“I don’t know how you can stand being on that old thing,” Dimitri says, drawing my attention back to the seventh floor. He nods to the staircase. “It looks like it’s going to collapse any moment.” His gaze trails upward. “What were you looking at?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. I just…I was thinking about trying to dig a little deeper into some of the Primordial stuff. I’ll meet you at our table in a moment?”
His brow darkens with disappointment. “Really, Halira? If you just came here to sneak onto the forbidden floor—”
“I didn’t!” I protest. “For your information, I came here to learn. It’s not my fault my appetite for knowledge can’t be satiated by the beginner textbooks they have us reading. We already know about fiends and demons, Dimitri. We have firsthand knowledge of how horrific they are and what they’re capable of. None of this stuff is going to prepare us for what we’ll find in the Shadowthorn.”
He shakes his head, back turned toward me. “Whatever. If you get caught, I want no part in this. Good luck finding what you’re looking for. You know where I’ll be.”
I’m left standing there, jaw slack and skewed as the offense seeps in. For once, I actually am trying to understand what we’re up against, and of course he still thinks I’m up to no good. What is it with my friends and family always assuming I don’t care? Just because I’ve spent most of my adolescent years with no real compulsion to do anything, doesn’t mean I actually wanted to waste my life away, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’m always trying to goof off.
With a low, irritated growl, I try casting my frustrations with Dimitri and everyone else out of my mind. If I’m going to find anything on these shelves, I’ll need to keep a clear head.
I spin on my heels and head to the next floor. Then the next. There’s no real rhyme or reason why I think the answers I seek will be buried in the older documents—it’s quite possible they’re on the floor Dimitri and I study on, or even at the very bottom of the library where more recent history is stored—but there’s a tingling in my gut that tells me otherwise. I just have this feeling that the information I’m looking for has been buried away for some reason, as if someone long ago thought it was too disturbing for the people of Arcathain to know. Kind of like how the innerworkings of the necro-ink seems to be kept from civilians—there are just some things that regular, defenseless people don’t need to know.
But I refuse to be one of the defenseless any longer.
I reach the eleventh floor, tempted to try my hand at sneaking into the twelfth, but ultimately deciding my pride couldn’t handle proving Dimitri right tonight. If it comes down to it, if after I’ve searched this library high and low and I still can’t find anything about the creature I encountered in my home, then maybe I’ll risk breaking into the top floor of the library.
Until then, I’ll just work my way down from here, floor by floor.
I find my way to one of the corners of this floor—a level dedicated to the books, tomes, and artifacts gathered during the Shadow Massacre era, back when Crusaders were revered, and their numbers were unfathomable. It seems as good as any place to begin, so I start pulling out the scrolls and tomes tucked away on the shelves.
I come across legers with hundreds of names, the Crusaders who faced and slaughtered the other Primordials until there was only one remaining. I find the temporary treaty, signed and dated by the mages and the humans who were in power at the time. It grants humans the right to wield weapons, to possess items of magic like necro-ink and shadowsteel, and explicitly states that once the last Primordial falls, the humans will lose all of those privileges once more. There are drafts for how the mages made the shadowsteel weapons, blueprints for curating necro-ink. I find spells for healing and destruction, tools and ingredients that have lost their structure over time, but still stand like a testament to their contribution to the progress we’ve made.
There’s one tome in particular that sucks me in. It’s a detailed recounting of how each of the Primordials fell: Khaymus with a spear to the heart; Khunas, beheaded by a double-bladed axe; Qhistus blown to pieces by an explosive device created with scraps of shadowsteel and magic. I’m surprised to hear the mages referenced in these histories, even if it is infrequently. All my life, we’ve been led to believe that the mages abandoned us, but it would appear that even then we had some allies. For a time.
I skim through dozens of books, some of them boring, others enthralling, and some terrifying. One, in particular, a journal kept by a Crusader named Kier who lived within my parents’ lifetimes, documents his many encounters with the demons he came across.
“They outnumbered us four to one, and we saw no better alternative than to run, if we were to survive. We fought until they had slain enough of us that they lost interest in the living and descended upon the dead. I shall never forget their gurgling maws as they sank their razored teeth into my fellow Crusaders.
“But we couldn’t look back. We ran as the demons tore the others to pieces, and for a time, we thought we were safe.
“But they found us. Despite our best efforts to cover our tracks, they scented our trail…”
It’s there that I stop reading, horrified by the information I’ve just gleaned. I’d never heard that demons could do such a thing. I knew they were drawn to blood, and after today I am also privy to their taste for deceased flesh particularly, but I’d never heard that they could scent and track us.
It’s valuable, life-saving information, but it’s still not what I came here to find.
I put the tattered journal back on the shelf and keep perusing.
By the time I reach the end of the first bookshelf, the room is already cast in soft shadows of twilight. The sun is setting, and I am nowhere closer to the answers I seek. None of the histories transcribed on the pages I skimmed told of anything even remotely similar to a demon posing as a human, or any other shadowcreature for that matter.
I glance around the dusty bookcase to the hundreds of remaining rows on this floor alone. I’m getting nowhere fast. At this rate, I won’t even make it through all the books on this floor before our official initiation. I’ll be shipped out to some dangerous border town before ever learning what it was I had laid eyes on. If only there was some way to narrow down my search. Perhaps if I figured out the right, pointed questions to ask the other scholars, maybe they could help guide me in the right direction.
Something squeaks, drawing my attention back toward the corner from where I began. The sun has sunk so low now that no light graces the floor near the wall anymore, and therefore I almost miss the mouse scurrying past the bookshelf. I breathe a sigh of relief. At first, I’d thought it was a floorboard creaking, someone who had caught me in my independent studies and would expect answers.
I start to turn back around, intent on rejoining Dimitri before our study time is over, but just as I begin to drag my gaze away, I catch another flicker in the shadows. My eyes strain at the second mouselike shape that scurries along the dusty floorboards.
When a third and fourth one scampers by, I can no longer contain my curiosity. Either I’m losing my mind—in which case, I need to verify that these mice are only figments of my imagination so that I can report myself to the medical ward for further testing and aid—or…or I’m about to witness something strange and extraordinary.