Chapter 5 THE LIBRARY THAT SCREAMS

Here's your twentysixth dialogue-rich scene, titled *"The Library That Screams. * This is at the point just after Saiha has his dangerous midterm - now, with Adrah, he's seeking answers about the bone-chilling image of his "dark future." They search the forbidden sublevels of the academy's oldest building ... where the books are not whispering.

They scream.

📚 Scene: Midnight Grove Archives – Sublevel 9, "The Library That Screams"

[Setting:]

A narrow stone stairway winds its way downward, into the belly of the academy. The doors here are inscribed with cautionary tales of dead languages. Saiha and Adrah force their way past them, torchlight-flickering shelves of *living books spread out in front of them. * Some shiver, bound in ancient magic. Some bleed. Some ... murmur names that have been dust for ages.

SAIHA:

(glancing around)

"I thought this was a library.

ADRAH:

(squinting at a shelf)

"This one has been sealed since the Bloodfire Uprising. It's not quiet. It's *restrained. *"

* [A book near you gives a low, guttural moan. Saiha freezes.] *

SAIHA:

"Was that-?"

ADRAH:

(nods)

"Yeah. It screamed. Don't touch that one. "It remembers being burned alive."

SAIHA:

(mutters)

"This is trauma on shelves, this place."

*[They walk on, further. The magic and the rot are in the air. One book is pulsating blue and covered in chains.] *

ADRAH:

(stopping)

"That's it. The Chronicle of Becoming. " It contains every recorded - and unrecorded - transformation in bloodline-bound mages.

SAIHA:

(approaching slowly)

"What if it shows me the thing I don't want to see?"

ADRAH:

(quiet)

"Then we face it together."

SAIHA [plapping a hand against the book] The chains snap. The pages flap open, landing on a double-truck of blank space. Then - his name in black ink, and below him, a vision spills out in shadowy vision. The same shadowy Saiha is there, but now it *kneels before a dying king. *]

SAIHA:

(staring)

"That's not

Of course - here's your twenty-seventh and dialogue-heaviest scene, picking right up from "The Library That Screams." **This moment occurs **moments later as Saiha and Adrah flee the haunted archive and blunder into a hidden chamber beneath the screaming library - a chamber that should not be to be, yet is familiar nonetheless to Saiha.

🗝️ Scene: The Under – The Forgotten Throne

\[Setting:]

Like the tiles, a bone stairwell in the archive leads into silence. At the loww end is a round cavity. One glass-and-ash throne in a circle. And about it: twelve mirrors, all facing in. Each and every one reflecting different sides of Saiha.

SAIHA:

(voice hushed)

"This was not in the blueprints. No map. No mention."

ADRAH:

(low)

"Because this place wasn't created.

It was remembered."

*\[They step forward. One of the mirrors flashes - Saiha as a boy, in a palace of snow alone. In another he's wearing a cursed crown similar to the one in the projection. Another one just shows him ... fading away.] *

SAIHA:

(quietly)

"These are all me. All the lives I never lived."

ADRAH:

(gazing at the throne)

"Or haven't yet."

SAIHA:

(torn)

"If this is some fate thing, I'm not interested in it. I don't wish to govern over anything. I just need to pass my exams, survive the semester and-"

ADRAH:

(interrupts gently)

"- kiss the boy you love in peace?"

SAIHA:

(smiling faintly)

"That too."

\[All at once, a mirror shatters. The shards hang suspended in mid-air, conjuring the spectral image of a face - **a time-worn face similar to that of Saiha but with empty stars for eyes. **

FRACTURED SPIRIT:

"WHAT YOU ARE, YOU CANNOT UNMAKE.

THE BLOODLINE DEMANDS. THE THRONE REMEMBERS."

SAIHA:

(firm)

"Then let it remember.

I'm not a king. I'm me.

And I get to choose."

*\[The throne creaks and cracks. The mirrors distort. [Adrah clutches Saiha's hand.] *

ADRAH:

Whatever you do, you're not doing."