The pounding at the door shattered the pre-dawn peace.

  Ember was off the bed in a heartbeat. Briar rolled onto her elbows, half-awake, her hands already reaching for the closest heavy object.

  Callie grabbed her jacket and rushed down the steps, crossing the narrow shop floor in five strides. She flung the bolt aside and opened the door.

  Theron was there, slumped against the doorframe, hair plastered to his forehead with blood and rain, armor splintered. He tried to speak, but only made a wet, rattling sound.

  “Help me,” he croaked, then pitched forward.

  She caught him under the arms, barely slowing his fall. Ember advanced, a single, warning snarl, but Callie snapped, “Back!” and the warg obeyed, teeth bared but unmoving.

  Briar was beside her, and together they half-dragged, half-carried Theron to the exam table. He left a small trail of blood on the floor. His leg jerked as they hoisted him up, the motion sending a jet of fresh blood arcing from a rent in the chainmail at his ribs.

  She tore open her kit with numb precision, rolled up his ruined tunic, and pressed linen to the worst of the wounds. Briar fetched water which Callie purified.

  For a moment, there was only the urgent work of triage—clearing the wound, finding any sources of bleeding and using [Mend Flesh] to heal any shallow lacerations; then binding with cord and cloth. Then, as Callie cut away the leather of his breastplate, her hand brushed his temple.

  The world stuttered.

  She was not in the shop. She was hurtling down a tunnel of stone, the air thick with the stink of mold and fear. Shadows danced on the walls—no, not shadows, but the shapes of men and women running, falling, dying.

  A flare of magic lit the corridor. In the flare she saw Thistledown; her hair silver in the dark, face set like steel.

  The a massive shadow blotted out everything. It surged across the wall, swallowing torchlight and bodies alike. Theron ran. Ran, not toward Thistledown, but away from her. The shadow seemed to chase him, inexorable, consuming all that dared linger. He stumbled, fell, screamed, but never stopped running.

  The vision snapped. Callie was back in the shop. Her hands were still on Theron’s head, her fingers sticky with blood and fear.

  “You left her,” she said, not recognizing her own voice. “You abandoned her.”

  Theron’s eyes flickered open. They were wild, rimmed with red. “I... ” he started, but his mouth filled with blood.

  Callie wiped it away with the back of her sleeve, fighting to keep her hands from shaking. “You ran,” she said, quieter now, and set to work cleaning the wound.

  He tried to sit up, failed, and coughed blood onto the floor. “It was... ” he gasped, “it was... ”

  “Don’t talk,” Callie said, concentrating on any remaining areas of bleeding.

  He grabbed her wrist, desperate. “Can you make me forget?” His voice broke on the last word. “Please. You said... you said there were herbs for memories. For dreams. I don’t care about the pain, just… take it away.”

  Callie shook her head. “That’s not how it works.” She threaded the needle, her vision blurring for a second. “There’s nothing for guilt.”

  Briar watched, silent, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Who did he leave?”

  Callie didn’t look up. “Thistledown.”

  She stitched the deep gash above his ribs, the suture pulling flesh together in neat, clinical lines. The bleeding slowed. The breathing steadied. But Theron didn’t relax. He stared at the ceiling, his face growing older by the minute.

  When she finished, she cleaned her hands, then poured a measure of willow-and-poppy tincture into a cup. “This will help with the pain,” she said, but Theron only stared.

  Briar stepped forward, eyes hard as flint. “Don’t come back,” she said, her voice cold and precise. “Not ever.”

  Theron tried to reply, but couldn’t. He swallowed the tincture in one gulp, then lurched to his feet, ignoring the fresh red on his tunic. He didn’t thank them. He didn’t look back.

  Ember watched him go, tail still and low. As the door closed, the warg padded over to where Theron had bled on the floor, sniffed the stain, and then, in a gesture which was almost human, nudged the place where Theron’s hand had rested on the table. He let out a soft, mournful sound, then walked to Callie’s side and pressed his head against her hip.

  Callie sank to the floor, her back to the counter. She wiped her hands, then her eyes.

  Briar knelt next to her, wordless. “I knew… know Thistledown, you know. She used to help out in the village. I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe he didn’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” Callie said, but the words rang hollow.

  The sun was just beginning to rise, painting the fog outside with streaks of copper and gold.

  Inside, the shop smelled of blood, old pain, and the sweet, medicinal tang of willow.

  Ember lay down at her feet, head in her lap, eyes closed. Callie stroked his fur, her fingers searching for comfort in the thick, living warmth.

  They sat like that for a long time, neither speaking, each lost in their own inventory of wounds.

  ***

  The shop had barely begun to smell like itself again when the next summons arrived.

  It came not by knock, but by a sharp rap at the window: a small, harried figure in the blue sash of the Healer’s Guild. Callie met the runner’s gaze, read the urgency, and nodded once. Briar sighed, already packing some emergency supplies.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Ember was the first out the door, moving with new purpose. Callie followed, the runner keeping a respectful half-step ahead. Even the crows circling the rooftops seemed to sense disaster and were circling lower than usual.

  They reached the Adventurer’s Guild before most of the town was even awake.

  Inside, chaos had colonized the space. Every inch of floor was crowded with the wounded; some on makeshift pallets, others slumped against the wall, still in their dented mail or stained surcoats. The hall stank of metallic blood, healing salves, and unwashed bodies.

  Most of the beds were already full, but a new arrival was being carried in as Callie entered: a woman with half her face torn away, clutching a tourniquet around her own thigh. Over it all was the persistent, sour tang of disinfectant, applied in desperate, uneven sloshes by exhausted apprentices.

  Callie had seen mass casualty events before in her previous life. This was slightly different, a bit more violent, but the protocol was the same—triage effectively and work on the most severely wounded with the best chance of survival. Those on death’s door and the walking wounded would have to wait. She set to work without being told what to do.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone in charge.

  At the room’s center, on a platform meant for victory speeches, sat a man who could only be a berserker.

  His chest was bare except for the bindings that covered what remained of his left arm; sawn off at the upper arm, the stump still leaking through the linen. His skin was a color that suggested he should be unconscious, but his eyes burned with a hot, almost pleasurable violence.

  A half-circle of battered adventurers, all levels and types, gathered around him. Many wept openly. A few, too fresh from the carnage to process, just stared at the wall.

  “Tell us what happened, Artair,” said a bystander, too befuddled to do anything useful.

  Artair had looked up when Callie entered, his gaze sweeping over her, then dismissing her as another background detail. He raised his right arm—the one that still worked—and the crowd silenced.

  “Listen up,” he said, voice hoarse from shouting or pain. “Some of you were in the first wave. Some came after. If you know the story, listen again. If you don’t, listen harder.”

  He scanned the room, daring anyone to look away.

  “We left for the Archive at dawn, all fifteen parties. Seventy strong, not counting the support and porters. We had the best mapping crew in the district, three A-ranked mages, and at least two dozen who’d survived a C-class dungeon.”

  “We expected resistance, but not this.” He paused, voice trembling. “The entrance was ordinary. More than ordinary: dull, easy. First room was a reading chamber, stacked with books, no traps. The mapping crew marked a straight shot down the main corridor, only a handful of branches.”

  A hand went up in the back. “The archivists said it was safe. Said they’d never lost more than a pageboy.”

  Artair spat. “The archivists lied. Or maybe it changed when we got there.” He gripped the edge of the podium, knuckles white. “We made it fifty meters in, then everything went to hell. The corridor opened into a vault that shouldn’t fit inside the building—ten, twenty, maybe a hundred times bigger than the outside.”

  Another voice: “Dimensional overlay. Like the Ink Maze last year.”

  “No,” Artair growled. “Worse. The maze at least had an exit. This... this was a trap, built to kill us slow.”

  The air in the hall thickened. Even the wounded stopped groaning, the pain irrelevant compared to the story.

  “They waited for us to bunch up, then slammed the doors. Locked us in, killed the lamps, cut off all return. The first casualties were from arrows—Kobold archers, hundreds of them, firing from every shadow. We tried to push forward, but the floor split. Maybe a third fell into a pit, the rest got caught by Lamia, Liches, Plague Bearers.”

  He looked at the stump of his arm, then back at the crowd. “We lost thirty in the first twenty minutes.”

  A healer, passing by with a tray of bandages, muttered, “That can’t be right.”

  Artair fixed him with a stare. “You weren’t there.”

  Silence again, except for the distant sound of someone retching.

  “We formed ranks. Pushed deeper, because what else can you do? The center of the vault was… wrong. Like the air was thick, too hot, every breath making your bones shake. There were more monsters, but they didn’t attack head-on. They picked at the edges, dragged the wounded off.”

  One of the survivors, a woman with a shredded arm in a sling, whispered, “Someone managed to pull me out.”

  Artair ignored her. “Near the end, we reached the main chamber. It was smaller, round, walls made of black glass, every inch carved with runes. There were stacks of books lining the walls, some of them moving. But the worst was what was in the center.”

  He closed his eyes, the first sign of weakness. “A shadow. At first, we thought it was a trick of the light. But it moved. It—” He broke off, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It ate the dead. Not like a beast, but… like a hole in the world. You’d see someone fall, and their body would dissolve, bones and all.”

  A young man, face bandaged, asked, “How did you escape?”

  Artair’s eyes snapped open. “I didn’t. Not really. I was half-dead already. The thing ignored me, passed right by. Maybe it knew I wasn’t worth finishing off.” His mouth twisted. “The lucky ones died fighting. The rest—well, you’ll see when the rescue teams go in.”

  He looked at Callie. “They’ll need a lot of healers,” he said, and laughed. “But don’t count on any of them coming out whole.”

  The crowd, shaken to silence, began to disperse. Some drifted to the beds, others slumped to the floor. A few started to drink, even this early.

  Callie moved through the wounded, offering what care she could. Each survivor told a different version: some remembered the walls bleeding, some heard voices in the dark, others saw nothing at all. But all agreed on one thing: nothing in the Archive was as it seemed.

  And whatever lived there had decided, finally, to be hungry.

  ***

  After an hour, once the work was done, Callie tried to slip out.

  She knew exactly what was coming next—she had seen the exact same narrative play out in hundreds of other lives in the liminal Library. And Belus had promised her a “staycation”—eight full weeks before she had to run off to save the world.

  But the Guild leader, Thom, a barrel-chested ex-mage with a talent for paperwork, caught her at the door.

  “Healer Calanthe,” he said, “I need you to stay.”

  She forced a smile and lied. “I’m Level 20. Too weak for dungeon crawling.”

  Thom’s face was grave. “You’re not being asked, you’re being assigned. This is your second mission for the Healer’s Guild.” He lowered his voice. “The rescue teams are assembling now. Five parties. Each is supposed to have a dedicated healer. You’re the only one the Guild can spare.”

  “They have dozens... ”

  “Not anymore.” Thom’s jaw clenched. “Three of ours are still in the Archive. Three guild members are dead. Five more are needed here for triage and treatment. You’re the only one not actively bleeding or unconscious.”

  Callie almost laughed, then remembered how many times she’d dodged the system’s plans.

  She looked past Thom, through the open door to where Ember waited, his head low and his ears flat against his skull. She saw Briar too, arms crossed, watching with an expression that was all worry and none of the usual stubborn.

  “Fine,” Callie said. “I’ll do it.”

  Thom nodded, relieved, then thrust a large backpack into her arms. “Supply pack. Rations, healing kits. The porters will carry most of it. Use them wisely.”

  Callie noted the distinct lack of any resurrection scrolls. She guessed they weren’t in fashion in this world. She took the backpack, already feeling the invisible threads closing around her.

  On the walk home, Ember stayed close, brushing her hand with his snout at every step. Briar fell in beside her, silent for several blocks.

  At the shop, Callie dropped her personal supply pack on the counter and slumped onto the nearest stool. She put her head down and let the noise of the town fade into nothing.

  “Briar,” Callie said, finally, “if I don’t come back... ”

  “You will,” Briar said, voice flat but unshakable.

  Just a few weeks back, she would have thought of dying as just an opportunity to return to the Library to scold Belus and tell him, “I told you so.” But now she had something new to lose.

  Callie reached out, found Briar’s hand, and squeezed it.

  For a long moment, the shop felt like it had the day before; warm, golden, safe.

  But outside, the crows circled closer, and the world made ready to feed.