chamber: “Free me!”

Max found his blood running cold as he described the image. Something deep within him rebelled at the very thought of it. He was relieved when he finally stopped writing.

Max’s mass of words sank into the pages and disappeared.

Black lines rapidly appeared on the last page he’d written on, quickly taking the shape of an image, as if Edgar the speedster had been given charcoals and instructed to draw as quickly as he could.

In seconds, the image was complete.

It was a skull resembling the menacing visage Max had described. But it was only a passing resemblance. The skull on the page had an air of eerie elegance, like if you could coax it to speak, it would impart the wisdom of the ages. By contrast, the menacing image seared into Max’s mind was something no sane person would ever want to have speak, ever.

This looks familiar. What is it?

The emblem of the Hero known as Grave Whisperer. He wears it on his armor’s breastplate.

Max remembered now. Grave Whisperer was a regional Hero, his main stomping grounds being New Orleans; he wasn’t a world-famous A-lister like Knight Templar, Brainstorm, or Storm Chaser. Max had seen Grave Whisperer’s emblem on some t-shirts online. According to the Unreal Accords, Grave Whisperer and other Heroes couldn’t directly profit from their powers. For example, Heroes couldn’t become super-powered bodyguards to the rich and famous, charge fees for protecting the public, or join the military and become super-soldiers for the nations able to pay them the most. The Accords were designed to prevent Heroes from becoming mercenaries, with their awesome powers monopolized by the uber-rich. Heroes could monetize their Heroic status only indirectly, usually by trademarking their symbols, likenesses, and catchphrases, turning them into commercial brands. And even then, a certain percentage of their profits had to be paid to the Unreal Council.

Seeing Grave Whisperer’s emblem and thinking of Heroes’ trademarks made a decade-old beef bubble to the forefront of Max’s mind.

Max’s Knight Templar lunch box had been his prized possession until someone swiped it from the second-grade class cubby, and Max had never seen it again. Though he couldn’t prove it in a court of law, Max had been convinced the culprit was his nemesis Jenny Alfeld, retaliating for him hitting her after she sucker-punched him for taking the last chocolate milk. Punching Max had been bad enough, but stealing his beloved Knight Templar lunch box had been a bridge too far. Max’s aggrieved second-grade mind had concocted elaborate schemes to exact revenge, all non-violent to stay within the confines of his father’s don’t hit girls rule. (Assuming using bottle rockets to shoot Jenny to the moon was non-violent.) But Jenny and her family had moved out of state before he could set any of his plans in motion.

Max shoved aside the ghosts of childhood grievances, refocusing on the matter at hand. He wrote to the Librarian again.

Grave Whisperer’s emblem is somewhat similar to the symbol I saw in the hologram earlier today, but it’s definitely not what I saw.

Rather than us starting over from scratch, we will use Grave Whisperer’s emblem as scaffolding to build from. Step by step, tell me what to change about Grave Whisperer’s emblem to bring it more in line with the symbol you glimpsed.

Max did exactly that, using scratched message after message to tell the Librarian what to erase, elongate, add, and otherwise modify.

By fits and starts, Grave Whisperer’s emblem slowly transformed into something more closely approximating what Max had seen in Gadgetry class and the shadow realm. The closer the image came to match what Max remembered, however, the more slowly the Librarian responded to Max’s additional changes to the image.

Soon, the image faded, then disappeared entirely.

I find myself unable to continue, the Librarian wrote. Each additional change is a greater and greater effort, as if some unknown force is actively resisting my efforts to reproduce the symbol you saw. Logic indicates it is the work of the ward or curse we ran afoul of before.

Max nearly slammed the quill down in frustration before the Librarian continued.

However, it is no matter. You have provided enough information that I believe I can identify the symbol you saw.

The symbol is associated with Shadowholme.