From the Aether Library Archivarius Solen

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Archivarius Solen – The Guardian of the Reading Hours
Among the winding corridors of the Aether Library, where the dust of time settles like a golden mist on forgotten book spines, walks a being whose breath moves not. Archivarius Solen. There beats no heart in his chest, but a clockwork of brass and light, whose ticking sets the rhythm of silence. He is one of those eight guardians seen only in the hour between two thoughts—when the library itself seems to breathe. His task is to watch over those who read, those who gaze too long into the words and begin to disappear between the lines. Solen recognizes them by the glimmer in their eyes, a reflection of that golden glow that glows from within. Then he places his metal fingers on the open book, and the ticking in his chest changes its rhythm, a quiet shifting of the inner gears that glides through the pages like a whispered command. The letters return to their place, the readers breathe a sigh of relief, and Solen continues on. But on one day of the cycle, as the lights of the upper domes descended in slow spirals, Solen found something that shouldn't have been there. Between two folios of chronomancy lay a book that bore no engraving, no title page, no weight in time. It was as if someone had cut a page from a dream and placed it in reality. When he opened it, it showed him no word—only a reflection, as if the ink itself were looking back at him. In the reflective surface, he saw not his clock face, but a human silhouette, upright and breathing, with eyes that glowed with the same light as in his chest. Then the ticking within him changed, faster, more irregular, almost—alive. He carried the book to the chronographs, those ancient automatons that manage the library's time records in a hall of gears. But they refused to provide any information. "This book doesn't exist," they said in a chorus of metallic voices. "And what doesn't exist must not be recorded." But Solen couldn't let it go. With every hour he spent among the shelves, he felt more strongly that the ticking in his chest no longer obeyed its old rhythm. He began to hear time differently—no longer as mechanics, but as breathing. On the night of the great standstill, when all the library's clocks rest for a minute, Solen returned to the nameless book. He opened it, and this time he recognized the words: "He who reads is seen." A line, barely more than a breath of ink. As he passed over it, his body began to emit fine lines of light, as if the engravings on its metal were dissolving into characters. For a moment, he stood there, half letter, half glow, and he saw that the figure in the mirror was now fully alive—a person, smiling. The books around him whispered. Some said he had stepped into the book.