Chapter 12: The Library

Steve steps through the front door into Father’s Library, a vast pyramidical universe outside normal physics. Carolyn changes into a robe, identifies the place as now hers, and hurries him along a glowing jade thoroughfare toward a towering, unsupported spiral stair leading to a jade disk beneath a suspended model of the universe.

On the platform they find Mithraganhi, once the literal sun. Fearing Mithraganhi’s loyalty might enable Father’s return, Carolyn abruptly slits her carotid despite Steve’s protests. As Mithraganhi dies asking why, Carolyn insists Steve cannot grasp the stakes, and explains Father’s ruthlessness with an example: he burned out Michael’s eyes nightly until Michael “was motivated,” with wounds healed each morning.

Carolyn then addresses David’s fate: she froze him at the “upper limit of suffering,” creating an eternal link to anguish that accumulates infinite energy. She pushes the black sphere into the heavens, announcing David will become the new sun—hot and dangerous but nearly lightless—and promises to fix planetary orbits later.

They barbecue on the platform. Carolyn offers Steve any gift—immortality, invincibility, unimaginable power—and, at his prompting, speaks extensively of the siblings’ training, the bull, Margaret’s unraveling, Michael’s feral gaze, David’s atrocities, and Erwin’s role. Steve responds with compassion but learns he was even resurrected at one point, a truth he chooses not to hear in detail.

In dormitories beneath the jade, Steve watches news as the black sun appears and the world struggles for explanations. Seeking Carolyn, he finds her hovering and spinning amid the stacks, bloodstained, shouting in unknown tongues, her shadow falling over the universe. Shaken, he returns to the suite, vomits, and watches a physicist concede that science cannot explain the event. Concluding that Carolyn’s “vocabulary” and sanity are alien to his, Steve realizes he must act.