The Athenaeum had not changed. I had come to it once already, and it was exactly as I had left it. And yet it was not the same, because this time Ash was with me.
Ash stopped three steps past the threshold, her head tipping back until her gaze had climbed every balcony. A book lifted from a shelf two floors up and drifted down into a waiting hand. Ash's eyes followed it the whole way. "Wow," she said.
I had stood where she stood now. I had felt what she felt, though I had not admitted it then and would admit it less now. It was strange. The sight no longer inspired anything within me, but seeing Ash witness what I once had, in the same way I had, was not an unwelcome sight.
"Yes," I said. "It is rather impressive. By this world's standards."
Ash glanced at me. "As if you didn’t do the same."
"Do what?"
"Didn’t stare just like this. There was nothing like this before, Lys." She said it lightly which robbed it of any sting at all.
She was wrong. I had not gawked. A Queen merely surveyed, with appropriate appreciation, the better works of lesser civilizations. The distinction was considerable. Perhaps I should have said so.
I had wanted to bring Ash here for some time. I had wanted to bring her here alone, which had proven more difficult than the task warranted. The girl and the boy had both made motions to follow when I announced where I was going. I had informed them, with great dignity, that the Hero and I required some time in solitude. It had not been a particularly good excuse. I had expected to be questioned on it.
Instead, Ren's eyes had gone very wide. Her face had reddened to the color of her hair, and then she had nodded with a vigour that nearly unseated her own neck, seized Corin by the collar, and dragged him off down the corridor before he could so much as open his mouth.
I still did not understand it. Perhaps my excuse had been better than I had credited? Either way, we were now here. In less favorable circumstances than I would have liked, but regardless, we were here. I took Ash's arm and led her inside.
Madam Oris sat behind her desk near the entrance, exactly as she had the first time. There was a ledger open before her. She did not look up. From this distance I could see that she was reading, again. I was fairly certain it was the same ledger as last time. The Crest on her forearm caught the light. A black Sovereign mark in the shape of a book. The curiosity tugged at me, but now wasn’t the time.
I stopped before the desk and held out my hand. "You have something of mine."
She looked up. Her gaze moved over me without ever finding my horns. "Ah," she said. "You're that one." She set down her pen. "Why didn't you come back earlier? I said three days, didn’t I?"
"That is not something you need to know. Where is my card?"
She made a sound and reached beneath the desk. While she searched, Ash drifted a step away to watch a staircase detach itself from one balcony and reconnect to another two floors up. I watched Ash watch it. There was no harm in it.
Madam Oris produced a small wooden card and slid it across the desk. It was rather similar to the ones these students used to find their classes. A slightly darker shade, but similar enough. "This card lets you take out five books," she said. "Bring them here and I’ll register them. You can take out five, no more. You can take them for seven days. Other than that, don’t do anything to a book you wouldn’t want being done to you."
They were concise rules, and appropriate for a place such as this. I took the card and turned it in my fingers. I had walked out of this place with Zarvok's journal beneath my arm, with no card. I had simply walked, and no one had stopped me. "And if I do not bring them to you first?”
The woman snorted. "Then this whole place lights up like a thousand suns and you'll wish you had. So don't." She returned to her ledger. “You can’t take anything that belongs here willy nilly.”
Anything that belongs here. I did not ask. I took Ash's arm again and led her deeper in.
I explained the Athenaeum to her as we walked, because she had not asked and because I wished to. I explained everything that Ren had explained to me on that day. How one had only to think of a thing and channel the smallest thread of Essence, and the place would understand. How the books came when called. How the staircases moved.
"You think of where you want to go before you step on," I said, as we reached one of the spiral stairs. "It does the rest."
I stepped on, Ash stepped with me. Nothing happened. The stair remained exactly where it was, and so did we. I glared at the offending contraption, then glared up at a balcony above us. The contraption moved. The lower steps held firm while the upper flight detached, swung through the open air, and reconnected to the floor above. We rose. Ash said nothing about the pause. She was wise for a Hero.
We found an empty alcove, nestled in the upper reaches of the Athenaeum. One where there were no students to gawk and point. There had been much of that on the way here.
"Is there anything in particular you would like?" I asked.
Ash looked at me as though I had said something in a language she did not speak. "Aren't you the one who's dueling?"
I glared at her. "Answer the question."
She looked around at the shelves. They were so high I was sure she could not read the ones on the upper most shelves. Her jaw worked. "I wouldn't even know where to start, honestly," she said. "I haven't been in many places like this."
I stared at her. "You have not been to many places of…knowledge?"
"No." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I was always training and there wasn't a lot of time. And I didn't really see the point. The places I've been to weren't really like this." She looked at my face, and her hands came up at once. They were making a gesture that meant nothing to me. "That doesn't mean I don't like reading. Or that I wouldn't. I just didn't get to, before. It doesn't mean I can't start."
I held the disappointment for only a moment. How could one call it life, if one were not able to read and read freely? I could hardly call it such. No matter. Such deficiencies could be corrected now. I would make sure to correct them. "Very well," I said. "Then you will read what I read, when I first came here."
I took the wooden slab and channelled Essence and thought of the volume -the title of the general history I had read on my own first visit. I waited. A book drifted down from somewhere far above and settled into the air at arm's reach. I caught it and held it out to her.
Ash took it. It was an enormous thing, thick enough to be used as a weapon in its own right, and she eyed it the way one eyes a beast that has broken its cage. "This…is what you read?"
"It was the first of what I read."
Ash said nothing. She looked around, and sat at the nearest empty table. I joined her, and channeled more essence into the slab.
I groaned at the page in front of me. If I could have stared Ruin into existence by will alone, the book before me would not have remained on the table. It would have been ash, and I would have considered the world improved by its absence.
It was a collected account of those who had reached the Sigil, and the circumstances in which they had reached it. I had thought, reasonably, that such a thing would hold the clue to this Insight everyone spoke of and no one explained. I had thought wrong. Each account was more impenetrable than the last.
One man wrote that his Line had branched into a Sigil on the day he abandoned his family's farm and set out for a great city named Etheos, there to apprentice himself to something called a gunsmith. The very next account was a woman who wrote that hers had branched on the day she abandoned the life of a merchant and returned home to care for her ailing mother. Those were two opposite choices and they had led to the same result. The author compiling these seemingly did not find this strange.
Many of these accounts made no sense at all. Some were not accounts but poetic verse, and the verse was worse than the accounts. I read one that claimed to concern the true nature of water. Presumably the one giving the account had a water-related mark.
Water knows no shape but the one it is given, and so it is given every shape, and keeps none. I sought to hold it. It held me instead. On the morning I stopped reaching, the line branched.
I snorted. Whoever had written this had spent more effort on the rhyme than on saying anything worth rhyming. I turned the page.
The accounts that made some sense were no more useful for it. Many wrote of years of training that produced nothing, until a single moment of danger produced everything. One man's Line branched while he faced a beast he called a manticore, in the instant he was certain he would die and did not. I read that one twice.
I did not know what a manticore was. I doubted very much there was one to be found within these walls, or anywhere I might reach in two days. I marked the passage in my memory anyway, and could not have said why, and closed the book. I looked over at Ash. She was reading.
This in itself was not remarkable. What was remarkable was the intensity of it. All through my own reading, I had watched her from the edge of my sight, and I had watched her drop the book a dozen times, then take it up again a few minutes later, frowning. It was not the reading of someone driven by the hunger I knew. It was not the reading of someone who found the words before her interesting at all. "Why are you still reading that?" I asked.
She looked up. "Why not?"
I pointed at the book. "You do not find it interesting. I have been watching you fail to read it for an hour."
"It's good to know the history of where we are," she said.
I nodded. It tasted like a lie. Once, I would have let it pass. Once, I might not have noticed at all. Now, I noticed, and I did not wish to let it pass. "That is not your reason."
Ash looked away. She said something I did not hear. "Ash. I want to know."
She looked at me, and there was color high on her cheeks. "You said you read this," she said. "Didn't you?"
I did not understand. "Yes."
"Well." She turned the book a little in her hands, as if its angle were the difficult part. "I wanted to read something you read. That's all. How else am I supposed to explain it."
I went warm. There was, for once, nothing I wished to say. The book sat open in her hands. Ash looked back down at the page she had failed to read a dozen times and this time she did not drop it.
I let the silence be. It was a good silence. I let it be for some time. Almost none of ours needed filling anymore. I reached for more books. The ones on Insight were indecipherable, but the books on cycling and conditioning were not. Cycling or Breathing was the term for techniques used to absorb mana from the air and turn it into Essence. At higher stages it involved purifying said Essence.
Body Conditioning I had experienced first hand, though the books had stated that the Conditioning needed to reach Sigil from Line was a small thing. That run in the desert had been a small thing, apparently, compared to what a Sigil had to do to reach Crest.
Then there was the book on Tenets, and this one I did not want to set down. I had come looking for information on Lena’s power, and I had found it. I had found too much of it. I had read five accounts of Sigils who had reached a Tenet from a lightning-born mark, and not one of them worked the way another did. Some of them did not even seem related. One of them, the most common, was called the Lightning Armor. It wrapped close around the body, and turned all blows aside. It worked the same way as Ren’s Tenet of flame did -she’d called it a ‘Wreathe of Flame’, with some embarrassment. It was the same Tenet my Ruin had not breached. The same type of Tenet Lena most likely had.
For a time, we both simply read. It was enjoyable.
It was Sol who broke the silence. The bond tugged, and then I reached for it without thinking, and found her awake. Awake, and -I sat up straighter- rather furious. It was the annoyance of a small creature who had been left somewhere beneath her station for longer than she had agreed to bear. "We should go," I said, and rose. "I doubt I will learn more here in any case."
Ash rose with me, gathering several of the books we had been reading."Sol?"
How did she know? "She is displeased." I checked the bond again. "Considerably." I checked it a third time, in case the displeasure had worsened in the time it took to mention it. It had not, but a Queen is thorough.
Sol let out an outraged squawk from atop my head the moment I lifted her from the beast hall, and did not stop for the length of three corridors.
"You did not wait so long," I told her, adjusting her between my horns so the draught from the windows would not find her face. "It was an afternoon, Sol. A single afternoon." She squawked again, this time with the full weight of her small body. "Yes. I apologize. It will not happen again." It would happen again. We both knew it. She settled, eventually.
"Is that bird ever nice?" Ren asked.
"She is perfectly agreeable," I said. "She simply has standards."
Ren made a face that suggested she disagreed with this answer. Beside her, Corin walked with his hands folded and his eyes down, though he glanced up at Sol every few steps.
Ash had found the two of them with little effort. She knew where their rooms were, and she took me to them with hardly any repeated turns at all. What her secret was to navigate this place, I could not even guess. That had to be some kind of innate [Trait].
Ren led us to the door, which like everything of value in this Academy, was at the end of a descending corridor.
The door was a great slab of black and across its whole face ran etchings in the shape of branching patterns. There were lines that split and split again, in every color I could name and several I could not. The air in front of it pressed against the skin before one had even touched the handle.
"Still can't believe he's just letting you stay in here," Ren said. "Like, for three whole days. You're damn lucky, you know that? Do you have any idea what I’d have to do to-"
"It is fitting my station."
Ren’s mouth closed and she rolled her eyes so completely that I half expected them to come loose. She pointed. "Pretty sure the Archon didn't mean you could bring the bird in too."
"The Archon would not dare refuse me." Sol chirped from atop my head. It was, unmistakably, agreement.
Ren sighed and put her shoulder to the door, and I felt the Essence she fed into it before it groaned open.
"Woah," Corin breathed. He did not cross the threshold. His hand had risen halfway, as if to follow Ren in, and then thought better of it. He stayed where he was.
The Sigil resonance chamber was a vast white room, and it was lined with black pillars -pillar after pillar, marching away into a distance that did not end. The mana in it was thick enough to lean against. It was denser even than the time we had come from.
I stepped through, and Ash stepped through beside me, and we felt it. It was not unlike wading into a molten river that wished to push you back. I kept my back straight and my stride even. I needed Essence to reinforce my limbs, and a surprising amount of it. Else, I might have fallen down to my knees.The Ember Core groaned, and I almost groaned with it. I gritted my teeth, and forced myself still. Ash managed it the same way, with rather more grace than I suspected I had shown.
"How the hell," Ren said, staring at us both, "can you two just walk around like that?" Then she paused, and looked at us with her eyes squinted. “I see. I forgot you both were monsters. That much Essence just to move, really?”
"Don't think too hard about it," Ash said.
I crossed to the center of the nearest open space, where the pillars made room, and turned. The pressure here was greatest of all, and I found that I did not mind it. The Requiem hummed cold beneath the bracer. The Cradle answered warm. Atop my head, Sol had gone very still. I felt her through the bond. She was…pleased. Even she found this place to her liking. I knew she had standards.
I slowly reached for her and set her down. Sol started to waddle back and forth. She was handling this place with more ease than Ash and I had.
"You will bring our meals at the required times," I said aloud to both, loud enough that Corin could hear from where he stood.
Ren's head whipped around. "What do you think we are, your servants?!"
“Hmm. Not yet. Perhaps if your service is adequate.” I answered. Ren’s mouth opened wide.
"Okay," Corin called back, head slightly tipped.
"Don't encourage her!" Ren said.
I let them argue. Ash had drifted to one of the black pillars and set the tomes we had borrowed against its base. She was looking around the white room, and so she did not see Ren coming.
Ren sidled up beside her. She cut one glance at me, and pressed something flat into Ash's hands. She whispered something that did not carry. Which even I knew was odd for Ren.
Ash looked down at what had been put in her hands. It was a book. I could not make out the cover from where I stood, but I saw what the cover did to her. The color climbed from her collar to the tips of her ears in the span of a single breath. Her eyes went wide.
Ash said something back that I almost but not quite heard. Ren glanced around the chamber. Then she made a gesture with her hand. It was a gesture I had seen the girl make before. Her fingers laced together, then waggled.
I did not understand any of it. I understood only that there was a book, that it had turned my retainer the color of a Hamel sunset.
"What is that?" I stepped closer and asked.
Ash spun. She put her back to me, both hands behind her, the book pressed flat against her spine. "Nothing."
"It did not look like nothing."
"It's a book. It's just a book!"
"Then I would see it." I took another step.
"You can't." Her chin had come up, in the way it did when she had decided to be stubborn. Her face was burning. "Not yet, Lys. Just- not yet."
I clicked my tongue. I folded my arms. She said the word yet, but I suspected this particular yet might never arrive. I considered the various ways a Queen might part a stubborn Hero from a book, and discarded each of them, because every one of them ended with Ash unwilling, and that was not a thing I wished. "Very well," I said. "I will not pry." I let half a breath pass. "For now."
Ash did not relax until she had crossed to Sol's satchel and tucked the book away inside it, next to the food, and even then she kept herself between it and me. What, did she think I would do something as uncouth as go back on my word?
Ash walked towards me again. “So…this place.” Her voice was tight. “I guess it’s pretty much perfect for what we’re planning.” She did not meet my gaze.
I looked at Ren. The girl was back at the threshold of the chamber, and was presently pulling Corin’s cheeks from both sides. Only the Gods could guess why.
Her Tenet of fire was a thing my Ruin alone could not pass. Just like Isabelle’s power was something my Ruin had not breached. Ren had not known the particulars of Lena’s Tenet, but I would assume hers was similar, while planning for if it was not.
I would deal with all of that, in time. With preparation I would make here. I would attempt to reach Sigil, to fight the girl on a more even field.
Besides, this gave me an excuse to answer a question that had sat in me all day. "You want to see which of us would win," I said. "With our marks. Do you not?"
Ash finally met my gaze and she smiled. It was not a Hero's smile. She looked around the white room, at the pillars stretching away into forever.
"Yeah," she said. "Let’s hope we leave this place in a better state than we left the last."