The sun was starting to set and as the light moved across the floor the walls moved with it. Sat behind her desk Rose watched completely motionless while the far end of the room slid further and further away. The form she had been filling out moments before was forgotten even as her hand kept writing. Along the walls shelf after shelf of old books and records stretched and distorted to match the growing space. They filled more and more of Rose’s vision while a low hum filled her ears.

She could feel the hum as much as hear it. The vibrations travelled up her arm from where her pencil scratched against the paper. There was something right about it. Light and sound and her working. It made sense to her. The passing of time in the sun's rays. More time passing meant there had to be more space. And space needed to be filled.

With a start Rose snapped back into focus. The waning sunlight still poured through the windows but no walls moved with the shadows. The form she was writing was more filled in than she remembered but everything looked right. She had been noting down the details for another batch of records to be archived. A knock at the door startled her again and she realised that must have woken her up. She quickly walked to the door while rubbing her eyes. While she didn’t feel tired she figured she must be pretty exhausted to be having weird daydreams.

“Hello. How are you?” Mark greeted her as she opened the door. Rose didn’t speak with Mark very often. Most people's work at the archive didn’t really intersect with her in her little storeroom turned office.

“Hey Mark! I’m good. A bit tired. And you? Did you need something?” she replied.

“I need trays.”

Rose waited a moment for any more but nothing was forthcoming. “Sure, hang on a minute.” She tried to keep a smile on her face at the curt interaction. While she wasn’t close to any of her coworkers they could at least have a polite chat.

Pushing the feeling aside she tried to shrug off the lingering disorientation from her daydream. Mark was probably as tired as she was and hadn’t meant anything by it. She’d been planning to stay a little longer today so she could leave early on Friday but it seemed like a bad idea now. There was no point starting the weekend a few hours early if she was too tired to enjoy it.

Besides Rose’s desk and the cabinet she had permanently borrowed, the storeroom held folder after folder of city records waiting to be archived. Trays full of them lined the shelves. Since there was always something being brought in or out of the room it also held a few stacks of empty trays. While Rose would normally try to chat a little longer she wasn’t going to hold either of them up so she quickly went to grab some.

She frowned for a moment as she was searching. They were supposed to be closer to the door. And as she looked for them some of the folders looked unfamiliar. City records came in blue or green folders but these were all grey. Was someone storing something else without telling her? But a moment later she skipped a few shelves and found the empty trays under the windows. Boxes really but everything had to be recorded and inventoried here and ‘box’ was already in use. To no surprise the admin team of an archive was extra hung up on record keeping.

With the trays in hand she briefly glanced out of the window. The city archive stretched across several buildings. This window looked out over a large courtyard and the car park. To one side was the city hall itself covered in banners and decorations for the tourists. Almost the entire front was glass which caught what little light reached it. In almost perfect contrast on the other side was the main archive.

A huge building of plain brick that had been here longer than anything surrounding it. The city had bought the apartment building and turned it into storage. With the sun setting behind it it seemed to loom over the open space. Half of the courtyard was in darkness and the shadows of its chimneys were reaching out towards the city hall like a stretched out hand.

Rose turned away and brought the trays to Mark.

“Here you go. A whole stack. Is that enough or do you have a lot of things to move?” she asked him.

“That is enough. I need to go now. You should go too.”

“Yeah it is pretty late. I was going to stay longer but I think I’m too tired.”

“You should go to the archive.”

Rose would really rather not deal with whatever mood Mark was in. But it didn’t matter too much. She had to head that way to leave so she may as well help out and say bye to anyone staying late. There were always a few people around the reception this time of day.

“Sure I’ll give you a hand but I’m not carrying all of these for you,” she said. Mark took most of the trays from her and immediately set off. She rolled her eyes and quickly grabbed her bag before following. They were right by the stairs so it only took a moment to get outside.

There were a lot of people out and about for this time of day. Was everyone staying late? She hadn’t really seen anyone from the window. Most of the groups were heading to or from the main archive rather than the city hall. It was dusk but at this point the streetlamps hadn’t turned on yet. In the dim light it was hard to recognise anyone. On the other side of the courtyard figures could be seen behind the glass. They looked like looming shadows.

Rose shivered a little and tried to focus properly. Now that she was away from her work and moving she suddenly felt exhausted. For a moment she had felt relief as if a loud noise she had tuned out had suddenly stopped but now it felt as if the sound was back and was that much worse for her being aware of it. The feeling grew worse as she saw the walls of the archive looming overhead stretching taller and taller like the walls in her daydream.

That thought fell away again as the two of them stepped into the archive. The lobby felt as welcoming as ever. While most of the building was untouched since visitors sometimes came here there had been some renovating. The walls were done up with wood panelling to match the beams visible along the ceiling. Displays around the room showed off some of the history of both the building and where previous archives had been. And in the centre was the huge reception desk behind which Amanda was sitting.

“Hey Mark! Hi Rose! I hope you’re not here to steal another cabinet,” she called and waved at them. Amanda wasn’t the only receptionist but she was the one here most often. Usually taking as many shifts as she could to pay for more trinkets. Today’s find looked like some kind of floating sculpture.

The amount of money Amanda spent on magic items was probably higher than Rose even wanted to think about. The near complete lack of magic on Earth meant it all had to be imported from off world and the prices had always stayed high in the decades since magic items became available. They did look pretty though.

“No, no more cabinets. I’ll be coming after your desk next,” Rose replied.

“As if this thing would fit in your tiny office. Have a look at what I got.”

Rose stopped for a moment to hand the trays off to Mark. He had turned to her after they came in but was looking off to the side confused. Once he had the trays he mumbled something before heading further in. Amanda gave him a nod as he passed and turned back to Rose.

“Look, this ones really good. It’s an enchantment for a forcefield.” She gestured to the small sculpture. 

It didn’t look like anything in particular. A sort of rounded looping shape sitting in mid air over a magic circle. The circle was bright blue with little symbols all over it with no clear meaning. Rose had been interested in learning about magic at one point but gave up when she learned there were a hundred different ways of doing it with no standardisation. And since magic was nearly impossible to practise on Earth it hadn’t seemed worth her time.

“Is it like the little flying ship you had?” Rose asked.

“No no this is way better. The other one is only enchanted to make that specific model float on that specific base. This one creates a forcefield that you can put anything on. Here touch it.” Amanda reached out for Rose’s hand and pulled it to the empty space above the magic circle.

There was a strange sensation of a wrong texture. Like being thrown off when you lift something that you expected to be heavy but wasn’t. The force field wasn’t a physical thing and Rose could tell she was still just touching air. But she couldn’t push her fingers downwards.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Don’t push too hard though,” Amanda cautioned. “It does have a limit. I’m actually not sure how much. I need to read the manual again.”

“Sure.” Rose pulled her hand away. “But why is a magic glass table better than magic flying? Feels like it should be the other way around.”

“Doing it this way where it can keep anything up in the air is more complicated or something like that. I like them more since I can use it as a base for any model I want to put up in the air. Lot’s of companies want to buy these but obviously they can’t get enough of them since the guilds won’t supply that many.”

That was always the issue with magic. The first portals opened before Rose was born but she’d been taught there was a lot of excitement at the time. About access to another world and the wonders of magic. But it turned out different worlds had different capacities for magic and most were pretty low. You could bring magic items in from elsewhere but couldn’t make more. So almost everything had to be imported through the guilds who just didn’t have that kind of supply.

Magic items weren’t so rare that you couldn’t get your hands on something if you really wanted to but they certainly weren’t common enough for everyone to have one of everything like they did with appliances or phones. Apparently the worlds the guilds operated on just didn’t do mass production. Local mages made bespoke enchantments for their customers. And since Earth was too low magic they had barely any mages and barely any enchantments.

“Did you see anyone else coming in? I need to leave while I’ve got a moment and remind people it’s almost closing time.” Amanda continued after they both spent a moment poking at the enchantment.

“I saw a few people outside but I don’t know where they were going. I can make a quick round if it's just downstairs.”

“Oh could you? That’d be great. I don’t want to leave the desk unattended since a bunch of people have been coming in and dropping things off last minute. I think they’re clearing a room somewhere. No one asked for the keys so they haven’t gone upstairs”

Rose gave Amanda a nod and headed further in. Most of the building was kept locked up with different departments needing their own keys. If no one had asked for any they could only access the main hall and a couple of rooms on the ground floor. Going around was one more thing to do before she could go home but if they weren’t asking too much Rose liked to help people.

She also liked the inside of the building. It wasn’t pretty by any means but it had a sense of time to it. You could clearly see where each section had been added on or renovated. What parts were older. Behind the reception was another small lobby with doors in every direction. And past that the large area of the central storage room. The walls had been taken out long ago leaving one big hall and then put back in in the form of endless shelves.

What Rose stepped into when she opened the second set of doors however was not the main archive room. The brief normalcy and comfort of the lobby had left her feeling calm and awake so she was left completely unprepared for the madhouse recreation of what should have been there.

Instead of neat rows the shelves were scattered in haphazard patterns. Some had fallen over and strewn boxes of paper about. Most of them still formed rows but they angled at random and zigzagged between unevenly spaced pillars. Between them the floor was a mess. Every single one of the desks, usually for sorting and reading records before they went on the shelves, had been overturned. Everything was littered with staplers, laminating sheets and empty folders. 

There was more than disorder too. Some of the shelves were covered in stains. Black and grey liquid dripped down and soaked into the mess of paper everywhere. A few spots on the floor were covered in a deep red that seemed to soak into the wood floor and the shelves themselves as much as the paper.

All of this Rose saw only for a few moments as she scanned the area in front of her. Her attention was quickly taken up by the view upwards. The ceiling before had been higher than a normal room. Now it was gone. Above her the room rose and rose before disappearing into a black void. Some of the shelves stretched up into the darkness. The higher they got the more they began to twist. Until the tops looked like screws before being swallowed by the darkness.

Between the towering shelves was the most unsettling part of the whole sight. People Rose had not noticed between the shorter shelves, whose bodies were also pulled upwards to just below the dark void. Down by the floor their legs and torsos were normal. But instead of a head on top of their chests was another chest. And another and another. Stacked up in a pillar towards the hole on the ceiling. The many pairs of arms were constantly in motion reaching for papers and passing them between each other.

From the floor Rose almost couldn’t make out where the bodies ended but she thought she saw heads frantically looking between shelves at the top. Her thought was confirmed a moment later when one leaned down to her. 

It moved impossibly fast. The head that must have been hundreds of metres up was a few metres from her in a second or two. The entire creature had bent in the middle like a slinky to end up level with her. The face she saw looked frantic. Eyes wide open and twitching to look at anything but her.

It reached forward with one arm and held its hand out to Rose. For a moment she was frozen, trying to process any of what was happening, before she took a step back. The creature froze in turn as it finally looked directly at Rose. She didn’t recognise it as any of her co-workers. After a moment the creature opened its mouth wide.

Rose expected to hear a scream or some other noise. Instead the sound of shuffling paper in the background grew quieter. The air in front of its mouth shimmered like a heat haze before some of the distance between them disappeared. Rose suddenly found herself a metre closer to its waiting hand.

Vertigo overtook her as she was brought forwards without moving. The space between her and the waiting hand was steadily constricting now. She turned and was about to pick a direction at random to run in when she spotted Mark at the end of a row of shelves. He was facing away and she only caught a glimpse of him before he stepped into a room. Struggling against her dizziness she took off after him. 

As soon as she reached the room she ripped the door open, stepped in and slammed it shut again. The constant back and forth between understanding and confusion, starting from her daydream, was becoming too much. When the creature had leaned down Rose should have reacted in some way but she had just stood there until it did something. When she opened the door to the archive she shouldn’t have walked in given what she saw. Now that she was thinking about it she couldn’t actually remember entering. Only opening the door and suddenly being in front of a monster.

Trying to remember only made whatever was happening to her head worse and Rose slowly sank to the floor. Her head felt both foggy and crystal clear. She could remember every individual thing that had just happened to her perfectly but couldn’t understand how one thing led to the next.

A sound behind her had Rose stumbling to stand back up before she stopped. Mark was in the room with her and walking closer. She had almost forgotten that she ran this way because she spotted him. He looked at her with concern and reached down to help her up.

She almost went to take his hand before hesitating. Something about the way he was looking at her felt wrong. There wasn’t anything malicious about it but she still felt scared. He didn’t look frantic or desperate like the twisted creature had but he still reminded her of it. There was something wrong. She was sure of it.

With that feeling of certainty she could suddenly hear it again. That hum she had heard, had felt, in her office had never stopped. It had only grown louder after she stopped listening to it. Her whole body felt as if it were vibrating in time to the sound. As she looked at Mark for the first time she took in his appearance. The dark blue of his suit. Mark never wore suits. No one at the archive did; they weren’t nearly that formal. His pale skin was completely unblemished and free of all the freckles it usually held.

Another wave of dizziness overtook her as it felt like the last half hour of memories split in two. She still remembered everything as she thought it had happened. But now she could see the same scenes without the haze that had covered them. 

The shadowy outlines of people in the twilight hadn’t been any more than shadows. She had seen them clearly. Wisps of darkness in the shape of formal clothes wrapped around a wire thin skeleton. The shadow of the archive moving and stretching as it really did reach for the city hall. Her own office stretched to thrice its normal length.

For a moment Rose couldn’t understand how she hadn’t seen that. She had walked back into the room. She had noticed the extra shelves and walked right past them as if everything was fine.

Now that her senses were clearing she looked around the room she had entered. Just like the main archive it had been changed. The room was smaller than it should be but held more shelves than before. They were squeezed together tightly with their contents warped to fit. It looked like someone had edited an image to be narrower.

Piles of random objects covered a lot of the floor. Stacks of pen holders, coffee cups, paper. Random office supplies. Though not all were normal. There were tables that had only one half and sealed stationary packets with no contents. Rose scrambled away from Mark and grabbed a metal chair leg from a pile she passed.

She held the chair leg tightly as she stood back up and faced whatever was in the room with her. He, or it now that she could see properly, was between her and the door. 

“Back off! Get the hell out of my way!” she shouted at it.

The thing ignored her and stepped forwards. “You must return to work,” it said completely calmly. There were only a few steps between them which it quickly closed.

“Alright, fine. This is on you!” Rose shouted and brought the chair leg down on its head.

The impact jarred her arms but didn’t seem to do much. Mark swayed back for a moment as a little blood flowed from its forehead. But it was only a moment before it was reaching for her again. With more determination this time Rose pulled back and swung at Mark's chest. She braced for a second impact and was thrown off again when it didn’t come.

Instead flesh gave way and its chest caved in on itself. Under the pale skin and a thin layer of muscle its body was empty. Rose flinched back and regained her grip to wrench the chair leg free. The creature's front came away with the sound of tearing cardboard and what was left fell to the floor.

Rose looked down at the bag of skin and tried to steady her breathing. Between the still growing buzz and her own heartbeat she could barely hear herself think. Things had gone from scary, to confusing, to terrifying and she needed a break. The thing shaped like a mimicking Mark didn’t look like it was getting back up. Since nothing seemed to be following her through the door she could hopefully take a moment to gather herself before anything else happened.

“Well done! That was an excellent first fight. Good instinct going for the attack. If you’re up for more, would you like to make a contract?”