Legend XLVI – The Reader of the Last Hour

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It is said that deep among the mists of night, where the stars begin to hear their own breath, exists a library not of this world. Its shelves stand not on stone, but on time, and its walls are made of the silence of those who can no longer speak. It is called the Hall of Chronicles, and at its center sits a figure neither truly alive nor truly dead: the Reader of the Last Hour. Those who have ever seen him—and there are not many who have been able to recount such an encounter—describe him as a skeleton whose skull is illuminated by swirling golden symbols. Gears of light, runes of memory, floating mechanisms of past and future turn silently behind him, as if probing fate itself. His hands, dry as ancient parchment, hold a book thicker than any other, and yet it always seems to open to precisely the right page. When he reads, a pale glow rises from the lines, as if time itself were receding to make room for the words. The Reader was once said to be a chronomancer, a guardian of the boundaries between the hour and eternity. His task was to record the stories of mortals before they were scattered by the winds. But one day he found a book that no one had ever been allowed to write: the Chronika Obscura. It contained not only the past, but also the final sentence of every life. When he opened it, he recognized his own name on every page, and in that moment, time dissolved around him—and with it, his mortality. Now he sits there, caught between tick and tock, reading and yet being read. Whenever a person approaches the end of their days, a page turns in the distant darkness, and a gossamer thread of light detaches itself from the edge of the book. Some dying people believe they hear a rustling sound in their last breaths, even though there is no wind. That is the Reader, they say, completing the story of a life, word for word. But there are also those who claim that one can seek him out if one is brave or desperate enough. A wanderer is said to have tried: a father who refused to accept his child's death. He searched the Hall of Chronicles for many nights until he found it—or it found him. He knelt before the Reader and pleaded for a new page, a new sentence, just one more. The Reader of the Last Hour slowly raised his gaze, and in the black eye sockets, a golden spark briefly flickered—not emotion, but recognition. He did not speak, for he no longer had a voice. He simply laid his bony hand upon the book. This opened a page on which the father saw his child's name. But instead of solace, he found only the truth: the final sentence was already there, definitive and unchangeable.