Leo blinked. "An anchor for what?"
The old man let out a breath that seemed to carry the weight of centuries. "To hold a truth in place. To keep a terrible, beautiful secret from washing away."
He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping, though the library was empty around them.
"I have searched for a very long time," the old man continued, his eyes scanning Leo's face, looking for something he clearly wasn't finding. "For someone with fire in their heart. A will to change the world. A champion."
He paused, and a hollow chuckle escaped him. "I found only ambition. Greed. Souls that could be twisted. People who would use the power to become kings, tyrants, gods."
Leo just stared, baffled. This was far beyond the usual weirdness of a slow Tuesday. "I think you have the wrong person. I'm not a champion. I just... put books away."
"Precisely," The old man said, and for the first time, a spark of genuine, if bleak, amusement lit his aged eyes. "You have no grand design. No dream to corrupt. You are... empty of that particular poison. You are a still point. An anchor."
He seemed to come to a decision then, a final, fateful choice made not out of hope, but out of utter exhaustion.
"On a whim, then," The old man whispered, the words meant only for himself. "Let the universe's last hope rest on the shoulders of a man who asks for none of it."
He looked directly at Leo, his gaze suddenly sharp and focused, piercing through the quiet library air.
"Listen closely," the old man said, his voice gaining a strange, resonant quality. "This is my final gift, and my final sin. This has always been true."
He spoke the words, clear and absolute:
"You have always been able to see the world's cracks."
A strange silence fell. The words hung in the air, then seemed to sink into the very fabric of the space around them, leaving no echo.
The old man sagged, as if a colossal pressure had just been lifted from his soul. A profound peace settled on his features. He simply nodded once to a thoroughly confused Leo, turned, and walked out of the Grand Meridian Library for the last time.
Leo stood behind the desk, utterly still. The words felt... odd. Like an itch in his mind he couldn't scratch.
But nothing happened. The world looked the same. The books were silent on their shelves.
Shaking his head, he wrote the old man off as just another eccentric. He finished closing up, stepped out into the evening, and went home, completely unaware that the world he knew had just been fundamentally rewritten.