When he opened his eyes, the library was gone. He stood in a desert of white sand under a black sun. Around him were millions of people, all weeping, all holding identical scrolls. A voice—or perhaps a vibration in the sand beneath his feet—spoke:

For three days, the other Vatican librarians found him sitting in his chair, alive but unblinking, tears of black fluid streaming down his face. On his desk, the Osee Bible had opened itself to a final page—a mirror. And in the mirror’s reflection, Matteo’s pupils had contracted into letters.

And somewhere, on a desert that does not exist, Matteo is still writing—using his own dissolving body as ink—the true first line of the Osee Bible, the line that no eye was ever meant to see:

That night, he broke the seal.