They repeated the process again and again. It was a brutal, staccato dance between existence and oblivion.
Null-Rune Pulse (0:00): Cold, absolute silence.
Kaelin runs (0:02): Two steps forward.
Elias triggers Phase Shift (0:03): Conceptual oblivion, the chilling zero of the Vault.
Return Script (0:05): Violent re-integration into matter and space.
Recovery (0:07): Elias gasps, fighting the urge to vomit, gathering the dregs of Aether.
Null-Rune Pulse (0:09): The wave is upon them again.
With each shift, the required Aether Ink was exponentially harder to gather. Elias's control frayed. On the third shift, he heard Kaelin let out a muffled cry of pain as the Return script failed to perfectly align. She had lost a small section of her armor volume, which was now replaced by a small, impossibly dense pocket of Zero-Vault static.
The Guardian, who had been watching the perimeter, finally noticed the glitch. He didn't see the pair; he saw the scripts around them. He saw the Rune of Proximity flickering rapidly, not with a smooth, continuous tag, but with repeated, conceptual blinks—the effect of the Irrelevance script failing to fully hide the transition.
"Dimensional Anomaly!" the Guardian's voice boomed, echoing off the obsidian Archway. "It is the Rewriter! Activate targeted Null-Rune field! Focus on the Conceptual Distortion signatures!"
The Guardian raised his scepter. The next Null-Rune pulse was not the wide, perimeter sweep. It was focused, condensed, and specifically tuned to the frequency of Elias's Irrelevance script.
"He's targeting the concept, Elias!" Kaelin screamed, pulling him violently forward toward the Archway's entrance.
They were twenty yards from the gate. Elias knew he couldn't survive another clean hit from a Null-Rune, especially a focused one. If it caught him in the Zero-Vault, he would be permanently fragmented.
He had to shift one final time, and he had to hold the shift through the focused Null-Rune, something that demanded a power only the legendary Watchers possessed.
He gathered his entire core, pushing his remaining Aether Ink into the Dimensional Phase Shift script. This time, he didn't just ask the Realm to forget their volume; he forced the Rune of Conceptual Irrelevance to wrap around them like a secondary, protective membrane.
Null-Rune Pulse (Targeted): The wave hit them like a physical blow. The cold, absolute negation of the Null-Rune screamed against the boundary of the Conceptual Irrelevance script.
They phased out. The light vanished. The scripts vanished. They were in the Zero-Vault, floating in the conceptual void.
But the focused Null-Rune was still active on the Realm side, desperately trying to nullify the space they occupied.
The Null-Rune, unable to destroy them, began to exert an immense pressure on their Return script. It was trying to trap them in non-existence. Elias felt his mind being pulled apart, the separate components of his identity—his memories, his knowledge, his very name—stretching thin, ready to snap and disperse forever into the Vault.
I must exist!
Elias fought back not with Aether Ink, which was gone, but with Intent. He focused on the only thing holding him together: the sheer, desperate, defiant knowledge that the Archive was corrupt, and he had to expose it. He visualized the single, contradictory stroke of the Inverse Inertia he had used in the ravine, forcing a tiny, desperate tear in the conceptual integrity of the Null-Rune's focus.
The Null-Rune's focus wavered for a fraction of a second.
That was all the space the Return script needed.
They slammed back into reality with a catastrophic force. The impact of re-integration was so violent it felt like a punch to the chest. They appeared just three feet from the obsidian Archway gate, which glowed ominously.
The Guardian immediately spotted them. He raised his scepter for a final, catastrophic Null-Rune blast, aimed directly at the pair.
But Kaelin, anchored by the reality of the physical world, was faster. With a feral roar, she launched her short-sword, spinning it end-over-end toward the Guardian's hand.
The Rune of Momentum on her sword was a crude, physical script—one that the Guardian's armor could easily deflect—but the sudden, surprising physical threat forced him to momentarily activate his Deflection Rune on his arm instead of firing the Null-Rune.
The sword hit his gauntlet with a shriek of scraping metal, momentarily halting his aim.
That fraction of a second bought Elias and Kaelin their lives. Kaelin grabbed Elias, who was now barely conscious, and half-dragged, half-carried him beneath the Archway's colossal frame.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the Rune of Spatial Integrity took over. The blue light intensified, and the air around them shimmered with raw, unfiltered cosmic energy. The scripts of the Veridia Realm—the laws, the corruption, the Enforcers—were instantly replaced by the bewildering, complex Runes of dimensional transition.
The Guardian roared in frustration and fired the Null-Rune blast, but it struck the massive obsidian frame of the Archway, creating a blinding, silent explosion of anti-Aether that rebounded uselessly into the sky.
Elias was vaguely aware of a profound, shifting feeling—like falling upward—and then, silence. They were through the gate.
Kaelin collapsed with Elias onto cold, alien ground. Her wrist was throbbing where she had held Elias's dissolving form. She looked at him, huddled and twitching, his face pale and clammy, the Gryphon quill clutched loosely in his hand.
"We made it, Scribe," she whispered, her voice rough with exhaustion and fear. "But your debt just became life-long."
Elias couldn't speak, but his defect-sight, though dim, registered the change. The scripts here were alien, complex, and ancient. They had entered the Archivist's Realm—a world governed by much stricter, higher-level laws. He had survived the first layer of the Archive's defenses, but he had exhausted all his energy and shattered his mind to do it.
He closed his eyes, his consciousness retreating deep inside himself to hide from the overwhelming scripts of this new, terrifying reality.
In the distant, polished metal sphere of the Great Library, the immortal Overseer registered the anomaly. The targeted Null-Rune had failed. The Rewriter had successfully performed a Dimensional Phase Shift using only the scripts of Conceptual Irrelevance—a feat that should be physically impossible for a mortal Scribe.
The Overseer's focus intensified. The Rewriter was now in a new Realm, and the threat level was officially raised. A single, enormous, golden-hued script was woven into the cosmic Aether, directed across a thousand light-years to the Guardian of the next Archway: Intercept and Integrate. Do not allow further Dimensional Displacement.
The cost of this single, unauthorized action had now summoned the attention of the highest levels of the Archive. Somewhere in the universe, an ancient, crystalline structure, dedicated to tracking the flow of dimensional energy, momentarily flared in protest against the massive, unauthorized expenditure of conceptual power, then settled back into its eternal, silent rotation.
End of Chapter 6