Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The morning arrived with the sort of quiet confidence only ancient forests seemed capable of.

No war horns splitting the dawn. No shouting merchants hawking bruised produce in the mud. No heavy, rhythmically marching boots of the King’s Guard. Just birds conducting complicated, high-pitched political arguments somewhere high above the canopy, and a slow breeze that tasted of pine sap, damp loam, and rotting leaves.

Milo had almost forgotten that woods could sound like this. Not tense. Not haunted by the stench of burning grain. Simply... alive.

He paused, adjusting the worn leather strap of his pack where it dug into his collarbone, and unfolded Osmund’s map for what had to be the eighteenth time that morning.

Calling it a map remained, at best, an act of blind optimism. Half the ink had faded into soft gray ghosts of coastlines that probably didn’t exist anymore. Someone had drawn a thick, frantic circle around a blank section of parchment and written: Probably here.

Another hand—using darker ink and a sharper quill—had savagely crossed that out: Definitely not here.

A third traveler had apparently decided both opinions were utter drivel, adding a jagged arrow pointing toward a crease in the pigskin with the helpful note: Walk until the trees feel wrong.

Milo stared at the parchment, the paper rustling in the cool morning air. "...That’s not how geography works," he muttered.

The forest offered no rebuttal.

He folded the parchment away with a dry sigh. It was a bizarre thought, really. A mere week ago, he had been sitting in a dungeon for what power decided was justice. Now he was wandering aimlessly through a primordially deep forest because the wealthiest, most eccentric merchant in the kingdom had essentially patted him on the shoulder and said, "There’s supposedly a magical library hidden somewhere in the weeds. Good luck with the beasts."

Somehow... this felt perfectly reasonable.

By noon, the path had vanished.

Not ended. Not choked out by brambles. It had simply ceased.

There had been no dramatic fork in the road, no fallen oak blocking the way, no ancient crumbling boundary stone to mark the edge of civilization. One moment, his boots were crunching down on compressed, pale dirt. The next, his foot sank into untamed, cushiony moss.

Milo stopped, frowning. He turned on his heel. Behind him stretched a completely ordinary woodland floor blanketed in copper pine needles and shattered twigs. Ahead of him... lay the exact same thing.

"...I managed to get lost professionally," he whispered to himself.

He rubbed his temples. Aria would never let him live this down. Real explorers don’t get lost, she had declared once, leaning over an ale mug with absolute, terrifying confidence. They merely discover places that weren’t where they intended them to be. He’d laughed so hard back then that she’d refused to speak to him for almost six minutes.

The memory settled warmly in his chest, a small ember of comfort against the damp chill creeping through his cloak. Then it faded, leaving behind the hollow ache of distance.

"I’ll tell you about this one," he murmured to the silent trunks surrounding him. "When I get back."

When. Not if. Holding onto that word felt suddenly vital.

An hour later, the wilderness began to turn.

At first, he couldn’t put a finger on the shift. The trunks remained a dull, iron-gray bark. The leaves overhead rustled green and gold in the ambient light. Birdsong still drifted down from the high canopy. Visually, nothing had changed.

Yet every nerve along his spine was suddenly standing on end.

The forest had become... too consistent.

Milo slowed his pace, his hand instinctively dropping to the hilt of his hunting knife. He watched the wood around him. Every tree stood precisely six paces from the next. Every lower branch bent at the exact same sharp, unnatural thirty-degree angle. The sunlight filtering through the leaves didn’t dapple or shift with the wind; it fell in razor-sharp, repeating geometric grids across the floor, making his skin itch just looking at them.

He stopped completely. "...No."

His eyes narrowed as he crouched beside a fallen, decaying log. Green moss covered its northern face. Perfectly normal. He looked to the next log three feet away. The moss covered the exact same patch, down to the razor-thin, jagged edge of its growth. He checked a third. Exactly the same. A fourth. A twin.

A cold weight dropped into his stomach. Nature was chaotic. Nature repeated patterns, sure, but it never copied itself with mathematical precision.

Someone—or something—had constructed this grove according to rigid, artificial rules instead of wild growth.

Milo spun around to look behind him. The faint trail of bent grass he’d left behind was gone. Not smoothed over by the wind. Erased. The forest sat pristine, seamless, without a broken twig or a crushed leaf to prove a human had ever stepped foot inside it.

"...Well," he let out a slow, shaking breath, watching his exhalation fog faintly in the air. "I suppose the trees do feel wrong."

Whoever had annotated Osmund’s map had possessed a deeply irritating talent for being right.

He kept moving because stopping felt dangerously like giving up.

The air grew progressively colder—not a winter chill, but a dense, suffocating quiet that pressed against his eardrums like heavy water. The wind died completely. No insects buzzed in the undergrowth. No birds sang overhead. Even the crunch of his own boots sounded muffled, deadened, as if the forest was swallowing the sound before it could travel a foot.

Eventually, he pushed through a thicket of identical fern fronds and emerged at a clearing.

He almost missed it entirely, because it wasn’t a clearing in any traditional sense. It was simply an absence.

The woods abruptly terminated in a flawless, geometric circle roughly thirty paces wide. Inside the ring lay pristine green grass, dotted with bright blue wildflowers bathed in soft, sourceless sunlight.

And right in the dead center sat a single wooden door.

It stood entirely upright, anchored to nothing. There were no attached stone walls, no crumbling foundation of a ruined temple, no archway, no surrounding frame. Just a heavy, weathered oak door standing patiently in the middle of empty air.

Milo stared. He remained rooted to the spot, his mouth slightly open. "...Of course."

At this point, a floating castle would have barely raised his eyebrows.

The door’s handle was cast in heavy bronze, completely untarnished by weather or age. Carved deeply across the center wood were four brutal words:

ENTER ONLY IGNORANT.

Milo stared at the aggressive carving. Then he let out a short, disbelieving laugh that broke the oppressive silence of the glade. "I think," he admitted to the empty clearing, "I qualify."

No thunder rolled. No ancient mechanism ground beneath the earth. He took a breath and stepped into the circular clearing.

The grass beneath his boots felt unnaturally soft, yielding to his weight like velvet, almost as though the earth itself was trying to slow his stride—begging him to reconsider. Up close, the oak appeared impossibly old. Thousands of tiny, erratic scratches crisscrossed the dark grain.

Not random marks, he realized with a jolt. Names.

Hundreds of them were etched into the wood. Some were crisp and fresh; others were faded, smoothed down by centuries of rain and wind. He leaned closer, reading the legible ones.

Aster.

Yorin.

Lysandra.

Unknown.

Near the bottom, one name had been hacked out so violently with a heavy blade that the oak itself had split in a jagged scar. Another name looked as though it had been carved from the inside—scratched backward into the grain as if by someone clawing desperately to leave a record before being dragged into the dark.

And beneath them all, almost buried under centuries of layered graffiti, was a single, final line:

If you still believe knowledge is something you possess... turn back.

Milo’s faint smile vanished.

Slowly, he raised his right hand and pressed his palm against the untarnished bronze latch.

The moment his skin made contact, a shockwave of heat rippled through the wood—not a burning fire, but a deep, throbbing warmth. A sensation of immediate, terrifying recognition. It felt impossibly like stepping into a crowded room and having a total stranger turn around and address him by his secret name.

Then came a second feeling. Heavy. Ancient. Intolerably vast.

It felt like a silent librarian slowly turning their head, looking up from a desk after sitting in the dark for a thousand years. Something on the other side of that slab of oak was looking directly at him. Not with malice. Not with welcome. Simply with a cold, terrifying curiosity.

Click.

The heavy bronze latch dropped with a crisp, metallic snap that vibrated through his teeth. The door unlocked itself.

Milo swallowed past the sudden dryness in his throat. He thought briefly of his sister sharp, protective glare. Of Hadjer’s impossible, stubborn loyalty. Of Aria pretending she wasn’t worried even as her hands trembled over her sword hilt. Of Osmund smiling knowingly over a badly drawn map.

"I’ll come back," he whispered. Whether he was promising them, or trying to convince himself, he couldn’t tell.

He planted his boot, pushed the heavy oak door open, and stepped through.

Darkness swallowed him instantly.

It wasn’t night. It wasn’t an empty room. It was the complete and absolute absence of light, form, and matter. There was no floor beneath his feet, yet he wasn’t falling. No ceiling above, no walls, no stars, no air to breathe, yet his lungs didn’t burn.

He glanced back over his shoulder in a panic.

Through the narrow frame of the open door, the forest remained perfectly preserved. Bright sunlight, emerald grass, whispering trees—a peaceful afternoon in the world he knew.

Then, without a sound, the door swung shut.

Thud.

The realm of light collapsed into a single thin line, then vanished entirely.

Total, blinding blackness.

For a long, agonized breath, nothing happened. Milo stood suspended in the void, the sound of his own heartbeat hammering wildly in his ears like a trapped bird.

Then, somewhere in the infinite, boundless dark, a sound stirred.

A voice spoke. It didn’t travel through the air; it echoed from inside his own skull. It was neither male nor female, young nor old, quiet nor loud. It was simply ancient—a sound like tectonic plates grinding together beneath a deep ocean.

It asked a single, quiet question:

"Who are you?"

Milo opened his mouth to answer—to give his name, his title, anything at all.

Before a single sound could escape his lips, the darkness around him breathed out.

And smiled.