Chương 29: 29 loop 1, part 9

The Keeper had already rearranged the corridor twice by the time I reached the end of the first hallway. Walls opened in front of me and others slid into place behind me. Stone grinding against stone, wood against wood, quick but unhurried. Ahead, new passages opened one after another. Each was lit by old enchantments buried in the ceiling, which produced a dull glow the color of weak tea. For once, nothing blue was squatting in my path like sentient roadblocks. It was the easiest stretch of my entire night.

I barely needed [Stride]. The corridors were clear and nothing was trying to bite me. I almost could have walked on my own legs and it would have been fine. Not that I was going to. But I could have. That was the point. The tether stopped pulling gently and angled sharply downward through the floor—steep, almost vertical, like Corwen was directly below me and not far away at all. The Keeper, true to her word, was funneling me toward whatever route led down.

The deeper parts of the fourth floor were different from what I'd seen. The palatial sections, the wide corridors with intact sconces, all of that was behind me. Down here, the stonework was uneven and cracked in places, with sections of floor that dropped a foot or two without warning. The terrain punished anyone who assumed floors were flat. [Stride] moved at walking pace. Walking pace was fine for hallways and classrooms. It was not fine when the [Soul Tether] was pointing almost straight down.

Every minute I spent gliding through corridors at a leisurely three inches was a minute I wasn't finding my uncle and a minute I wasn't sleeping. I needed to go faster. I needed to be able to go down. I cancelled [Stride] and stood there on the broken stone, thinking back to the spell the Keeper had cast. [Float] was a common Enchantment spell. I'd seen it in textbooks. The Keeper had used it on herself not ten minutes ago.

It targeted an object and reduced its gravitational interaction, letting it drift freely in the air. I'd never bothered learning it because it cost way more mana than it should just to walk in the air. It was why I had invented [Stride], less mana, less effort, similar effect. But desperate times called for desperate measures. I pointed my wand at my shoes and robe and cast [Float]. [Float — Enchantment] Cost: 30 mana. Reduces the target object's gravitational interaction, allowing free directional drift.

Duration: until dispelled. My robe and shoes lifted, and I lifted with them. I was free of any surface, rising until I willed myself to stop about a foot off the ground. I hung there, weightless. I swung my legs and arms like I was swimming. I was sure I looked ridiculous. I finally found my footing and started walking. A door appeared at the end of the corridor. The wall rearranged and it was simply there, as if it had always been and I just hadn't been paying attention. I floated through.

The room on the other side was large and warm. It smelled like cinnamon and—oddly enough—cheese. Long tables ran the length of the space, scarred with burn marks and stained with substances I didn't want to think about. They looked gross. Shelves lined every wall, but these weren't the regular library stacks I'd been passing through all night. These were spellbooks. These were instructional texts that I had waited my entire life to find. I was in an alchemical kitchen dedicated to the study of food magic.

I almost started weeping. Every type of food appliance you could imagine was in here. But I ignored it all in favor of the shelves. Without thinking, I started pulling book titles. Culinary Enchantments for the Discerning Palate. Thermal Regulation in Bread and Pastry. On the Conjuration of Broth from Base Elements. One entire shelf was dedicated to preservation magic. Another was focused on flavor enhancement.

A third appeared to be the magical catalogue of every cheese known to man ending in a spell book titled Ex Nihilo Caseum. And then I found a title that stopped me midair. Summoning Food: A Practitioner's Guide to Culinary Creation and Manifestation. I literally had dreams about this. I grabbed the book and put it under my arm. I didn't fucking care. I had it. And then the [Soul Tether] tugged the hardest it had the entire time I'd been following it. It was like my uncle's heart had stopped. I took off at once.

I exited the kitchen into another hallway. Three doors stood open on each side, and I did my best to ignore them in favor of my uncle. But curiosity proved too much, and I took a quick glance into each one. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The first was an armory. Racks of weapons sat behind glass cases, most of them old enough that the glass itself had yellowed.

Swords and staves hung in racks alongside weapons I didn't have names for, including a thing that was mostly hooks. A bearded axe dangled near the back at an angle from a single mount, its lower hook catching the light as I passed. [Soul Sense] pinged on it, faint but unmistakable. The axe had a soul. Several of the others did, too, weaker signatures buried under decades of neglect. The second was a workshop, cavernous, with stone workbenches and partially assembled constructs standing in rows.

Humanoid frames of stone and metal ranged from knee height to twice my size. None were active. Tools were laid out, a layer of dust over each one. The constructs had empty chest cavities, open and waiting. It was a golem workshop. But I didn't have time to stand and gawk. I kept going. The third room was circular, lined with crystalline structures set into the walls. They were connected to each other by copper-threaded conduits that ran into the floor.

The crystals had gone dark a long time ago, but the infrastructure was unmistakable. I'd spent two nights reading about exactly this. These were mana batteries. Liquid mana storage, like the research from Theron's papers. Except these were older than Theron's experiments. Someone had built this a hundred years ago, and it had worked, given the pipes that connected this room to the golem workshop. I stopped for a second to consider what these rooms all meant.

I'd just floated past an armory, a golem workshop, and a mana battery chamber. None of these belonged in a library. But Therumia's Lost Library had never been just a library. She'd built a queendom on top of it—and queens needed armies, and armies were extremely expensive. They required research, preparation, and building. The Keeper had led me through the queen's private workspace, and I couldn't tell if it was efficient routing or a purposeful tour. At the end of the hallway was an old ladder.

The rungs were corroded but solid enough, iron bolted into the rock face at intervals that suggested someone taller than me had installed them. The hole in the floor dropped into deep darkness. My marble lit the first few rungs and then gave up. The tether plunged straight down through the opening. The ladder was maybe twenty feet or thirty feet tall. I crawled down one rung at a time, using [Float] to ensure I didn't go too quickly. I had reached the fifth floor.

The corridor was raw stone, rougher cut than anything above. I could immediately tell the Keeper's influence was gone. There was nothing rearranged around me. Something shuffled in the walls to my right. Stone scraped against stone, and a pale blue hand, covered in bandages, started pushing through a gap between two slabs. I didn't wait for the rest of it. I pointed my wand at the floor beneath the gap and cast [Slick], and then I ran. Or floated. Walked very fast through the air.

Whatever the correct verb was for a man moving his legs to fly a foot off the ground. Behind me, a Frollart hit frictionless stone and made a sound like a wet bag of sand falling. The tether pulled me forward. I followed it, casting another [Slick] behind me. The Frollarts could have the fifth floor. I just needed the part with my uncle in it. The rough-cut stone opened into a space that didn't make sense. I was in another library. I was starting to get tired of libraries.

Shelves stretched in every direction, tall enough that [Wideview] couldn't find the tops of them. It made no sense. Or it would have, if magic wasn't a thing, because there were clearly some sort of magical resizing shenanigans going on. The architecture was old. Older than the school. Older than the queendom built on top of it, if the rumors were true. The shelves were carved from stone with ridges running through it like growth rings in a tree. But the books were weird. And their sizes made no sense at all.

A volume the size of a dining table drifted past me at head height. Its pages turned slowly, as if an invisible reader were flipping through. I flinched as it hit me. But it passed through my shoulder and kept going, like it wasn't there. I pinched myself to make sure I hadn't fallen back asleep. But I was awake. I was still physical, so it wasn't me. The shelves were real. The floor was real and solid. The books around me were not. They glowed faintly, pale and translucent. They were the ghosts of books.

What the fuck? A creature walked between the shelves to my left. It was roughly humanoid but proportioned wrong, with too-long arms and a head bent at an angle no neck should allow. Its blocky head was pressed against a phantom stack of volumes. It moved at a steady working pace, reshelving the ghostly books as it went. It walked through a stone pillar without breaking stride and didn't react to my presence at all. More of the creatures moved deeper in, drifting between the stacks, reading, carrying, sorting.

A massive library was still in operation, staffed by creatures that weren't entirely here. Another book floated through me, this time hitting me in the face. I stopped floating. My brain needed to catch up with what my eyes were telling it. The few physical books that existed down here were scattered among the phantoms. The real ones had dust on them. The ghost ones drifted through shelves, through walls, and through me. I didn't understand any of this. A notification pulsed at the edge of my vision. [Quest Update! Step One Complete: The Lost Library — Located] [Step Two: Enter the Dungeon] I stared at it. It was the quest I'd received when I'd entered the restricted levels. The one I'd dismissed because I had better things to do—like follow my uncle into a murder. And now, without really trying, I'd finished the first step. My kind of quest. I dismissed the notification. I'd have time to figure out whatever this was later. The tether tugged again, and I rushed forward. The shelves thinned. The phantom activity faded.

The space opened into a wide clearing between the stacks, and at the far end of it, a pair of doors stood closed. They were massive, stone and iron, tall enough for something three times my height to walk through without ducking. The tether ran across the clearing and stopped. My uncle was on the floor. He lay face down, one arm extended, clutching his cloak. The other was tucked under him. A protective ward shimmered over him—a pale dome of gold, cast at some point before he'd collapsed.

The tether connected directly to his chest. The pulse was threadbare. The ward was close to shattering. And it was easy to see why. Something giant was hitting the ward.