Etched Oblivion

Etched Oblivion: Some truths were never meant for human minds. When seventeen-year-old Silas Crane moves into a new apartment for the third time in four years, he finds a thin, yellow book on the shelf. No title on the spine. No author's name. Just a deep, bruised yellow cover and pages that feel older than they should. He leaves it alone for three weeks. Then one rainy Tuesday night, he opens it. He wakes up on the floor with no memory of what happened, only the cold carpet against his cheek, a book that has closed itself, and a mirror that shows him something wrong. His hair, dark brown the night before, is now completely white. His left eye is the same brown it has always been. His right eye is gold . And somewhere behind it, settled like sediment in still water, is the truth of everything, every secret the universe has ever kept, every mechanism behind reality, every name of every thing that existed before names. The complete, unfiltered archive of existence, poured into a seventeen-year-old boy who just couldn't sleep. Now Silas sees things. Names floating above strangers' heads. Dates he understands without being told what they mean. The private, invisible weight that every person carries without knowing anyone can see it. He can control it most of the time. He can keep the door closed, almost always. But the thing that gave him everything isn't finished with him yet. It visits him in dreams. It calls him a vessel. It tells him that no one was supposed to survive the reading. That he is an anomaly. That he is interesting. And in a school corridor in East London, there is a girl named Nora Calloway, sharp, quiet, perceptive in ways that unsettle him, who noticed his shadow was wrong before she ever noticed his white hair. Who brings him tea without being asked?. Who holds his hand when the weight of knowing becomes too much and doesn't let go until he's ready. He looked at her date the first chance he got. It was far away. Impossibly, beautifully far. He's been holding onto that ever since. Etched Oblivion is a story about carrying something you can't put down, being seen by someone you're afraid to let look, and what it means to stay yourself when the entire universe is living inside your head.