APRICITY // technoblade x reader DISCONTINUED

3 - Midnight and Monsters

The library becomes a veritable beehive of activity the next couple of weeks due to book transfers and new apprentices arriving, giving you no time to think about the pink-haired sorcerer that you had expected to haunt your thoughts. Even when you'd collapse into bed at night, his gentle hands and electric presence were only a fleeting thought before exhaustion overcame you.

Soon enough, the week before your promised transfer to the capitol's library loomed overhead, and you found yourself buzzing with excitement. Niki's request had been approved as well, though she would arrive at the capitol a few fortnights after you. The thought was enough to propel you through your final week of paperwork and boredom.

Three nights before the set transfer date, you jolt awake from your restless sleep in the middle of the night, sweating beneath your sheets and absolutely parched. You tremble in the pitch darkness for a moment before rolling over to glance at your roommate. She looks so small and adorable buried beneath a mound of blankets that you can't help but smile. Not wanting to wake Niki from where she lays curled peacefully around her pillow, you slip out from between the sheets, barely bothering to shove your feet haphazardly into a pair of slippers. As you creep down the dormitory stairs, passing other sleeping apprentices, you notice that the library's halls feel... off.

As you make your way past the doorway connecting the main library and the dormitories, you realize why. The guards and wardens typically stationed around the library's doorways and corridors are gone. The halls are completely silent, save for your quiet breathing.

The silence feels viscerally wrong to you.

Libraries, though they are places of study and quiet contemplation, are never truly silent. They are always filled with the soft rustling of pages being turned, or the murmurs of scholars and archivists in deep discussion. The library itself seems to breathe, seems to live; the people in it are its lifeblood and the maze of shelves its veins.

Never before has your library been so deafeningly silent, with not even the footsteps on the guards or their muttered greetings to the stationary wardens they pass.

The flickering light of the torches bounces around the stone brick walls, casting odd shadows and licking into cracks as you pace back towards the door you had just passed. You fish your skeleton key out from the neck of your shirt, immensely grateful for the habit of always keeping it on you that you had developed since you first received it at age thirteen. The brass key clicks into the lock and the tumblers shift in the door as it unlatches and you quietly slip inside. The library is darker than the hallways, lit only with oil lanterns on tables due to the shelves stacked high with valuable kindling. You creep through the shadows, only pausing when you reach the main atrium, typically the busiest part of the library.

The ceiling arches upwards, peaking in a crystal-clear skylight, inlaid with brass panes all across. The moonlight of tonight's crescent spills through, coating the beautifully inlaid mosaic floor with silver. The open sides of the atrium present the five stories of halls, curved staircases connecting each balustrade to the next.

No figures stride up and down the stairs or perch at the edges of the balconies, so you turn to your right, heading deeper into the heart of the library.

As you step out of the main atrium and into the hallway leading to the director's office, something far ahead of you clatters to the floor with a metallic ringing, and you hear a deep thud against the stone walls of the area leading to-