I opened my eyes, feeling fairly certain that a book or several had fallen on my head during the Shuffling. It was as if my skull had grown twice as big and its weight increased at least tenfold. Nevertheless, my sanity remained intact and so when my eyes confirmed that I was indeed still inside the library, I did my best to get up and shake this uncomfortable feeling.

"Guys...?" I mumbled, my voice coming out coarse and rough. I grabbed onto a nearby shelf and used it to help myself up on my feet again.

A quick glance around the place did not make my worries any weaker. Quite the opposite actually. The room in its very essence was what pretty much any person would label as a library. It was a relatively small and cosy space with tall bookshelves filled to the brim and with a walkway slightly higher up, working as somewhat of a second floor to this area. There were only two oddities that ruined the idyllic feeling of the place. One of them was the presence of a massive empty terrarium covering pretty much the entire single wall. I was not sure if it was supposed to be like that, or if its inhabitant managed to escape, in which case my mind wondered how big would the creature be to require such a large living quarter.

The second oddity, however, was even more concerning. Although the place seemed nice in the initial concept, its current state was simply awful to look at. Books were scattered across the floor, and some of the bookshelves were ripped out of the walls and tossed around, even blocking one of the exits. The detective part of my brain came to the conclusion that something had escaped from here and caused a whole lot of havoc on its way out.

A faint groan came from one of the book piles and I almost began climbing the shelves in fear, before I noticed a very human hand reaching out from the mound. Without a second to waste, I rushed over and helped my friend up.

"Amy? You alright, pal?" I asked.

"Yeah... Ugh, I didn't feel this weird since I tried alcohol that one time."

"It should get better. I also felt quite worse when I came to."

"Guys...?" We heard another voice coming from the walkway above us. We both turned towards it and saw Corwyn leaning against the railing. "Where the hell are we?" he asked.

"Somewhere in the library. Whoa. Eliot, did you make all this mess?" Amy asked.

"Haha, real funny. You think I have the strength to just toss bookshelves around? No, I think something must've escaped from the–"

"Hello?!" Rogier's calling interrupted me. "Are you there?!"

"Rogier? Where are you?" I called back.

"How the fuck am I supposed to know?! Where are you?"

I did my best to follow his voice. It was coming from one of the hallways leading outside but was seemingly blocked by countless fallen and misplaced bookshelves. I had to crawl and climb my way through them before I finally spotted Rogier. He was hanging upside down from one of the bookshelves by his ankle, which was trapped between two heavy pieces of furniture.

"Oh my god, Rogier!" I called out and crawled over to him as quickly as I could.

"Yeah, not the best position to be in. Blood has been rushing into my head like crazy. Be so kind and just lift that fucking thing off my leg, okay?"

I nodded and began making my way up to the top of the furniture pile, but my heart was racing with unease. Something was telling me that he truly got the shortest straw of the four of us, and I wasn't sure if he hadn't suffered any serious injuries. With all the strength I had, I tried my best to lift up what looked like a wardrobe that was keeping him trapped. To call that thing heavy would be an understatement. It took all my strength just to move it up a couple of centimetres. Fortunately, it seemed just enough to allow Rogier's leg to slip free as he fell to the ground with a loud thud.

"Are you okay?" I asked him and let go of the wardrobe.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," he assured me, but when my eyes slid over to his leg, which had previously been trapped under the rubble, my stomach turned. His ankle was facing a completely wrong way.

"Dude, your leg!" I exclaimed, unsure what to do.

"It's fine, let's just get out of here," he said as if nothing had happened and began crawling his way through the tiny gaps in the barricaded hallway and back into the messy library room.

"Are you both in one piece?" Amy asked the moment we emerged.

"Yeah, I just got stuck," Rogier said and let out a sigh of relief. "Just give me a moment. Hanging upside down for so long really makes you feel dizzy," he said and rolled onto his back.

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

"Oh, god, Rogier!" Amy gasped and pointed to his ankle, now snapped about ninety degrees to the side.

"Shit..." Corwyn said and from the sudden swivel of his legs, I came to the conclusion that the sight was not making him feel too well.

"Hey, hey, easy pal!" I said as I quickly grabbed him, helping him stay upright. "You okay?"

"Y-Yeah. But he's not!"

"Rogier, I should have something for pain in here, don't worry," Amy reassured him and dropped her backpack onto the ground.

"Don't worry, I've got this," the hunter replied and sat up. He grabbed his ankle with both hands and with a sharp movement, snapped it back into its original place.

Now it didn't matter whether I was supporting Corwyn or not. The sight of something like that floored us both. Fortunately, the pile of books behind us cushioned our fall.

"Wusses," Rogier replied.

Meanwhile, Amy stood there, stunned by his actions, before she finally managed to push a few words out of her mouth. "Are you crazy?!"

"What? It's fine? See?" Rogier smiled and moved his foot in circles to show he hadn't lost any mobility.

"Fine?! That's not fine! That's most likely fractured!"

"Oh... Nah, It's not," He pulled his foot closer to him and quickly rolled up the leg of his trousers. We all stared in awe at the metal prosthetic.

"You're missing a leg?" Corwyn asked, the worries having disappeared from his voice.

"Nah, it's still my leg. I think."

"That makes no sense," I said, scratching my head. "Unless you were born with a metal one."

"Of course, I wasn't born with it! But I have no idea how I actually got it. All I know is that I have it because of that fucking university you all wish to work for."

We all exchanged confused looks and Corwyn and I finally stood up again.

"I was left for dead, you know? When I went on... I think my seventeenth expedition? I worked for the uni, just like everyone else. We got attacked in the last few minutes before the Shuffling. Got hit by an axe-welding guardian. The dude got me good. Cut right into the shin bone. The Shuffling was about to come and they knew that helping me walk all the way to the middle section would mean they wouldn't make it out in time, so they left me behind. Then the Shuffling happened, along with everything that comes with it. The colours, the shaking, the unconsciousness. When I woke up, I was lost in the library, but my leg was healed. Or rather, it was replaced with the mechanical one."

"So someone helped you while you were out?" Amy asked.

"I'm not sure. It's weird though. Eventually, I ran into another group of delvers and got rescued. The medics did some tests and that leg is not just any old prosthetic. It's like it had woven itself into my body. Becoming part of it."

Corwyn's eyes widened as the words reminded him a bit of his own situation. "It's an artefact?"

"Yeah. Or at least it behaves like one. But I have yet to find some supernatural powers of it. Guess the ability to control it like it's my own is supernatural enough though. So here you have it. That's why this is not such a big deal. And it's also a big fucking reason not to go work for the university. Become independent. Like me."

"Yeah, easy for you to say. We can't afford our own equipment," I reminded him.

"Neither can I. I stole this off of a corpse of a dead delver a long time ago. You make do."

"G-Guys?" Corwyn grabbed our attention.

"Yeah?" We all turned to him.

"H-Have you seen the plaque there?" he said and pointed to one of the bookshelves. My heart skipped a beat as I read the text carved into a small wooden sign - floor 257.

"Hey, that can't be real, right? We would have surely died if we went this deep," I said.

"Nah, this is possible. The Shuffling negates the effects of going deeper, so nothing bad happens to us. It could've thrown us anywhere. Be glad we didn't end up at a much higher number. Though you are still not used to descending, so at this point on, we can't go deeper at any cost. You would most likely melt into a puddle of blood after five steps. I mean, except for Mr Prodigy over there," Rogier explained and gestured at Corwyn.

"So we just find stairs and go up, no?" Amy offered the most logical conclusion. "Sure, it will be one hell of a climb, but we might be able to make it before the next Shuffling."

"Oh yeah? Then tell me, genius, which way towards the centre room?" Rogier smirked.

Amy looked over the possible exits. One of them was sealed off, and the other two led into various corridors. There was nothing that would indicate which way was the right one.

"Umm..." she mumbled after a while.

"Don't bother, kid. We can't find the centre. We are too far."

"Well, this just looks like a Glassroom of sorts, no? Maybe if we just try one of the corridors, we would eventually find some of the circular hallways. From the curvature of the walls, we could then easily tell which way the centre is."

"I applaud your thinking, but no, it doesn't work like that. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?" he asked and sat down. Amy quickly reached into her backpack and to no surprise for either of us, she pulled out exactly what he had asked for.

"This is the centre room," Rogier said and drew a circle. "From it, you've got four passageways, evenly spread out." He added four lines. "Then, you've got the circular corridor, as you just said." Another circle joined the lines, connecting their ends. "Here, we've got lots of different Glassrooms," he continued and made another concentric ring. "If we keep going away from the centre, the pattern repeats, beyond the Glassrooms, there's another circular corridor, then even more Glassrooms and that kind of pattern repeats once more. Beyond the third set of glassrooms though, is chaos. Corridors connecting rooms much like this one. It is not known how far this section reaches, but finding a way towards the centre from here becomes more than complicated."

Amy glanced over the drawing again. "Okay, so what idea do you have? Just wait here to be rescued?"

"Not really. We'll just wait until the next Shuffling and hope it'll spit us out somewhere closer to the middle. Before that, we need to look around for anything that might help us. Food, water, anything to defend ourselves with, etc."

"Food and water? How long do you think we'll stay here?" I asked, slightly worried about his sudden survivalist planning.

"When I got lost, I stayed here for nine days. I doubt any of you have rations for that long. We'll go look into some other rooms for supplies and when the Shuffling comes... well, gods help us."