I didn't know what I had expected, but certainly nothing even remotely like what I saw when I stepped through the door he had led me to.

It was a library. In the real, old meaning of the word. There were no computer terminals. Instead, the large room was filled with a maze of shelves, containing more paper-bound books together in a single place than I had seen in my entire life. Probably more than still existed in all of Pharos.

"Unbelievable..." I muttered.

"I thought you'd like this place," Cloud commented with a smirk on his lips.

"Like it? I love it!" I exclaimed happily.

I stepped forward to wander along the rows of shelves, and let my fingers brush over the backs of the books. They were bound in linen, as white as the rest of the room, their titles printed in narrow black letters on their backs. But I was still too awestruck to really take in what the letters said. I just picked one at random and opened it, flipping through the pages and inhaling the dusty scent of the paper. As I ran my fingertips over the narrowly printed pages, the feeling of the paper underneath my skin caused a pleasant shiver to run along my arm and through my entire body. I began to read.

"Out of the multitude of his thousand children, the god of sleep raised Morpheus by his power. As the most skillful of his sons, he had the art of adapting any human shape, and dexterously could imitate the gait and countenance of men, and every mode of speaking. He could simulate the dress and customary words of any man he chose to represent, but he could not assume the form of anything but man, such was his art. Another of Sleep's sons could imitate all kinds of animals – wild beasts or a flying bird, or even a serpent with its twisted shape. That son, by the gods above, was called Ikelos, but the inhabitants of earth called him Phobetor. A third son, named Phantastos, could change himself into the inanimate forms of earth, into stone, water or a tree."

I remembered that story very well. It had always struck me as peculiar, because for some coincidental reason the realm of Phantastos was where we chose all our names from.

It was a strangely elating feeling to read these words out loud, to hold an actual physical copy of this story in my hands. Rationally, I knew it was no different from the digital version that I had read, years ago, as a child on a glowing tablet under my blanket at night, enthralled by the myths of the Old World. But emotionally, it was a vastly different experience. I felt like the world I read about was just about to come to life all around me if I continued on.

Cloud came over to me with a curious expression in his face.

"Ovid's Metamorphoses," he recognized correctly.

I nodded. And then a weird realization struck me. Of course he would know that story. Since this was my dream, he would know everything I knew, and all the books in this library were probably books I had read at some point in my life. My mind had probably just chosen to show me printed books because I had always loved the scent of the paper dust, and the linen and glue that held the pages and cover together, rare as it was in this day and age when everybody used tablets and screens.

But... to be able to remember this passage in such detail, word for word... and there are so many. It's impossible that I've read all of this, isn't it?

I put the Metamorphoses back and let my gaze wander along the rows of books once more. Maybe some of them would be blank if I opened them?

The shelves were mostly filled with Old World literature, the kind that was considered "classic" already back before the war. In the real world, there were probably very few paper copies of these books left, if any. Maybe some vintage imitations, or antiques in expensive collections. A few old books had been scavenged from the wastes in the earlier days of the Keres program. They were now sealed in special preservation archives in the basement of the academy library, inaccessible to the public. But personally, I certainly had never seen any of these in print. And I couldn't imagine how so many books could have survived the war, especially considering their pristine condition.

So it must be a dream.

I wandered through the rows of shelves with a furrow on my brow. I spotted several familiar titles by Twain, Poe, Lovecraft and Goethe, works of Lessing, Kant, De Beauvoir and Sartre, Nietzsche, Blake and Milton, and a well-used copy of Dante Alighieri's "Divina Commedia". I had read most of them, or at least heard of them, some of them had ingrained themselves into my memory more than others. I found nothing that couldn't be explained as some product of my memory.

And yet, I hesitated to open any of them. What would happen if I picked one of the less familiar ones? If the pages were really blank, would the illusion break, and would I be thrown back into the nightly reality of my room in the dorm? I found myself starting to think that I did not want that to happen.

Lost in thought, I touched the letters on the back of the Divina Commedia, feeling for the soft indentation of the black print against the white linen.

Cloud saw my gesture, and smiled. "One of my favorites. You know it?"

I nodded again, unable to put my thoughts into actual words. It was too depressing to think that all of this would be gone when I woke up.

"By now, I think I may have read all of them."

He cast a sorrowful look along the rows upon rows of books. "Or most of them. Some of them, repeatedly. But that one is still one of my favorites." he said, pointing to the ragged back of the Divina Comedia.

"All of them?" I raised my eyebrows in disbelief.

I had really spent a lot of my life with my nose stuck to a tablet, but even so, looking down along the rows of shelves once more I was now fairly certain that I could not have possibly read that much.

They must be empty. My memory couldn't possibly hold all of this, I thought at the same time.

"So... just how long have you been in here?" I asked.

"Long," he just said in response to my question. "So long I cannot even tell... Days blur together when nothing interesting happens. Things rarely change around here – you are the first new arrival for quite some time."

As he moved next to me, I searched his face for any indication of how old he was. It was hard to tell. He struck me as the kind of person who didn't look their age – or rather, he looked ageless, somehow. Older than Bridge, Arrow and Feather, but probably not much older than me.

What does it matter? It's a dream.

I watched him pick up another book from a shelf. On second glance, that one looked different from the others. The back was not white, but grey. I caught a glance at the title on its back, and saw that it was printed in a different font. When he opened it to flick through the pages, I could clearly see that the back was still quite stiff and unbroken.

Dark Abyss, by Bianxiao Liu. Never heard of that one before. But... if this is a dream, does that mean my mind just made this one up? Or do I just not remember that I've heard it before?

Intrigued, I stepped closer. I really wanted to have a look at it, but he put it back and suddenly turned around to face me again. He ran a hand through his tousled white hair, leaving it messier than before.

"Listen, about before... I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have told them about your memories. It should be entirely up to you if you want to share them, and you shouldn't be pressured. It's just... of course we're all pretty excited about a newcomer, and the thought that you might remember... well, it was very childish, but I guess I told them because I thought we might finally know... who of us was right."

About whether this is a prison, or hell, I remembered what he and Quill had told me about Tartaros. I suppose you wouldn't be very open to the discussion whether it might just be a dream.

"I don't know anything about this place," I said instead and shrugged. "Sorry to disappoint."

"You – no, don't think about it like that – you're not disappointing at all."

I could feel blood rush to my cheeks once again as he looked down at me with a soft smile on his lips.

"So... you really believe this place is hell?" I whispered.

"Well..." He took a deep breath before he continued to talk. "When I first awoke here, I was very confused. I didn't remember anything except for my sister being my sister, and I had these terrible, strange nightmares that haunted me. We didn't leave each other's sights for the first few days. We were just terrified of... something. I woke up screaming night after night and could not fall asleep again. She seemed to get over it after a while, but.... eventually, to avoid waking Rain with my nightmares, I wound up spending many nights here in the library, reading."

He let his gaze wander along the shelves with melancholy in his blue-green eyes.

"I liked the ancient Greek myths best. And I noticed something curious about them: I always knew that they were just that. Myths. Made up stories. I thought, without memory, stuck in this place, it should be hard to tell reality from fiction, history from fairy tales, but somehow, reading these books, I found that I was left with some kind of intuition about what seems plausible, and what must have its root in a realm of myth and magic. Like a gut feeling, hard to explain. But then I found out that Tartaros... well, the things that happen in this place, they sometimes defy that intuition. Impossible things can happen here, things that make no sense whatsoever."

If you ask me this whole place is impossible and makes no sense whatsoever, I thought.

"That made me question everything all over again. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps magic was real and the myths were true, and we died in the real world and somebody sent us all here to some kind of afterlife to punish us. And honestly, I came to prefer that idea over an even more upsetting thought – that perhaps this place is all there is. That this is reality, and all of these books are set in a world that never existed. That's what Rain and some of the others believe," he explained, tapping his fingers against the back of the Divina Comedia.

"So they believe there is nothing outside this prison?" I asked.

He nodded, and continued his tale. "When we came here, our heads were filled with nothing but vague nightmares and fear. There were no memories, nothing to anchor us to anything else, anywhere outside. Tartaros – that was the only thing we somehow all knew about this place. A name, nothing more. Tartaros was our reality. There was no reason to hold on to the belief that there was something other than this, except for my intuition that told me that something about this place... is wrong. And that this is not all there is. And now you are here. And you remember."

He fixed his mesmerizing eyes on mine again as he spoke. I could not tell if it was his velvety voice or his eyes that kept me so captivated, but there was something strange about that man. Extremely intriguing, vaguely tantalizing, but also very strange. My own intuition told me that there was something wrong about him too. Yet I couldn't avert my eyes as his expectant gaze bored into mine.

"But I cannot talk about it," I said quietly. I shuddered at the thought of Rain's death glare and what had happened when I had simply tried to speak my name.

"It doesn't matter. One of the first things you said after waking up was a quote from Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. Wherever you came from, whatever your name was or how much you remember about your past, the details don't matter to me. The fact that whatever place you come from has these stories as well still means that there really is something outside of Tartaros."

"So because of that you no longer believe that you're dead?"

"Well, not exactly." A soft smile graced his features, but there was a hint of sadness and melancholy about his eyes. "What I'm saying is, thanks to you, I can at least imagine that I was alive at some point."

"For what it's worth, I think all of you do actually remember. More than you give yourself credit for," I said, smiling back reflexively.

All things considered, I was well aware that this man was just a figment of my imagination, a character in my dream. Yet I would have told him anything just so he wouldn't stop smiling at me like that.

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "What do you mean?"

I was about to answer when suddenly, a painful shrieking sound filled the room, startling me so much that I almost jumped in surprise. Before I could cover my ears, the noise had passed again.

"What the hell-"

Cloud reached out to grab my hand, but then seemed to change his mind at the last moment once more.

"Come," he just said, and turned to leave.

"What's going on?" I asked, confused and slightly frightened by his sudden change in behavior. I caught up with him with a few quick steps.

"Sorry. We need to go," was all that he said as he pulled open the door to the atrium and ushered me outside.

I caught a quick glimpse of his face from the side as I passed. His brow was furrowed and there was a darkness in his eyes that I hadn't seen before. Something was terribly wrong.