“Come, girl,” Ardruna says. “There is no reasoning with him right now.”
“As opposed to earlier?” I go grab Olm’s book and stuff it into my cleavage. “He’s lucky you forgave him for his lies.”
“I haven’t,” she says. “But he’s my family. I love him anyway.”
It looks like he doesn’t want me to be part of this family, though, and I’m tired of him pushing me away. It’s good. Good that he did this to me, showed me his real face. Sometimes people live an entire life with someone and never get to really know them.
So why does my heart feel already broken?
“How come the door to the sanctum is open?” I ask, approaching it cautiously.
“So that I could make the rounds, check that nothing has escaped.” Her tail slashes against her hindlegs. “I sent him to the nest to rest. I’m worried. He looks haggard.”
“You still insist that this isn’t his usual self?”
“He says things he doesn’t mean,” Ardruna says. “I know his heart.”
“Even if you’re right, he wants me gone, so I’m going. Maybe that’s what is needed. Maybe I’m the one stressing him and bringing out his worst self.”
“I can’t believe that,” the lioness growls as we walk through the open door of the sanctum.
I shrug. “Then you tell me what the matter with him is.”
“I can’t figure it out,” she confesses, ambling beside me. We’re heading toward the shelves. “I just know this isn’t like him.”
“So you’ve said before. I want to slap his face and shake some sense into him.”
“Sometimes I want to sink my teeth into him and drag him around the temple,” Ardruna admits. “So I can’t blame you.”
A snort escapes me. “Like an oversized kitten.”
“Rawr,” Ardruna says.
The collapsed part of the sanctum is the same as it was last time. Roane didn’t try to free the trapped books from the rubble. The rest of the place looks calm, apart from the occasional rattling of chains as the books shift on their shelves and in their niches.
“The journals are this way,” I say. “Roane showed me the spot last time.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Any random clue.” My memory doesn’t fail me, thankfully, and I stop in front of the shelves filled with journals. Some are large books, bound in leather, embossed with letters and symbols. Others are small, covered in metal and gems. Yet others are simple, hardcover books with no decoration and no titles on their spines.
Can one be addicted to books? I think I might be. Closed books call to me. They are locked treasure trunks, waiting to be plundered. Every time I lift a book cover, I tremble with the thrill of the story that awaits me.
I pull out a journal and leaf through it. It’s dated to about three centuries ago, and it’s written in a tiny, half-faded script. I scan the pages for any mention of magic and monsters, butsimilar to Ersil’s journal—Roane’sjournal—it’s more focused on the man’s feelings, the loneliness, the exploration of the world, and the occasional escape of a creature, promptly sent back into the book it left, because“killing the creature means killing part of the story and the book shall never be the same.”
There’s a librarian who cares about books, unlike Roane who kills monsters right and left, never thinking about the repercussions.
Of course, that’s because he can’t stuff the creatures back into their books. Probably why the world is breaking apart.
I randomly haul out one of the large, leather-bound journals and flip it open. This one is older, written during the first years after the Last Reversal that is said to have devastated the world, half a millennium ago. The world was in shambles, but the Library of Areon didn’t suffer much damage since it was sealed off during the Reversal. It was inaccessible for a thousand years, during which time people lived on what is now the sky, in the rotation the Reversals cause.
This librarian, Isekiu, notes that Areon’s world was chaotic when he arrived. Certain monsters had escaped over the centuries and with nobody to return them to their stories, they had broken the temple doors and roamed the cavern, multiplying, forming communities. It was hard work, tracking down which monsters belonged to which book, and a moral dilemma. Was it fair to destroy such communities and families to send a monster back? What about the creature’s children? What about the fact that their books had already changed?
This is fascinating to me. A royalstoriologist, a story specialist, would love this. Naida would love this. Gods, I wish she were here with me. She’d have solved this riddle in the blink of an eye and we’d be on our way back home.
Next, I take out bejeweled little journals, diaries written on parchment, rolled up and secured with twine. I leaf throughguardian logs written on fine green leaves, stitched together with spidersilk. I check titles, read entries and leaf through to their last pages, and they all stop abruptly. Which makes sense. The librarian keeps a log until he or she dies.
But Roane stopped writing while being alive and well.
