Arasain feels the world go silent — not dark, but hushed. Sound falls away like dust shaken from old parchment.
He finds himself standing on an endless floor of polished obsidian, broken only by tall shelves made of flickering starlight, holding books bound in materials he cannot name. The sky above is a vault of swirling constellations, their patterns ever-shifting, forming glyphs he almost recognizes.
In the center of this astral library sits a woman cloaked in white and blue, her face covered with a simple gray blindfold. Her quill moves with absolute precision, copying glowing words from one ancient tome into another — the same title embossed on both covers:
On Divine Judgement and the Scales of Eternal Justice.
She turns a page, then stops. Her head tilts, the quill hovers above the parchment. And she speaks.
“The Scales have fallen.”
A whisper. A warning. Her blindfold trembles.
“The Scales have risen.”
A second whisper — but with no comfort in it.
She lifts her head and stares directly at Arasain — blindfolded still, yet seeing him fully. Her voice is no louder, but now it fills the entire void:
“When your truth is measured… will it settle cleanly?”
“Will your weight drag others with you?”
“When justice stumbles, who feels the fall?”
“When a soul is weighed on a lie… is the judgment still true?”
One by one, the pages she has written begin to flutter as though caught in a rising wind. The copied words fade from the page, rising into the air as radiant motes. Her hand clenches the quill harder. Then, she leans forward and, almost gently, says:
“Ink lies when the hand lies. But you are not the hand, are you?”
“Seek the ink. Seek the truth beneath the words.”
“The Scales have risen… but not for you.”
The library vanishes like fog at dawn. And Arasain wakes — parchment dust in his hands, and the name of a book echoing in his mind.
