Prague, Czech Republic – The Monastery Ruins
Ethan Vaughn tightened his grip on the manuscript, its leather cover strangely smooth despite the centuries it had spent buried beneath the Vltava Monastery. The weight of it was heavier than it should have been, almost as if the book itself resisted being lifted. Symbols, burned into the cover, pulsed faintly under the dim light of the excavation site. They weren’t Latin, Greek, or any known linguistic structure. The markings didn’t just resemble a forgotten language—they felt deliberately designed to remain unreadable.
He exhaled slowly.
As one of the world’s leading linguistic decryption experts, Ethan had studied thousands of ancient texts, from lost civilizations to coded war documents. But this was different. This book shouldn’t exist.
And yet, here it was.
Dr. Helena Kovač, head of Prague’s Historical Linguistics Division, stood beside him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “You should put it down, Professor Vaughn,” she said, her voice edged with something close to fear. “Three experts before you tried to translate it. None of them are here anymore.”
Ethan glanced at her, curiosity flaring. “What do you mean?”
Kovač hesitated. “I mean they’re gone. Vanished. No notes, no messages. They were here one day, and the next—nothing. It’s as if they were erased from existence.”
Ethan frowned. “You think this book had something to do with it?”
Kovač didn’t answer immediately. She looked at the manuscript as though it might breathe, as if, at any moment, it might open on its own. Finally, she said, “I think this book does not want to be read.”
Ethan should have walked away. Any rational person would have. But the symbols called to him, whispering in a way that was more than just intellectual curiosity. He had spent his entire life seeking out hidden languages, decoding forgotten scripts, uncovering buried truths.
And this… this felt like the ultimate truth.
Ignoring the weight of Kovač’s stare, he turned the manuscript over in his hands and carefully flipped open the cover.
The pages were pristine—far too smooth to be parchment, yet too thick to be modern paper. The ink hadn’t faded. The symbols were sharp, flawless. They had not been written; they had been etched.
His pulse quickened.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he murmured. “Even the best-preserved texts degrade over time. But this…” He traced his fingers along the script. “It’s untouched.”
Kovač took a step back. “You shouldn’t read it out loud.”
Ethan wasn’t listening anymore. The first line of text shimmered faintly, as if the ink itself were shifting under his gaze. The structure didn’t match any known linguistic pattern, and yet—somehow—he understood.
He cleared his throat.
And spoke.
“The one who speaks will reshape the world.”
The words left his lips like an exhalation, disappearing into the thick, humid air. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a subtle pressure built in the room, as if the very atmosphere had tilted.
Kovač inhaled sharply. “Ethan…”
Her voice sounded distant. Muffled.
A strange static hum filled his ears.
His hand tingled, and when he looked down, his breath caught in his throat.
The scar. The small, jagged line on his palm—the one he had carried since childhood—was gone.
Not faded. Not healed.
Erased.
Ethan’s fingers trembled as he turned his palm under the light, his mind scrambling for an explanation. He knew that scar. He remembered the exact moment he had gotten it—the broken glass, the sting of antiseptic, the stitches in the emergency room.
And now… nothing.
His skin was smooth, unmarked, as if the accident had never happened.
The manuscript’s pages rustled slightly, though there was no wind in the underground chamber.
Kovač looked pale. “Ethan,” she whispered. “Put the book down. Now.”
His throat was dry. “This is a coincidence,” he muttered, though even as he said it, the words felt hollow. “I must have misremembered—”
“Who’s Adam?” Kovač cut in.
Ethan blinked. “What?”
Kovač’s face was tight, her eyes darting to his in confusion. “You just said his name. Adam. Who is he?”
The world around him seemed to contract.
A sickening pulse moved through his brain, like his neurons had misfired all at once.
Because Adam wasn’t just a name.
Adam was his best friend.
The man he had spoken to this morning.
The person who had convinced him to take this assignment in the first place.
But when Ethan reached for his phone, his hands trembling, he found no texts, no calls. No messages.
He tried to picture Adam’s face.
And… he couldn’t.
His mind had gone completely blank.
Like the name was an echo of something that had once been real—but now wasn’t.
The manuscript sat in his hands, heavier than before.
He had only spoken one phrase.
And already, something had been rewritten.
“I have to close it,” Ethan whispered, his voice cracking. The book felt like it was sinking into his hands, burning cold against his skin.
But he couldn’t move. His fingers remained splayed across the parchment, as if magnetized to the very words that had begun to unmake reality.
Kovač crossed the space between them in two swift strides, eyes wide with alarm. “What’s happening to you?” Her gaze darted between his face and the manuscript. “Your eyes—”
Ethan blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision. The edges of the room had begun to blur, shadows stretching into impossible shapes. “What about my eyes?”
“The color,” she whispered. “They’ve changed.”
A new line of text caught his attention, the symbols rearranging themselves, shifting beneath his gaze until they formed words he somehow understood.
The past is mutable. Memory is fiction.
His mouth went dry. “Do you see that? The text—it’s changing.”
Kovač shook her head slowly. “I see nothing but the same symbols that were there before.” She reached out, hesitating inches from his arm. “Ethan, you need to stop reading. Now.”
But the words were already forming in his mind, translating themselves without his conscious effort.
Speak, and sever the thread.
The phrase hung in his thoughts, tempting, dangerous. Every instinct told him to remain silent, yet his lips parted of their own accord. He could feel the weight of the words on his tongue, pressing to be released.
“Ethan!” Kovač’s voice seemed to come from miles away.
The excavation lights flickered, casting eerie shadows across the ancient stone walls. Dust motes hung suspended in the air, motionless, as if time itself had stuttered.
He fought against the compulsion, gritting his teeth. “I can’t—” he managed. “It wants me to—”
“Don’t give it what it wants,” Kovač urged, finally grasping his shoulder. Her touch felt distant, separated from him by some invisible barrier. “Whatever this is, it’s not just a book. You know that now.”
Ethan’s phone buzzed in his pocket—impossible, this deep underground. With trembling fingers, he pulled it out.
The screen displayed a single message from an unknown number:
Speak the words. Find me.
Beneath the text was a photo—grainy, distorted, but unmistakably showing a man with familiar eyes. A face he almost recognized.
Adam.
The name echoed in his mind, bringing with it fragments of memories—laughter in a university corridor, late nights poring over ancient texts, a friendship stretching back decades. But the details slipped through his consciousness like sand through fingers.
“I knew him,” Ethan whispered. “How could I forget someone I’ve known for twenty years?”
Kovač’s expression hardened. “The others who vanished—they must have read more. Said more.” She tried to pull the book from his hands, but it wouldn’t budge. “Let go, Ethan!”
The manuscript’s pages turned on their own, flipping rapidly until stopping at what appeared to be the middle of the book. The symbols here were different—sharper, more aggressive in their angles.
A cold sweat broke across Ethan’s forehead as a new understanding flooded his mind.
“It’s not a book,” he gasped. “It’s a key.”
The symbols pulsed brighter, and a faint crackling sound filled the air, like static electricity.
“A key to what?” Kovač demanded, backing away as the lights flickered more violently.
Ethan looked up, his altered eyes reflecting the manuscript’s glow. “To the spaces between worlds.”
The words spilled from him unbidden, translated directly from the shifting symbols:
“Between the fold of what was and what may be, I open the path.“
The chamber shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling as a low rumble vibrated through the monastery ruins.
Kovač stumbled, catching herself against a stone pillar. “What have you done?”
Before Ethan could answer, the manuscript’s pages began to emit a pale blue light, soft at first, then blindingly intense. The symbols lifted from the page—not as ink, but as three-dimensional glyphs that hung in the air between them.
Phantom-like, they rotated slowly, casting strange shadows that didn’t match their shapes.
Ethan felt something fundamental shift within him. Knowledge poured into his mind—not just of the language, but of its origins. Images flashed behind his eyes: civilizations that had never existed in any historical record, technologies that defied comprehension, and beings that moved between realities like humans walked between rooms.
“I can see everything,” he whispered, his voice altered, resonating with a strange harmonic. “The language—it’s alive.”
The manuscript rose from his hands, hovering before him, pages turning by themselves. Each revealed new symbols, new phrases, each burning themselves into his consciousness.
Kovač backed toward the chamber entrance. “I’m getting help.”
“There’s no help for this,” Ethan said, his gaze fixed on the floating manuscript. “No one else would understand.”
Another line of text revealed itself to him, and he felt compelled to speak it aloud:
“What was forgotten shall be restored. What was hidden shall be revealed.“
The moment the words left his lips, a searing pain shot through his temples. He clutched his head, crying out as memories—not his own—flooded his consciousness.
Visions of a sprawling library built of impossible architecture. A circular chamber filled with identical manuscripts. Figures in hooded robes, speaking in the same language etched into the book before him. And behind it all, a presence—vast, ancient, patient.
When the pain subsided, Ethan looked up to find Kovač staring at him in horror.
“Your face,” she whispered. “It’s changing.”
He reached up to touch his cheek and felt unfamiliar contours beneath his fingertips. Stubble where there had been none. A scar above his eyebrow he’d never had.
Something was rewriting him.
His phone buzzed again. The same unknown number.
Keep speaking. Almost there.
This time, the photo showed Adam standing in what appeared to be the very chamber they were in, but… different. Older. Untouched by excavation.
“I have to find him,” Ethan said, his voice now a mixture of his own and something else—something older. “He’s trapped between.”
Kovač shook her head, fear evident in her eyes. “That’s the book talking, not you. Fight it, Ethan!”
But he knew, with a certainty that transcended logic, that Adam was real. That he existed in some adjacent reality that had been sealed off, accessible only through the manuscript’s power.
The hovering symbols rearranged themselves once more, forming a phrase that burned with significance:
“To undo what has been done, speak the name of the forgotten one.“
Ethan hesitated, feeling the weight of the choice before him. To speak again would irreversibly alter something—perhaps everything. But to remain silent meant abandoning Adam to his fate.
A tremor ran through the chamber. Cracks appeared in the ancient stone walls, spreading like spider webs.
“We have to leave now,” Kovač pleaded, genuine fear in her voice. “The whole structure could collapse.”
Ethan looked at her, then back at the manuscript. The book that wasn’t a book. The key to worlds beyond their own.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But I have to know.”
And as the chamber began to crumble around them, Ethan spoke the final phrase:
“Adam Kovač, I call you back.“
The world exploded into blinding light, and reality itself seemed to fold inward like paper in a flame.
When Ethan could see again, the chamber was transformed. No longer an excavation site, but a pristine underground sanctum, illuminated by strange, hovering orbs of blue light.
And standing before him was a man he both recognized and didn’t—familiar yet alien, with eyes that matched his own altered irises.
“You finally found me,” Adam said, his voice echoing strangely. “I’ve been waiting for someone to read the words.”
Behind Adam stood Dr. Helena Kovač—but not the one who had been with Ethan moments before. This Helena was older, her hair streaked with gray, her eyes holding the same otherworldly knowledge that Ethan now felt coursing through him.
“Welcome to the true Vltava Monastery,” she said, her accent thicker, her demeanor entirely changed. “The one that exists between realities.”
“I don’t understand,” Ethan whispered, though even as he spoke, new knowledge was filling the gaps in his mind. “What is this place? What’s happening to me?”
Adam approached, placing a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. The touch sent cascades of memory through him—shared experiences that had never happened, a friendship spanning lifetimes rather than years.
“You’re remembering who you really are,” Adam said gently. “The manuscript doesn’t change reality—it restores it. We’ve been trapped in a fractured version of our world for centuries.”
Ethan turned to see the Helena he had arrived with standing frozen near the entrance, her expression locked in suspended terror.
“What about her?” he asked.
“A construct,” the older Helena replied, her voice devoid of emotion. “A guardian placed to prevent anyone from activating the manuscript. Just as the false memories of your life were constructed to keep you from seeking the truth.”
The manuscript floated between them, its pages still glowing with that eerie blue light.
“There are more words to speak,” Adam said urgently. “More realities to restore. The balance has been broken for too long.”
Ethan felt himself at the precipice of something vast and terrifying—a choice between the reality he had known and one he was only beginning to remember.
“If I continue reading,” he asked, his voice barely audible, “who will I become?”
Adam’s expression softened with understanding. “You’ll become who you always were. The keeper of the language that shapes existence itself.”
The manuscript’s pages turned once more, revealing a complex array of symbols that seemed to pulse in rhythm with Ethan’s heartbeat.
He understood now. This was only the beginning.