William stumbled, bleeding from one ear where the sonic backlash hit him. He clutched a fresh spell between his claws, but his hands were shaking now, his wards slower to form. His logic was cracking under the sheer, unreasonable weight of my fury. He could have retreated, he should have, but the ingrained duty of his station, the absolute belief in the Library's authority, kept him rooted. Instead, he stepped forward into the maelstrom I'd created. His tiny frame straightened, wings snapping out wide, catching the chaotic light. His glasses fell away, landing in the dust and ash like broken punctuation, unnoticed. His robes lifted with invisible wind, scorched and tattered at the hem and edges. He began to speak, not in Draconic this time, but in a language far older, resonant with power that felt foundational. The runes around him didn't flare—they knelt, acknowledging a deeper authority. Pages twisted midair, books slammed shut across the chamber. The ground beneath us leveled momentarily, fractures sealing themselves, only to shimmer with something deeper, more profound. Authority made manifest.

  His voice was layered with dozens of tones—not echoes, but precedent, generations of Librarian voices speaking through one mouth. "Article Nine," he intoned, the words hitting like physical blows, "Clause of Silence." The world went utterly still. The imposed silence was absolute, crushing even the crackle of fire, the howl of the Boon, the frantic beat of my own heart. I opened my mouth to breathe, to growl, to scream—and nothing emerged. Sound itself had been forbidden. A second spell bloomed beneath me without a sound; the floor peeled open metaphysically, flipping the rules of gravity within a localized field. I hit the ground knees-first, air knocked from my lungs, unable to stand. The Boon snarled in silent protest inside my ribs. I tried to rise, but my limbs wouldn't move right; the rules had literally changed around me. My body no longer made sense inside this specific magic—arms suddenly too heavy, legs too long, weight shifted impossibly.

  William walked toward me, glowing faintly with golden logic, his expression not smug, but radiating cold, righteous fury. "You think you’re the first wild thing to claw its way into this place?" his voice boomed inside my head, bypassing the silence entirely, a direct psychic transmission. "The first cursed vessel that thought hunger made it special? You're not special. You're not powerful. You’re unbound. That makes you a risk. And risks," his mental voice hardened, "are to be contained." He raised both hands, claws glowing fiercely with enforcement runes. A massive, circular contract glyph appeared above me—intricate, binding, complete, absolute—and began its slow, inexorable descent.

  [Ohhh,] Malice’s voice purred directly into my mind, low and gleeful despite the crushing silence. [He’s gonna put you in a cage. He thinks he can trap you. Isn't that just adorable?]

  The glyph touched my forehead, cold and heavy as judgment. The Boon exploded inward, not attacking the spell, but recoiling from the sheer presumption of it. Something ancient inside me, something tied to the core of the hunger, shrieked in outrage as the glyph tried to impose definition, limitation. The hunger coiled, flared, and then answered not with force, but with rejection. The cage shattered mid-descent, golden pieces flying outward in every direction like shrapnel. They sliced through William’s robes, grazed his cheek, drawing a thin line of blue-black blood. He stumbled back, shock momentarily overriding his fury. His silence ward faltered under the psychic backlash, and sound slammed back into the world with a deafening physical crack.

  I rose, power dripping from me like blood, the air shimmering around my form. My ribs felt like they were distending under the pressure, my vision was tinted red, and my breath rattled with voices that weren't entirely mine. William’s eyes went wide. For the first time, genuine, unadulterated fear flickered there. I tasted it on the air like burnt sugar and ash—not just fear of death, but fear of me, of what I was becoming. The glyph pieces still spun around us like shards of frozen golden lightning, one embedding itself point-first in the cracked marble beside my foot. I didn't flinch.

  The Boon surged, my heart a hammering forge. My skin itched, split in places, and instantly reformed, tougher, darker. Armor twisted across my body like it was growing, sharp thorns unfurling from pauldrons and greaves. The axe in my hand hummed not with magic, but with a resonant, devouring hunger. Malice watched silently from within, radiating satisfaction. I raised my head slowly, meeting William’s wide, fearful eyes. “You wanted a monster,” I rasped, my voice now unnervingly layered—mine, the Boon’s, and something else, something ancient and hungry that had slithered in between. “Congratulations.”

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  I launched. He threw up a ward instinctively, a complex lattice of preservation runes, but it was hopelessly slow. I barreled through it like smoke through paper, slamming into him with enough force to send him flying backward. He hit what was left of the pillar he had tried to defend earlier and dropped to one knee, coughing sparks and dust. He was chanting something—a fail-safe, a desperate last resort, probably—but I didn't let him finish. I closed the gap with a single step that shouldn't have existed, the floor bending strangely beneath my boots as I pushed off with impossible speed. The axe swung wide in a golden arc. He just barely deflected it with a hastily formed glyph shield; fractures radiated out from the point of impact like crazed glass, but he was still standing, barely. “Clause Forty-Five—!” he began, voice strained.

  I punched him. Not with the axe, but with my gauntleted fist, suddenly surging with the Boon’s dark fire. It slammed into his chest with a sickening crunch, throwing him off his feet to crash through the remains of a collapsed shelf behind him. The ward sigils woven into his robes stuttered and flickered out like dying embers. He landed hard amidst scattered, burning pages and didn't get up right away. I stalked forward, no rush now. The Boon was purring, stretching its metaphysical limbs, deeply satisfied. William groaned, trying to push himself up. Blood trailed from the corner of his mouth as he lifted one shaking claw, tracing a desperate, final rune into the air before him—a spell aimed directly at the Boon, at the source: Containment. Nullification. Rewrite.

  “Don’t,” I whispered, the layered voice almost gentle.

  But he cast it. It hit me like a psychic hammer blow directly to the brainstem. For a single, blinding heartbeat, everything vanished—vision whited out, limbs spasmed uncontrollably. The Boon screamed in raw, furious protest as the spell tried to dissect it, to unravel its nature, to rewrite its purpose, its very structure. And that was the fatal mistake. Because the spell didn't dissipate the Boon; it fed it focus, definition, opposition. The nullification glyph imploded violently before it could fully form. The backlash scorched William where he lay, sending him sprawling back down with smoke trailing from his chest and a choked cry. He tried to crawl, tried to cast again, his movements jerky and weak. I stepped over him, my shadow falling across his broken form.

  He looked up at me. Small. Mortal. Breakable. Finished. He was sprawled in a puddle of melted glyphs and scorched parchment, robes in tatters, claws twitching feebly against the floor like a broken metronome. The last spell had fizzled before it even fully left his hand, his breath coming in ragged, wet rattles. The Library groaned around us amid the widening cracks in the marble and the steady consumption of burning books, ancient knowledge still bleeding away as its own rules splintered piece by piece under the onslaught.

  I stood over him, the axe feeling heavier—no, hungrier—in my hand. My reflection flickered across its polished golden curve, showing a distorted image: horns curling back from my brow, eyes burning like dark embers, my armor pulsing with red-veined hunger. I didn’t know if it was real anymore, and frankly, I didn’t care.

  William blinked up at me, his voice paper-thin. “You... don’t have to do this.” He said it like it meant something, like he wouldn’t have done the same in my place.

  “Neither did you,” I replied, the voice no longer sounding human. I dropped the axe and pounced, my weight driving him flat against the cracked marble.

  He squirmed feebly beneath me, clawed hands pushing weakly at my chest as I pinned him down and sank my teeth into his shoulder. He screamed—high, shrill, desperate—as hot, coppery blood laced with something old and arcane gushed into my mouth. This wasn't magic or ritual; it was raw, primal consumption. I bit again, tearing through muscle and scale, my jaw working like a beast at slaughter, ignoring his shrieks and flailing until I finally reached his throat. The body jerked once, then stilled.

  My hands slick with blood, claws digging into what little remained, I couldn’t stop. Driven by something bottomless inside me, I gnawed through the cartilage of his ribs, crunched bone, swallowed torn sinew. Each bite fed the void. There was no triumph, no grief, only the stark feeling of being fed.

  Malice laughed, delighted within my skull. [Oh, now that’s the monster I was promised. Such lovely work. How does he taste, darling? A bit dry? Too much book dust?]

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my gauntlet, smearing it red. Simultaneously, across the floating parchments of the Library, a warning flare lit up. Then another sparked, followed by dozens, then hundreds, igniting the air. Beneath the floor, something ancient began to howl—not an alarm, but a sound of deep mourning mixed with recognition. One of their own had been eaten. Not slain. Not corrupted. Consumed.

  I stood slowly, breath ragged, blood staining my lips and chin. I looked down at the ravaged remains, then up at the growing storm of script and sirens building overhead. They knew.

  And gods help them—I wasn’t full yet.

  ? The Myth Seekers [A litrpg fantasy adventure] ?

  by Luminous Zephyr

  Sever the strings of gods and kings.

  But no favors come free, and the more he fights for freedom, the tighter the tangle of fate becomes.

  Finally, after forming a team to take on Janek’s Tower, the adventurers set off with high hopes.

  But before even reaching their destination, the team finds they are no longer chasing adventure.

  They are living it.