Chương 85: Chapter 18: A New Routine

Selena did not grant him a single further glance. She continued on her way to the doors of the library, that sanctuary of stone and knowledge. Upon reaching the service desk, the same young librarian with a weary face looked at her with a neutral expression. —I need books on dream interpretation. Selena requested with a slight bow of respect, and before the man could consult his lists, she added with a firmness that admitted no reply: —I have access to everything. The librarian nodded, unfazed.

—From the eighth floor to the fifteenth floor. He spoke with monotony; his face filled with boredom while his eyes lingered on her. —You will find the sections on archetypal symbolism and recorded chronicles of dream visions. But time, that ever-elusive resource had run out for her. A glance at the library's central hourglass confirmed she was at her limit; she had lost time being interrupted by idle nobility.

Unable to investigate further, she turned on her heels and ran out of the silent precinct, heading for the Atrium of Knowledge. There, beneath the imposing silhouette of the Hourglass, a solitary and upright figure awaited her. Isolde. Dressed as always in her impeccable and neat black tunic with violet trim. Her face was a mask of serene impatience. Selena arrived first, panting, and gradually the others joined them, forming once again the small flock of the condemned.

Isolde, without a word, activated the secret mechanism. The labyrinth of corridors that followed was a déjà vu, a familiar descent into the bowels of the mountain, until the door slid open revealing the same white room, blinding and implacable. —Get rid of all accessories. Isolde ordered, her voice cutting through the white silence. Her gray gaze swept over the group and stopped at Selena. A flash of something that could be understood, or simply pragmatism, crossed her eyes.

—You —she said, addressing her— It is not necessary for you to remove the bracelet. The concession, made in a tone as neutral as the environment surrounding them, was a small relief in the sea of tension. Selena felt the faint heat of the object on her wrist like a grudgingly granted shield. Once everyone was stripped, standing in the white void, Isolde began to speak. Her voice was clear and sharp, like a diamond on glass. —I heard that the fool Valerian... The word "fool" came out with devastating naturalness.

—... conducted yesterday's class incorrectly. Here you have me again, repairing his poor practice. She sighed, a sound of profound annoyance, and for an instant, her eyes turned completely white, showing her irritation. —Sit in a circle. They obeyed, forming an uncomfortable ring on the pristine white floor. Isolde then moved toward the center.

From nowhere, she placed four objects on the floor in front of them: a blank sheet of parchment, a piece of knotted wood, a common rock, and a piece of coarse linen cloth, stained with something dark and dry that smelled of fruit. —I will give notice when I want an answer —her voice was now a whisper that, nevertheless, filled the room— Until then, only silence. She paused, letting the command settle in their minds. —Search, with the perception you are learning to feel, for the object that is not an object.

She closed her eyes. Then the silence that always accompanied her became even more present; it was almost as if she were part of it. A stillness interposed itself between everyone and her, and she was enveloped by it, as if her silent nature became present there, tangible and palpable. Selena, forced to focus, set her attention on the four objects arranged in the center of the circle. The virgin parchment, the knotted wood, the gray rock, the stained rag.

She observed them until their contours began to dance before her eyes, but none emanated the strangeness Isolde asked them to feel. Time, elastic and deceptive in that cuboid without references, crawled by. Minutes that tasted like hours passed, and frustration began to grow in the group like a subtle scent. It was then that Selena, almost by process of elimination, lowered her gaze. Not toward the objects, but to the immaculate floor upon which they rested. There, she saw nothing, but she felt something.

A slight vibration, a different density in the air just beneath where the objects lay. It was not a sensation coming from them, but from the floor itself, as if beneath the pristine whiteness something else beat, something hidden. She looked up again, bewildered. The objects remained just objects, inert and common. But the impression persisted, a dull hum at the edges of her perception, like the echo of a whisper too low to be heard.

After what seemed like an eternity of silence and forced concentration, Isolde stood up. There was no transition; one instant she was merged with silence and the next she was standing, her gray eyes sweeping over them with coldness. —Which is the false one? —she asked, her voice breaking the spell of stillness like glass. An eyebrow arched slightly, the only sign of expectation on her impassive face. Yarra was the first, her voice firm, certain of tangible evidence. —It is wood. Isolde did neither nod nor deny.

She only made a slight gesture with her hand, indicating they should continue. —It is the stone —said Corin, with absolute determination in every word. —The wood —Fern repeated, clinging to the first answer. —It is the cloth —Ren affirmed, his martial tone attempting to impose certainty where there was none. —It is the paper —Maya declared with surprising boldness, her eyes fixed on the white parchment as if the key resided in its emptiness. Then, all eyes, including Isolde's, turned toward Selena.

The expectation for the one who was different, the singled-out one, was palpable. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Selena, still doubting her own perception, spoke in a low but clear voice. —It is... what is beneath the floor. Isolde opened her eyes fully, and for a fraction of a second, something that could be approval or simple curiosity about the girl flashed in her gaze.

—Maya is correct —she announced, and the healer suppressed a slight smile of triumph— The parchment is not a common object; it is imbued with the energy of the void through the use of the Touch. She paused, and her gaze pierced Selena. —But Isabella... she did not only look among what was arranged. She noticed the spell written beneath the room. A profound silence, laden with new admiration and a bit of unease, fell over the group.

—Maya, you win five copper coins —Isolde concluded, pragmatic— Selena, you have the request to be answered. Without hesitating, with the question that had been burning inside her since her dream, Selena launched her doubt into the air. —What is the best book to understand the Halom? Isolde observed her, and for an instant, Selena thought she saw a flash of understanding in that coldness. It was not sympathy, but the recognition of a legitimate search in the sea of ignorance surrounding them.

— The Oneiric World of the Blindfolded Mage —she replied bluntly— It is on the fifteenth floor of the library. —Thank you —Selena replied with a bow of her head that was both respectful and eager. The information was a treasure, and she had just been given a map. —Then, with nothing more to add, the class ends here —Isolde declared, her voice restoring the usual coldness— Gather your things and we shall leave.

Minutes later they emerged, not in the Atrium of Knowledge, but in a side corridor near the university baths, whose warm steam and mineral herb scent floated in the air. Without further ceremony, the group dispersed. Selena did not waste a second; she headed directly to the library, her mind already navigating toward the promised depths. After being guided by a librarian as silent and ancient as the walls, she descended to the fifteenth floor. There, her concept of what a library was shattered forever.

From the tenth floor onward, the precinct transformed into a subterranean cathedral of knowledge, colossal and dark. Each level housed shelves that rose the equivalent of two stories, structures of black wood and metal that lost themselves in a gloom broken only by the yellowish flicker of tallow lamps, whose flames seemed to whisper secrets. The air was cold and smelled of millennial dust, faded ink, and a stillness that weighed heavy on the atmosphere.

Selena ventured into that labyrinth of shadows and paper; her tiny figure lost among immense rows of volumes bound in unknown skins and engraved with runes she did not recognize. She searched for hours, her fingers running over spines, her eyes scanning titles in dead languages and arcane symbology. But The Oneiric World of the Blindfolded Mage hid from her.

In the end, with her body aching and her spirit dejected, she returned to her room with the bitter taste of disappointment in her mouth, the stinging sensation of one who has brushed a crucial truth with their fingertips, only to see it vanish into the gloom. The weekend offered her a respite, a necessary change of focus. In Languages and Dialects of the Area, the professor, a meticulous man with linguistic maps spread across his lectern, presented them with a myriad of options.

After the lesson, he separated them into groups to be instructed by specialists. Without wavering, Selena chose Sahric, the melodious tongue of the southern deserts, Samira's homeland. It was a tangible approach to one of the silent shadows following her, an attempt to decipher the scholar hidden behind the slave's mask.

In Paleography and Deciphering of Ancient Texts, the professor, an elderly woman with eyes that seemed to have read even the oldest stone, initiated them into the art of classifying a text without knowing the language. She spoke of the importance of structure, recurring patterns, the texture of parchment, and the fluidity of ink. At the end, she tasked them with choosing one of the four fundamental dead languages to study in depth for the following week. Selena did not hesitate: Volg-Thûr.

The Mother Tongue, the key to ancient laws and the power that lay beneath the stone of Erabergh. The last day of that weekend, accompanied by the ever-vigilant Fjora, she attended her Weapon Practice and Handling class. The instructor was a veteran with a face crisscrossed by scars and a simple philosophy: attacking to save one's own life was the only maxim.

He gave a choice from an arsenal: sharp-tipped spears, deadly-bladed halberds, curved bows, twin daggers, longswords, jagged-headed maces, brutal axes, the variety was absurd. There was also the option of unarmed combat, but it was the least popular. Selena observed Fjora and saw how her glacial eyes settled, with a flash of almost nostalgic recognition, on a short scimitar.

It was an elegant and lethal weapon, longer than a knife, shorter and more manageable than a standard sword, with a curve that promised quick and deep cuts. Selena pointed to that very weapon. If she was going to learn, she would do so with an instrument that resonated, however distantly, with the person beside her. Thus ended a week laden with effort and learning, but with the thorn of not having found the book Isolde had recommended still lodged in her side.

The new week began, and with it, the classes in the Whispering Void. In History of the Echo, Selena was able to display, to everyone's surprise, the knowledge she had already been painfully extracting from the Chronicles of the Echo. She unraveled myths and their raw realities with a clarity that earned her the evaluating, and perhaps slightly less contemptuous, gaze of Isolde.

In Emergency Protocols, they made it very clear that, in the face of a rebound or a crisis, it was vital to know one's own body to the last heartbeat, and to know how to differentiate a mental ailment induced by the Void from a purely physical one. The border between madness and death was as thin as the most translucent sheet of parchment.

Perception classes became a familiar torture: searching, in the white room, for the object that was not what it seemed, sharpening an inner sense that still felt embryonic and clumsy. In Magical First Aid, Valerian reappeared, theatrical as ever, but with a brutally direct message. —The key to containing a rebound —he exclaimed while balancing dangerously on his chair— is prudence. Do not be greedy, or you will die. Period.

Selena carved that sentence into her mind in letters of fire, underlining it as one of the most important truths she had heard. Finally, in Basic Physiology, they learned the concrete price of power. The comparison tables were varied and depended on the resonant's domain. Valerian, as a demonstration, made a small bluish flame sprout in the palm of his hand. A flame that warmed the air for an instant and then went out. —This —he announced with a bitter smile— children, cost me two hours of my life.

Calculate what something larger would cost. The weekend arrived like a breath of fresh air after the suffocation of the void lessons. To Selena's mind, Sahric was a pleasant revelation; she learned it and it fit naturally. She discovered, with a surprise bordering on delight, that its structure related to the languages she already knew, in a way similar to how French relates to Spanish.

The patterns, the grammatical constructions, felt familiar, a fertile ground where her intellect could take root with relative ease. For a moment, enveloped in the harsh and sweet melody of Sahric, she could forget she was everything else and remember the pure joy of deciphering a new code. That experience led her to a hasty conclusion.

Upon facing Volg-Thûr in her paleography class, she expected to find a similar relationship, perhaps like that of Latin to Spanish, a mother tongue from which familiar concepts derived. But Volg-Thûr was a wall of granite. There were no evident bridges, only the occasional minimal vestige, a syllable that sounded vaguely similar, an abstract concept that seemed like an echo of another.

It was like trying to jump from Spanish to Ancient Greek: a common origin was sensed in the distance, but the path was full of precipices and unknown signs. The Mother Tongue was a monumental challenge, a riddle carved in the oldest stone, and she was barely scratching the surface. With her mind still turning over linguistic roots, she attended her weapons class expecting, perhaps, the catharsis of metal against straw. But no.

The training began with the raw reality of physical conditioning: running until the burning in her lungs became just another companion, and practicing air cuts with a wooden sword that weighed like a stone in her inexpert hands. Fjora, curiously, seemed to enjoy that primitive effort.

She ran by her side with insulting ease, and occasionally, Selena caught a fleeting, almost imperceptible smile on the Khelganor warrior's lips, as if the simple act of training the body reminded her of a distant home among fjords and ice. It was closeness, something being born from that small act. The routine had settled into her new world with startling ease, the university with its echo that consumed lives, that took away sleep or hunger.

The fun in learning new languages that she felt increasingly as her own, the tedious search for "the oneiric world" that never appeared, the medicine that felt more pleasant each day as she took notes, knowing it would be the best balm to heal her own tormented soul. Finally, after so much time, she had created bonds, she had gained space for her curiosity; she had created a new routine that fulfilled her.