The Neitherlands always felt like the lobby of a dying insurance firm, despite the fact that it housed the collective memory of every sentient soul in existence.
As Kai stepped through the portal into the Great Library, he couldn't help but marvel at the sheer boredom of the place. 'Imagine it,' he thought, a small, dangerous smile playing on his lips. 'A place with all the records, all the secrets, and all the spoilers of the multiverse, and yet it manages to be one of the most uninteresting places in the infinite sprawl. It's a graveyard for stories that haven't ended yet.'
He walked with a leisurely and grace toward the main desk, his boots clicking rhythmically on the cold stone floor. Zelda sat there, hunched over a mountain of parchment, meticulously cross-referencing notes about missing volumes. A harried-looking Traveler stumbled in from a side door, dropped a soot-stained ledger onto the desk without a word, and vanished back into the stacks before the dust could even settle.
Kai leaned against the edge of the desk, casting a shadow over Zelda's ledger. "You look as beautiful as ever, Zelda. The candlelight really brings out the... bureaucratic exhaustion in your eyes."
Zelda looked up, her spectacles reflecting the dim, light of the room, she didn't flinch as she regarded him, "Mr. Malachai. To what do we owe the pleasure of your... uninvited presence?"
"Oh, please. 'Mr. Malachai' sounds like I'm about to audit your taxes," Kai smirked, his voice dripping with amusement "I prefer Kai. It's short, punchy, and easier to scream when things inevitably go sideways."
He paused, tilting his head. "I fail to understand something, so help me out here. Why do you need to hire out more Travelers for your little errands when you've already got a perfectly good one under contract? Isn't one Penny Adiyodi enough for your soul-crushing filing system?"
Zelda sighed, setting her quill down. "Travelers are a rare commodity, Kai. There are thousands, no millions of books scattered across the multiverse that need to be collected, cataloged, and slotted back in."
"Is that why you set my friends up with that little quest you gave Penny?" Kai's tone was light, almost harmless, like a soft breeze before a hurricane.
Zelda blinked, her expression looked like a mask of practiced innocence. "A quest? I'm afraid I don't follow."
Kai let out a sharp, genuine laugh that echoed through the hollow hall. "Come now, Zelda. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. The wide-eyed innocence doesn't suit you; it clashes with the librarian aesthetic."
He pushed off the desk and began to wander, his hand trailing along a nearby shelf. He plucked a book at random, a heavy, red-bound volume titled The Thermodynamics of Siphoned Divinity and began to flip through the pages with a bored expression.
"You gave him a book of fairy tales about seven little keys," Kai said, his voice dropping an octave as he turned back to her. "Keys that just happen to lead to the one place in the universe that can bypass the Plumbers. You didn't give him a future, Zelda. You gave him a roadmap to the apocalypse, hoping he'd be the one to light the fuse so you wouldn't have to get your hands dirty."
He slammed the book shut, the sound like a gunshot in the silent room. "But here's the thing about maps. They only work if you know who's actually driving the car."
Kai turned back to her, leaning his hip against the mahogany desk as Zelda continued her defense.
"I only rewarded Mr. Adiyodi as the deal implied," Zelda said, her voice steady despite the intensity radiating off him. "Penny performed a service for the Library, and in return, he received a volume of significant historical value. That is the nature of our contracts."
Kai let out a sharp, mocking laugh that cut through the silence of the stacks. "And you just happened to decide that his reward should be the literal instruction manual for the Seven Keys? The only things capable of bringing back the one thing the Library is currently starving for? Wow." He wiped a fake tear from his eye. "The convenience is just staggering. I should've known. You lot love to 'take advantage' of a situation like a vulture loves a fresh carcass."
"Nonsense," Zelda said, her composure finally beginning to fray at the edges. "The Library does no such thing. We are observers. We catalog. We do not interfere."
"Really?" Kai's eyes flashed a dangerous look "And yet, you sent Penny on a suicide mission to the edge of the world to bring back the spark. Normally, I'd be amused. I might even bring popcorn and watch the show. But here's the problem, Zelda: this little quest of yours places my people in the immediate vicinity of the Nameless Brother, the charming other half of the Nameless Sister."
Zelda's breath hitched and her eyes flickered toward a row of scrolls before she recovered. "I have no idea what you are talking about. I gave a Traveler his reward. Nothing more."
"Oh, but I think you do," Kai purred, stepping into her personal space. "Let me tell you a story, Zelda. It's one of my favorites because it highlights just how opportunistic and dare I say thieving you people are."
"Once upon a time, long ago, before the Library was just a bunch of dusty snobs when four very skilled, very ambitious Librarians decided they wanted a promotion. They found the Nameless Sister, and with the help of a grumpy old Librarian known as the Binder, they decided to play surgeon. They divided her up, Zelda. They carved her power into four stone organs."
He held up four fingers, ticking them off one by one.
"Each organ was a little battery of pure, god-tier magic. And because sharing is hard, they each tucked one inside their own bodies. Poof! Instant divinity. They weren't Librarians anymore; they were Iris, Bacchus, Aengus, and Heka. From filing books to qruling planes, qtalk about a career jump, right?"
He leaned over her desk again, his face inches from hers.
"But there was a catch. The new 'Gods' were terrified of the Binder. Because the guy who puts a toy together usually knows how to take it apart, and he was the only one who could turn them back into boring, mortal humans. So, what do the new Gods do? They thank him? Give him a pension?" Kai asked before continuing. "Nope. They cursed him into a book and hid him away so no one could ever find the 'off' switch for their immortality. They turned their coworker into a paperback."
He tapped the desk rhythmically. "So, tell me, Zelda... is that where your 'Quest' is really heading? Are you looking for the keys to the kingdom, or are you just trying to clean up a very old, very bloody mess left by your predecessors?"
"That is... an interesting piece of folklore, Kai," she said, her voice starting to feel strained but somehow still being professional, "But I assure you, that isn't how we operate. The Library is a foundation of order, not a conspiracy of—"
Before she could finish the word, In a blur of motion that defied the laws of physics, Kai vamp-sped across the room. His hands slammed onto the desk cracking it in half, leaning in until his face was inches from hers. The charming, sarcastic boy was gone. In his place was a predator, his skin developed veins that spiderwebbed and looked dark and hungry beneath his eyes, and his fangs crested over his lower lip.
"I am not in the mood for nonsense, Zelda," he hissed, to drive the point home, Kai didn't just display his face; he released a pulse of raw, unfiltered magic. It wasn't a spell; it was a physical weight. The Librarians and Travelers who had been rushing toward the desk to intervene were suddenly slammed into the floor. The sound of dozens of bodies hitting the stone at once echoed like a gavel, they stayed down, pinned by a crushing gravity that made it impossible to breathe.
"You see, unlike those self-absorbed, self-serving ingrates you call gods, I am a being of my own right," Kai said, "I am the architect of my own power. And I will not tolerate me or mine being messed with by a bunch of librarians with too much ambition and not enough sense."
He stood up straight, his vampire features receding but the threat remaining.
"This is your one and only warning, Zelda. Do you understand?"
Zelda, her face white and her breath coming in shallow gasps, managed a stiff nod. "Of course... Outsider."
Kai didn't even blink at the title. It didn't surprise him. He knew he wasn't in any of their precious books; he was a glitch in the 40th sequence, a variable they couldn't account for. He was the one page they couldn't read.
He turned to walk away, his boots clicking once more on the stone as the crushing weight on the floor lifted. The librarians gasped for air, scrambling away from his path like mice.
"Oh, and one more thing," Kai added over his shoulder. "Be sure to inform your Head of Circulation that he should tread very, very carefully. To become a god is a tribulation, the likes of which he cannot imagine. And if he tries? That tribulation will be personally blessed upon him... by me."
With a sudden, silent ripple in the air, Kai vanished.
Zelda stood frozen for a long time, her hands shaking as she reached for her spectacles. She looked at the empty space where he had been, her voice a terrified thread of sound.
"Everett?"