Chương 28: 28 Loop 1, Part 8

"You know my uncle?" I said.

"Do you know where he is?" The voice paused, as if considering her words carefully. There was no telling what I was going to learn from her, and how much was going to be true.

"Yes," she said.

"To both."

"Where is he?"

"Most likely below us. He descended to the fifth floor about eighteen hours ago. He went to the entrance of the dungeon, where he meditated before casting a full spell I didn't recognize. He then meditated further before casting a second. And then his presence went still." Two spells, that was it? Well, whatever my uncle was doing down there, it wasn't simple.

"Huh? His presence went still?" What did that mean? Eighteen hours ago had been during breakfast. Where was he now? Still in that dungeon? That didn't make sense to me. Why didn't he come out?

"His mana signature dropped to near nothing, and he has not moved since. I can feel his soul slowly dimming." Something cold settled in my chest that had nothing to do with mana. I sat down at the edge of the desk. A small sconce lay unlit behind me. The wood was cold under my hands, and I stared at my uncle's handwriting on the scattered papers. He had written them in a shorthand of his design, one I had never wanted to learn.

"How do you know all of this?" I asked her.

"Because I am the Library. Well, rather, its Keeper." There wasn't a hint of arrogance or emphasis in her voice. She was simply stating a fact.

"Keeper?" I prodded her to continue. The book on the desk shivered. Its pages fanned open, riffling through themselves as if caught in a wind that didn't exist. And then she said, " [Float]." I felt the mana leave her. A tiny, efficient expenditure, maybe 10 mana. My kind of spell. The book rose off the desk, drifted to the height of my shoulder, and hung there, spine vertical, pages half open as if it were enough. The Keeper was an enchanted book that could cast her own spells.

I was going to have a lot of questions about this later.

"Every corridor, shifting passage, and dead end you walked through tonight was my doing. I was guiding you here."

"Guiding," I said.

"Is that what you're calling it? Because from my perspective, it felt a lot more like being funneled through a series of increasingly terrible options by someone who wanted me dead."

"I didn't want you dead."

"Well, you certainly could have picked a shorter path."

"The shorter paths were all occupied." She could have been reading a train schedule.

"The Frollarts have been agitated since the mana surge this morning. Every route I opened for you, I had to close behind you, and still, you were being swarmed. The alternative was letting them group up more, which would have ended this conversation before it started." I thought about the knuckles on stone. The shrieking. I thought about the multiple dead ends. The fact that I had been so close to my uncle, and yet prevented time and again. That had all been her.

"You can move the walls."

"I can move almost everything within my domain. The architecture responds to me. But I cannot leave this room. Unfortunately, my soul is anchored to this book, and the book is anchored to this study. Beyond these walls, I am limited, despite my power."

"And the Frollarts? If you have all this control, why didn't you stop them?"

"I can't directly influence them. Or any other monster in my domain, for that matter. Sure, I can redirect them, but I cannot control them entirely. They are a creation of the dungeon below me." The monsters weren't hers. They belonged to something underneath her, which she couldn't control. Which meant the thing I'd been running from all night was a symptom of a bigger problem. Fantastic. There was that word again. Dungeon. The quest notification I'd dismissed on the stairs flashed through my memory.

Something about the dungeon. I hadn't bothered reading the full text. It sounded like a lot of work. It sounded like punishment.

"What dungeon?"

"This Library is built on top of one. The dungeon has a soul of its own—ancient, vast, and deeply unpleasant. It has been absorbing ambient mana from the surrounding environment for aeons, and uses it to generate creatures. These Frollarts are the lowest tier, and always manage to find a way up into my floors. The dungeon produces them as a defense response."

"A defense response against what?"

"Us." The book drifted past me while she spoke, circling the room in a slow orbit. She paused at a shelf, hovered there as if reading her own neighbors, and then continued on. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Lovely. I was sitting in a building that was built on top of a dangerous dungeon, and it considered us enemies. This was going to require a lot of work, wasn't it?

This was the worst library I had ever been in, and I had once spent three hours in a Kratosian public reading room that didn't even have fucking chairs.

"How old is it?" I asked. Sure, I was asking questions now, but as soon as this conversation ended, I was going back to sleep. As long as I could.

"Older than the Library. Older than the school."

"The dungeon proper starts on Level 5," the Keeper continued.

"Everything above is the Library, and everything below is the dungeon. The Library was originally built to study and contain the dungeon."

"And people just let a dungeon sit under a school?" I wasn't that shocked, to be honest.

"The school came much later, and besides, not many people know about this dungeon at all. Decades upon decades upon decades of building, and… well, here we are." The book had stopped moving. She hung perfectly still near the far wall, pages closed, as if she had drawn herself up to her full height. It was an absurd sight to see. She paused long enough for me to notice she was choosing what I got to know.

"I even knew of a queen who ventured into the dungeon. She emerged with enough power to nearly conquer the known world." Did she think I didn't know about Therumia? I was a little tired of her talking down to me. At this point, however, it would require effort to change her mind about my personality, and... well. Yeah." Nearly conquer?"

"Well, she succeeded at first, and then she lost it all. But that is a story for another time. One I'm sure would bore you anyway." The Keeper clearly knew things she wasn't sharing with me, and she was being deliberately obtuse. But I wasn't going to push. I had more immediate problems than half-hidden history lessons.

"My uncle," I said, changing topics slightly.

"Why does he go down there?"

"Your uncle visits the dungeon on the fifth level every time he comes to the Library. He sits in front of the entrance and meditates. And then he casts that powerful spell. I do not know what spell he casts, but the expenditure is massive. Whatever it is, it is beyond anything in my experience. And my experience is considerable. The Library walls shake every time." Corwen had been doing this regularly. Coming down here, sitting in front of a dungeon entrance, and casting something enormous every time he visited.

I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but it was clear. This was why I was here now. Back on Monday. There were questions I should have been asking. What spell? Why the dungeon entrance? Why every time? What was Corwen doing down here that nobody at the school knew about, and how long had he been doing it? But I already kind of knew. Not the full details or mechanics, but I knew my uncle, and I knew what [Soul Tether] meant. And something had to have brought me back in time.

Asking the Keeper would make it real in a way I wasn't ready for. So I did what I always did with uncomfortable truths. I let them sit in the corner of the room and pretended they weren't looking at me. The Keeper seemed to understand that I wasn't going to ask, because she moved on without waiting for me to. The Keeper had felt it every time Corwen cast his spell. I wondered if she knew what the spell did, or if she even cared.

"Except this time was different," the Keeper said.

"This time, the mana he spent was nearly twice his normal amount. The Library buckled. The Frollart population has gotten so out of control." The book was beside me now. I hadn't noticed her drift back. I'd been too deep in my own thoughts. She hung at the edge of the desk, motionless, pages slightly parted, like she was waiting for me to say something. Nearly twice the normal amount. I stopped breathing. I was pretty sure I knew what happened. [Soul Tether] reserved 25 percent of my mana pool.

That was the cost of maintaining the connection for me. But [Soul Tether] wasn't just a passive link. It was a conduit. An active bridge between two souls, between mine and Corwen's. Whatever spell he had cast, the tether must have drawn on both ends of the connection. The spell cast twice. Once for him, once for me, doubling the cost. It was the only explanation I could think of, at least on short notice, and without a ton of research into an already experimental spell.

[Soul Tether] was still pulling me toward him. He was alive. That was enough for now. I didn't say any of this. I sat on the edge of his desk, in his study, surrounded by his handwriting, and the Keeper didn't interrupt. I appreciated that. Most people couldn't resist filling silence. She let it sit. He was going to end up like my father.

"I need to get to the dungeon," I said.

"That is inadvisable."

"Noted. How do I get there?" I stood and looked down at the gold thread. It ran through my chest and angled sharply into the floor. I didn't want to think about what that meant, so naturally, it was the only thing I could think about.

"Follow the tether. It will take you through the Library floors to the stairwell that descends to Level 5. I will keep the corridors ahead of you as clear as I can, and hopefully the Frollarts will stay behind you. But the mana surge has unsettled things deeper than the Frollarts. I cannot promise you a safe passage."

"What kind of things?"

"The kind that are normally kept close to the dungeon. The creatures it produces are made of its mana. If they stray too far, that mana bleeds off permanently. The dungeon doesn't let that happen. It keeps them contained—not for our benefit, but for its own."

"And the surge?"

"Disrupted its hold. Some of them may have slipped loose. The dungeon entrance is large, and it is outside my reach. Whatever is down there, you may have to walk past it." I stood up from the desk. My legs had opinions about this. Practically begging me to cast [Stride]. I obliged them. The gold thread pulsed through my chest, faint and steady, angling down through the floor toward wherever my uncle was slowly dying.

"One more thing," I said.

"Yes?"

"If I don't come back, you just sit here forever alone?"

"Yes."

"Sounds lonely."

"You have no idea."

"No, that sounds amazing." I picked up my marble and floated out of my uncle's study. The corridor ahead was empty, and the Keeper had already started rearranging the walls.