Thankfully, being alone with my thoughts and dreams had been normal for all my life, so I didn't think much about what had just happened. In fact, my conscious mind was already back to probing Mes for more information when an embarrassed-looking angel finally scooted back into view.

  "Right, sorry about that. Shouldn't have presumed." I suspected Wera's mind might be just a bit as frazzled as my own. Taking a few more steps into the room, she soon came closer than during our first encounter.

  As she approached, I once more felt the power shedding off her. It felt lifeless and melancholic, like food dissolving into ash in my mouth. And yet, I could feel it reach out to me with a life of its own. It was the same way my own soul had reacted when she had opened the door. Instinctively, the power coming off my mind closed in and resonated with her own soul. Wera must have also noticed the wordless exchange, my soul touching hers, and hers brushing against mine. Both reacted with unexpected familiarity. Unlike me, she seemed to recognise what exactly the connection meant, though, as her face lit up with a new idea.

  "Wait, we have the same affinity? That's great, then I can just-" Not finishing her sentence, Wera instead closed the distance before us entirely. Her wings spread out, and I saw some of them start to emit light. Dimly at first and in the same gray as everything else around here. After another second, though, I saw them for the very first time. Colors. Her feathers were shining in all the different hues of a rainbow. The light pulsed and pushed into the room, and after a moment, into me as well. For some reason, I expected it to feel nice. Instead, my subconscious started to scream out in horror. As the light started to push my dreams away, they knew this was everything they had ever warned me about.

  My thoughts had often hoped for this to happen. The moment my mind would be made up solely of clear, coherent rationale. They thought they would be celebrating. Instead, they panicked alongside their partner. The only companionship they had ever known was being burnt away before my very eyes. Not even Mes had any comparison to pull on as the library wordlessly watched on, documenting the destruction of my mind. Worse of all, though, was my subconscious reaction. Although it had been my thoughts that had reached out to the angel, the other part of my mind wasn't angry at this outcome. For as long as I could remember, my dreams had tried to protect me, not letting the outside world in or the secrets hidden inside out. Now they only gave one last warning to my thoughts. A promise not to look at the core of the library, lest it break me even more.

  However, through the dissolving body of its friend, my consciousness had already glimpsed the heart of darkness. My memories laid bare to my thoughts without filter or restraint. At the very center of it all was her. I was so happy to remember her again, the way she smiled at me when I cooked her food, how she had tried to hide her tears when our parents died, the determination that she carried herself with later in life. And then it all came crashing down. Suddenly, all I could remember about her was the terrible fate and undeserved death that had befallen her. Worse of all, though, was the knowledge that came along with it. It had all been my fault. The wound in my mind split open at the delicate seams I had crafted over the centuries, the lifeless gray of my own soul seeping into my mind once more.

  Before Wera's spell could completely destroy my soul, she stopped. My thoughts were scared, my memories scarred, and my subconscious was barely clinging onto its own existence. "Ooh, gods! Oh, no, no, no... I'm so sorry. Oh, the boss is so gonna kill me again when she finds this. I-I'm so sorry. I don't- This... usually doesn't happen. Oh, why did I just cast without thinking again?"

  My thoughts barely registered her rambling. The word 'boss' carried some strange connotations, but I didn't have the energy to analyse it much. I just wanted to be left alone. I had been content in the void. Why did this angel have to make me remember? The remains of my subconscious simply exclaimed that I shouldn't have looked. That this was all they had ever warned me about. My thoughts didn't have it in them to argue back. They had always been curious, always looking for new knowledge, and now someone else had gotten burned for it again.

  The angel probably wasn't even aware of the change she had caused inside my soul. The delicate balance she had just broken without even realising. In response to my sudden silence, she blurted out a few more sentences of apology, reassurance, and panic. The words she used tried to embed themselves into my thoughts, but my mind didn't give them a foothold. The foreign intrusions simply slid out as if they had never been real to begin with. I wished they hadn't. How I wished my broken consciousness could have at least been right about that one thing.

  After a few seconds, the light of Wera's spell had once more been drained from the environment. The brief moment of life was drowned out in an endless sea of gray. I was glad for it. Once upon a time, I might have called the magic beautiful. The way the colors had refracted off her wings and the patterns played across her soft feathers. Now I hoped I would never see it again. Eventually, the angel calmed down a bit as well. I wasn't sure how exactly I must have looked from her perspective. Was I a lost soul she wanted to shepherd away? A broken mind she intended to fix? Maybe she would just go away again. Leave me behind to suffer after the damage she had inadvertently caused. Just like I had done all too often.

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  Against my expectations, Wera instead approached me again. Operating on pure instinct, I tried to get away, to move even an inch from the being that had just hurt me more profoundly than anyone who wasn't myself had done before. Unfortunately, this whole situation had started because that was the one thing I couldn't do. Even worse, the only protection I had possessed had just been stripped away as well. My thoughts braced for the pain to come. Maybe this time, my conscious mind would be the one to get burned away. All that would remain of my soul would be a mess of incoherent memories, or maybe they would be the ones to get destroyed instead. Part of my mind would have been okay with either. A broken library spewing out contextless memories or a bundle of thoughts that could never retain anything.

  Contrary to my expectations, Wera opened her wings and put them around my being. It wasn't comforting per se, my soul brushing against her body, but it didn't exactly hurt either. The sensation simply was. Like putting your hand against a wall or standing on a floor. For a moment, I thought about hurting her. Lashing out at the being that violated me so much in such a short amount of time. I didn't have it in me to do so. I had never wanted to hurt anyone, not Wera, not my sister, nor our parents. Still, I somehow always did. That's why my subconscious had been so insistent that I don't interact with anything.

  Thankfully, the angel didn't cast any more spells. Instead, her wings formed a protective layer between the outside world and me. For a moment, I laughed at the fact that she was doing the exact thing my dreams had tried to do since I woke up. Then I remembered they were still there, shattered, burnt, and bleeding into my soul. Suddenly, Wera started to move. I expected to be left behind again, to slip through her feathers and stay in the lifeless void. Instead, the contact of our souls pushed me along. It was the bumpiest ride I had ever been on. Every step Wera took, I halted for a moment before the wall at my back pushed me forward again. Soon enough, we had cleared the room and were marching down the corridor I had glimpsed before.

  Doors. There must have been hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. All looked the same as the one leading to my room. Gray, featureless indents in the wall. I wasn't exactly sure how Wera had managed to open mine up in the first place. Maybe she had cast another spell, maybe her soul had simply pushed them along like she now did with me. I didn't know where we were headed. There was no signage, guidelines, or lighting of any kind to differentiate one set of doors from another. How had Wera even found me in this endless monotony? Maybe the better question was if she had even been looking for me. The surprise upon first seeing me hinted at no. It might have been pure coincidence that we ran into one another. How long had I even been in the room to begin with?

  Eventually, I noticed a difference in the never-ending rows of doors. A blot of... color? Part of me wanted to say yes, there were colors off in the distance. Another said they were the same lifeless gray as everything else around. Both of them were right, yet neither conveyed reality. As we came closer, I realised the color originated from yet another set of doors, but these were different. Instead of indistinguishable blocks set into the plain wall, these doors had actual texture. There were accessories set into the frame, a strange progress indicator above, and a... gate between the actual door and our side. After a moment of analysing the sight, my memories pinged to answer my unspoken question. I was looking at an elevator, and an ancient one at that.

  Wera didn't seem surprised by the out-of-place machinery as she quickly slid the gate aside. For a moment, she awkwardly scooted her wings into the cage and pressed a few buttons with her feet. Afterwards, she made sure I was supported from below as the lift started to move up. Just like her spoken words earlier, I could somehow translate the alien letters I saw on the controls. Unlike back then, the meaning this time around was far less interesting. The first two rows of buttons were simply labeled as one through twelve, the last only had two buttons: go and stop. What caught me off guard, though, was the analog progress dial above the exit. According to the display, we were somewhere at the very bottom of an estimated five hundred or so levels. For a moment, I thought the dial was simply wrong as it shot up alarmingly fast. One glance outside the elevator disproved that thought. Beyond the metal box, I saw one floor after the other rush past. For a moment, I wondered how Wera withstood that sudden force, but if anything, the angel looked as if she was about to keel over from exhaustion.

  With every floor we ascended, the surroundings got more colorful yet also remained sterile gray. I wasn't sure how to describe it. A gray film of liquid over a window, or as if the hues of life were simply a reflection on this monotone world. Every time I looked closer at a spot I had been sure was one color, it got drained of life and a new one appeared in my periphery. At least until I glanced at that one instead. The only exception to that slow process of coloration was Wera. The angel had been gray when I first saw her and had returned to that state after her spell had run out. Her wings stayed gray, her skin remained lifeless, and I could have mistaken her feathers for delicate stone sculptures if they didn't occasionally move under my weight.

  No words were spoken as we ascended. The lift simply reached level sixty-something and came to an abrupt stop that was somehow perfectly smooth. Not even the wings holding onto my soul seemed affected by the shift in inertia. As we exited the elevator, I quickly noticed that this level was different. There weren't as many doors lining the corridor, and each one of them had just a touch of individuality. Not enough to say they were entirely different, but it was leagues apart from the gray blocks where I had woken up in. My guide, though, didn't pay any attention to those differences as she stared at one indent in particular with growing horror. That particular door was pushed open just a sliver of a millimeter. Nowhere near enough to glimpse inside, but still sufficient for my soul to feel its way in. There was a presence inside. Just like with Wera, I could feel it without seeing, and again, a part of my existence resonated with what it found.

  "Oh shit! It's my boss."