Chương 25: 25 Loop 1, Part 5

The gold thread pulled me forward and I followed it. Because wandering the Lost Library without a direction was objectively worse than wandering with one. I mean, there'd be so many different decisions I'd have to make. Left tunnel or right tunnel or straight. It was like this over and over, fork after fork after fork. I could've been wandering for hours aimlessly. That was why I was aimlessly following the gold thread. It was the perfectly rational option.

That had nothing to do with the fact that I could feel my uncle's heartbeat on the other end of it. That was what I had finally decided was the source of the pulsing. The deeper corridors of the third floor had lost even the courtesy of pretending to be lit, so I had cast [Marble] and [Illuminate] sometime after I saw the last torch. Technically, I didn't need light, because the gold thread still led me forward, but damn if I wasn't used to seeing things. [Wideview] was practically useless now. But I kept it on.

I held my glowing orb aloft in front of me. The gold thread didn't care about the Library. Or its walls. It cut through everything. The passage turned left, and the thread went straight. The ceiling dropped, and the thread ignored it. After following the thread for a good twenty minutes, there was another change in the Library. How so much fit down here, I didn't understand, except to say magic. The upper levels had at least pretended to be a functioning institution.

There were books on shelves, in rows, with a filing system that almost made sense. But this deep, books were stacked into walls instead of shelves, and there were just so many. I didn't even know the school had this many books, let alone that this many had ever been made. My illuminated marble caught spines wedged sideways between stones like mortar. A book wasn't mortar. And there was no way it was structurally sound.

Somebody with more ambition than sense had disagreed, and here we were, decades or centuries later, walking through the consequences. The tether pulsed, slow and shallow, as I continued to follow. I kept walking, faster than I usually walked, which was still not fast by any reasonable standard. But for me, it bordered on athletic. Because I was trapped down here, I might as well have tried to find my uncle.

The thread cut through the left wall at a downward angle, which meant Corwen was somewhere below me and farther in. Why it couldn't have led me down at some other point, I didn't know. But the deeper corridors branched and rebranched, and the tether ignored all of it. I wasn't thinking. That should have worried me. I was always thinking. Thinking was the only form of effort I respected, and I did it constantly. Sitting or standing or walking. Or when someone else was talking.

But right now, my legs were moving and my brain was quiet, and I was just going to keep walking until one of those things changed. The hallway I was on was longer than it should have been. I noticed because I'd been counting my steps, which I did when I was definitely not anxious and merely passing the time. At step forty-seven, I passed a shelf with a cracked blue vase on the third tier. At step eighty-three, I passed the same shelf with the same cracked blue vase on the same third tier. Shit. I stopped.

Looked behind me, and then ahead. Fucking portal. I wondered how long I'd been walking down it aimlessly.

"Very clever," I said. The Lost Library was supposed to be like this. Every text I'd ever skimmed on the subject agreed.

"Lost" in the title didn't just reference the fact that nobody knew where the room you needed was. It was called the Lost Library because you got fucking lost in it. The deeper you went, the more things shifted. Areas reconfigured around you. Maps started contradicting each other. I'd treated this information the way I treated most academic warnings: as somebody else's problem. And now it was mine, which I probably deserved. In the middle, between the two duplicate sections, was a left path and a right path.

I turned down the left passage because the tether said to go that way, and I was out of better ideas. Six stone steps descended ahead of me, evenly spaced and looking perfectly normal. I took them two at a time. At the bottom, where a door or hallway or literally anything useful should have been, the sixth step ended in a flat wall of featureless stone. The gold tether pierced directly through the center.

The staircase had obviously been built to go somewhere, and then someone or something had sealed it over before anyone used it. I put my hand against the wall. It was cold and solid. I climbed back up. The passage I'd come from had rearranged itself while my back was turned. The blue vase was gone, the shelves were different, and there were three corridors now. I picked the left one because the other two angled far away from where the tether was trying to take me.

It lasted forty steps before it curved right, then right again, depositing me back at the top of the six stairs I had just climbed. The same damn wall waited at the bottom. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"You're hilarious," I told the Library. It didn't respond. The stone around me stayed the same. And the tether kept running through. I tried the right corridor. This one went farther, maybe sixty steps, before the ceiling started dropping. As if someone had built this passage for people who got shorter the farther they walked. By step fifty, I was crouching. By step sixty, I was on my hands and knees, holding my glowing marble out in front of me like a lantern. And the passage was still narrowing.

And then, of course, the ceiling finally met the floor in a dead end. I backed out on my hands and knees, which was as dignified as it sounds, and returned to find the corridor arrangement had changed yet again. Two passages instead of three. And the staircase was gone. The Lost Library was shifting around me, and every shift was deliberate. Every path I took, the Library offered me a worse version of the same dead end. And every time I turned around, it reshuffled the options.

I stood in the corridor junction and did what I did best. Nothing. I leaned against the nearest wall and let the cold stone press through my shirt while the Library made the next move. I was done feeding it wrong answers. It took almost a full minute. But the left corridor, the one that had tried to flatten me, shuddered. The walls groaned. The stone shifted, and the angle changed. The passage that opened up wasn't the one that had been there before. Maybe the Library was testing persistence. Or maybe patience.

Either way, I was through. I followed the new passage. It went down at a gentle slope, curving left and left, almost as if it were a ramp. After another thirty steps, it opened into a wider corridor lined with shelves, stacked so deep with books that no wall was visible behind them. The tether cut through the space cleanly, angling forward and down. Finally, I felt like I was making actual progress. I kept walking, and I kept one hand on my wand. I heard the tiny pitter-patter of their knuckles before I saw it.

The sound was blunt and fleshy dragging across stone, like someone was walking on bruised, ruddy, bandaged knuckles. The sound came from around a bend ahead of me. A Frollart. I recognized it from every Dungeon Studies textbook I'd ever fallen asleep on. Chapter 9, right between goblins and trolls. Don't ask me why the monster textbooks weren't alphabetical. I'd only ever seen illustrated woodcuts, and somehow they were less ugly than the real thing.

It looked like someone had tried to build a frost troll out of mismatched parts and given up when they'd reached knee height. It stood in the middle of the corridor.

"Stood" was being generous. It squatted there, pale blue and fat, with arms that hung past its knees. Its knuckles rested flat on the stone, and its feet were up in the air, swinging back and forth. Its heavy monobrow overshadowed a wide, slack mouth that was unpleasant to look at. It had blunt teeth and gave off about as much menace as a footstool. The bane of adventurers everywhere, and of course one had found me. We looked at each other, and neither of us moved.

"Move," I said to the beast. It didn't move. The tether pulsed behind my ribs, aimed past this thing and deeper into the dark. I didn't have time for this. I tried to go around it. The Frollart was knee-height and approximately as wide as it was tall. This left a gap between it and the right wall that a person with any amount of dignity would not have attempted. I had no dignity. I had a gold thread pulling me toward my uncle and a limited supply of effort. I went for the gap.

It shuffled sideways with an unhurried confidence. It planted one fat blue hand on the wall, and the other stayed on the floor. I gripped my wand. [Trip] was right there. I spent barely half a second considering if the spell would work or not, and then I spied the bandages on its hands. Its knuckles were wrapped in grimy strips of cloth, wound tight around both fists. They looked like they had been applied once and never changed. Dungeon hygiene at its finest. I pointed my wand at the Frollart's hands." [Trip]."

The bandages on its left hand seized, twisted, and knotted themselves into the bandages on the right. Both fists snapped together like someone had tied a bow between them. The Frollart looked down at its bound knuckles with its mouth hanging open and its brow crumpled. Every muscle in its face was straining to process something it had never had to process before. It tried to pull its hands apart. The cloth held.

It tried again, harder, and the motion tipped it forward because its entire method of locomotion relied on those knuckles working. It wobbled, overcorrected, and sat down hard on the stone with a wet thud. I stepped around it and continued following the tether. I made it maybe ten steps before a thought occurred to me. The bandages would hold for a while, but [Trip] wasn't permanent. It tied what was already there, and that grimy cloth didn't look like it had long left in this world.

And sure, the Frollart was dumb, but it had teeth, and it would eventually work out that teeth could chew through cloth. I needed it to stay where it was and not come waddling after me. I turned back, pointed my wand at the stone beneath the Frollart, and cast [Slick]. The stone went frictionless. 10 mana was plenty for a patch this size. Enchantment worked best on material that didn't resist it. A stone floor that had been bearing weight for however long this place had been here gave way easily.

The Frollart tried to stand. Its feet slid. Its bound hands, still knotted together, pushed against the floor and lost tracion. It rolled onto its chest and tried to crawl, but that required friction, too. It lay there, sliding in a slow circle on its belly. I made it another ten steps past the thing when it started screaming. It sounded like the noise a kettle would make if you let the water evaporate too long. A high, wobbling shriek that bounced off every wall in the corridor.

The acoustics down here made it feel like the sound would travel for miles. It carried through the dark, and carried far. I stood very still. The shrieking stopped. Somewhere to my left, behind a wall of shelved books, something shuffled. Books started falling from shelf after shelf. And then I heard that noise. The noise of Frollart knuckles on stone. Ahead of me, past the next bend, more knuckles. Behind me, past the Frollart still sliding on its patch of frictionless floor.

"Oh," I said.

"Oh, no."