Chương 18: 18 Loop 0, Part 18

The Archives were as quiet as they were empty. I could only make out three other students up on a higher level. The rest of the world was burning down, and here, you couldn't tell. I came through the main entrance. Should have cast [Stride], but [Stride] was a gliding spell. I didn't have time for its top speed. So I limped as fast as I could. Grimm materialized at the front desk as soon as I approached. One moment, the desk was empty. The next, he was there, hands clasped behind his back.

He was wearing the same flat mouth and half-lidded eyes as every other time I had seen him. He was like that. Never changing, no matter who he was looking at or the state they were in.

"Mr. Yarrow, the Archives will be closing at midnight tonight. No exceptions, even for you."

"I need to get into the restricted levels." He studied me. I must have looked worse than I thought I did, because his bored expression almost cracked for a second.

"The restricted levels require faculty authorization for all students. You know this."

"My uncle is the faculty authorization, and is currently being held in the infirmary under arrest for the crime of saving two thousand people from a fucking dragon. So unless you've got another headmaster lying around, I'm going to need you to make an exception."

"A dragon," he said. His voice was flat. Somehow, he hadn't heard. Or he had, and hadn't cared. Either was plausible with Grimm. I sighed.

"Kalin Tuffet summoned a shadow dragon in the Crucible. It destroyed the arena and killed people. My uncle fought it and won, and now his mana channels are collapsing and he's dying. My roommate jumped in front of a breath attack that had my name on it, because he had worse survival instincts than I do and mine are terrible when people are in trouble. I can't fix that.

But my uncle's still breathing, and I'd like to keep at least one person I care about in that category tonight before I devolve into a hysterical mess. You have to move. I can't let someone else die like this." His face was still expressionless, but he reacted to my plea.

"And you believe the restricted levels contain something that will help you?"

"I know they do. I found research on mana channel reinforcement Monday night, and the part I need is in the restricted section. It says redacted. There's more research down there. I know it." Grimm held my eyes for a long moment. Too long, honestly. And then he crushed my dreams.

"No." But I wasn't going to take that for an answer.

"Grimm, I swear to Therumia, if you don't open that fucking door, I will enchant every Hessa-damned book in this library to switch places when you teleport. You'll spend the rest of your career trying to find anything, and every time you blink to a new shelf, the whole system will reshuffle behind you. I will make this building personally hostile to you. I have the skill, and I definitely have the spite. Test me." He laughed. A single, quiet exhale through his nose. He produced the key. From where, I had no idea.

He didn't have pockets.

"Try not to lose anything," he said.

"I never lose anything."

"My missing books say otherwise." What missing books? The iron door opened, and I went down. I didn't exactly know where to go, but I knew how the library was structured. Monday night, I had followed my uncle down these stairs, watching through [Wideview] as he descended past Level 2 and Level 3. And then he murdered a man. And now here I was, trying to stop him from being the one killed. The restricted levels were dark.

Every shelf I needed to read required [Light], and every time I cast [Light], it cost 3 mana I didn't have. I checked my pool. I really only had six casts in me, which was a problem, because [Enlarge] cost a little bit more. If I ran into a pre-war research paper, I'd have to use it, because they always believed that making things readable was a sign of intellectual weakness. I wish I was joking. I started to cast my first [Light], then cut myself off before I could finish. Wait. An idea came to me.

I cast [Marble], and then I cast the enchantment version of the spell [Light]: [Illuminate]. [Illuminate — Enchantment] Cost: 12 mana. Enchants an object to shed steady, even light. Duration: until dispelled. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. The orb in my hand started glowing, brightening into a solid white sphere. It took up most of my mana, but it solved my little problem. Damn, I could have cast [Stride]. My ankle throbbed.

Last night, I had found the Theron article by following a chain of references through three different texts on mana flow dynamics. Finally landing on On the Refraction of Mana Through Parallel Channels, Volume 14 of the Therumian Journal. I went for the unredacted version first, because some lazy part of me wanted to start with a source I already knew would pay off. Mana batteries had worked — the failure was the vessel.

Liquid mana corroded metal, bled into anything porous, and the only material inert enough to hold it was glass. Glass that shattered under load. Cassian had pushed for scale, and the whole thing detonated. But last night, I'd hit a wall. Souls could stabilize mana. However, stabilizing mana in a battery and stabilizing it in a person's collapsing channels were two different problems, and I hadn't found the bridge. So I'd gone to bed, because putting things off had always been the one discipline I was best at.

Tonight, I couldn't walk away. I followed Theron's references again, skimming for anything I'd missed yesterday. This led me to two new books. Aldenmoor's Principles of Vessel Integrity ran two hundred pages on the tensile properties of ordinary drinking glasses, urns, and other containers. In the ten minutes I wasted skimming through, I learned more about silica than any person should have to, and exactly nothing about souls.

A jointly authored survey called "Mana Containment in Practice" was worse: forty contributors, none of whom agreed with each other. Together they produced a document that read like a dinner party argument transcribed by someone who hated everyone at the table. The charts contradicted each other. One was printed upside down, and I couldn't tell whether that was an error or a point the author was making. Neither had what I needed. I almost put the book back. Dead ends in books were comfortable to me.

They gave me permission to stop. But tonight, stopping meant my uncle died in a poor excuse for a jail cell. So I did what I had put off last night, and went searching through the paper that had told me no. Monday night, I had skipped straight to the appendix, because I skipped to the end of everything. You know, why read the whole story if the ending sucks?

The appendix had pointed somewhere I couldn't follow: a single restricted line where Theron's conclusion should have been, the results of his whole research sealed off behind it. So tonight, I went looking for it. I found the restricted copy shelved sideways behind a stack of journals nobody had touched in decades. Thank Therumia for decent organization systems, though I was kicking myself for not creating a locating spell.

There was a "WITHDRAWN" stamp on the cover and, underneath it, the pages that were gone from the other copy. Re-reading anything was, on principle, against my religion. I did it anyway, twice, on the floor with my [Illuminate] d orb burning next to me. The container is the failure. I have written this line over and over again, striking it through each time, because there's something that feels wrong. But I can't figure it out. The truth is, the mana holds. The person's channels hold. The battery's channels hold.

Everything in the design holds. Except the vessel. Once the mana is delivered, the structure, the integrity, degrades. Liquid mana is not inert. It remembers once having belonged to a mage. Sealed in glass, it is like pressurized gas. It strains toward the nearest soul. And finding none, bounces back, moving faster and faster. I have watched a jar do this. I will not write down what it left behind. But the solution is not just a better jar. Sure, a soul will hold mana that no vessel can.

But a soul cannot be stored. Souls must be where they must be. No one quite knows why certain objects have souls. Why humans have souls. If it were just a matter of mana, this would be an easy solve. I have tested this again and again. But the rarity of containers that already have their own souls leaves me doubtful at ever making this reproducible. Indeed, Cassian Yarrow will not fund what cannot be sold by the crate. A jar scales. A soul does not. So we are to try enchanting the jar to be larger.

And wait for the soul to grow. I sat on the stone floor and stared at the page. There it was, the whole dirty truth, finally laid out in front of me. And I knew the problem immediately. I read the name again: Cassian Yarrow. Yarrow was not a common name. You didn't run into it at the market or on the average roster. There were exactly three people besides me that I knew of who carried it. One, my father, was dead. The second ran the school I was sitting in.

And the third was an uncle neither my father nor Corwen had ever talked about much. They had been triplets. I had always known that. What I had not known, what nobody had ever fucking mentioned, was that the third triplet had funded the man who blew up half of Freehaven. I tried to do the math. My father would have been twenty-five. And Cassian? Somehow, he had money? Enough to bankroll Theron's research, enough to push for bigger batteries, enough to turn a breakthrough into a crater? And then what?

He left my father to work himself to death in a Kratosian factory? Three texts, cross-referenced by hand. If my uncle lived through this, I was going to bill him for the effort. I didn't think I was angry. But I slammed my fist on the ground. Why had my uncle kept this from me? Nobody had thought this information was worth sharing with me. And I didn't have time to deal with it. I just wanted a nap. Why couldn't today have been an easy day? Cassian had been at fault. He wanted it bigger, so Theron made it bigger.

It was clear to me that the answer was obvious. Don't use a jar. Theron's failure came from the same failure that I had seen time and time and time again. When you mass-produce low-quality work, you mass-produce low-quality results. The thing people didn't get about my philosophy: I was not about low quality, no matter what Mela or Sara or anyone else had to say. I was about the minimum quality to be decent for the least amount of effort. There was an important distinction.

With the answer sitting in front of me, I sat and pondered. [Soul Tether] could fix this, but how? How could I save my uncle? A soul that could reach another soul and not let go. It clicked into place. [Soul Sense], our family trait. Something I thought was useless, other than perhaps talking with flagstones. A magical sense that nobody had a use for, especially not me. But that was just it. I had been handed the solution. Part of [Soul Sense] was being able to see souls.

And with [Soul Tether], you could direct souls. Cassian had the same trait I did. But a soul wasn't something you could sell by the crate, so of course he'd never bothered with it. It made me realize the truth. I didn't need a battery. Because I was one. My mana could be channeled straight into my uncle's collapsing system. And my soul would hold everything stable. It would just be me, emptying my pool into his and hoping it'd be enough to restart his regen. The cost was obvious to me.

If I didn't do this right, I'd be just as dead as my uncle. But whatever the risk, a single thought came to my mind. I could save my uncle. I could solve mana exhaustion.