You’ll be history, little brother, Gabriel whispered in his mind.And everyone will forget the weak, weeping pig you are.
Because these were the consequences of failure that the Governor had presented to Roy. And the only thing he wasn’t sure of, on that front, was whether it would be at the hands of the Old Ones or of the Governor himself.
He was just sure of the inevitability.
Roy pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and dragged his hands down his face. When he opened his eyes, he looked up. Bookshelves towered above him, dimly illuminated by lantern light. The scent of spilled ink hung heavy in the air, thickening, urging him to rest.
“Get up,” he told himself, shaking his head. “You have to get up. You have work to do.” He attempted again to concentrate, but exhaustion had long set into his muscles, making him slouch in the armchair and pulling him into a thin, broken sleep.
He jerked awake with a sharp, indrawn breath, unsure how long he’d been passed out. He rose from his seat, overcome with defeat and fatigue, then sighed, doused the lanterns, and left the room.
Night had fallen since his meeting with the Governor. The Orphic Basilica lay entrenched in deep shadow, lightened only by the fireplaces and lanterns that had lit upon his arrival. To his right were multiple reading rooms and study nooks, each overlooked by ancient busts of poets, authors, historians, and philosophers. At first, he could not place them, but two of the names engraved into the plinths Roy knew intimately. He’d read their works countless times before. One was Eran Grusmoor, the author of six epics about a family of sailors voyaging the fabled Never Sea. The other was Charles Patiny, a writer of more than fifty romance novels and twice as many poems, all inspired by an unreciprocated love.
Roy remembered a fragment ofHearts Unsung, Patiny’s last novel:By all accounts, it was not Love—that fatal heathen—which killed him but Memory, that thief of spirits.
Unnerved, Roy started to continue up to the sixth floor when a chill passed through him, snaked beneath his coat, and left his skin covered in gooseflesh. Wind stirred through the reading room he’d stopped beside, and for a moment, Roy was convinced that Charles Patiny was watching him,leeringat him, with his cold stone eyes.
Roy strode past the reading room, quickening his pace. While he didn’t think that he was being followed, that didn’t alleviate his dread over the impression that someone, Percival perhaps, was taunting him from the shadows. His heart thundering in his throat, he darted around a corner, where he found a black iron staircase.
As he mounted the last step, the Orphic Basilica’s sixth floor sprawled out around him. Overhead, a sparkling glass orrery spanned the ceiling. It was a dazzling display of twelve worlds, only one of which he knew—Kalthis, his home world. Spinning about the worlds were moons and suns, sculpted from silver and gold glass respectively and attached to the overall exhibition by near-invisible cords of string. Beneath the orrery were writing desks, armchairs, and divans, arranged in a star.
As with the lower floors, the sixth was adorned with an inordinate number of teak and mahogany bookshelves, so many that Roy envisioned hundreds, thousands, of aspiring poets, playwrights, and authors loading books into their arms, intent on mastering the craft taught to them by their tutors. Between the aisles were moth-eaten cushions and threadbare gray quilts, next to which sat silver trays laden with the dust of long decomposed meals. By the light of the lanterns suspended from rusted iron hooks, Roy made out a tin plate scattered with dead maggots. It didn’t elude him that this was the first true sign of the library’s age he’d seen thus far.
Despite the need to select a room to retire to and sleep off his troubles, Roy couldn’t resist the temptation. He’d spent years holed up in his bedchamber, rifling through outlawed texts, but as he’d pointed out to the Governor, his collection was limited. When was he ever going to get another chance like this, a library stocked with more books than he knew what to do with?
I’ll fuss about the Old Ones tomorrow, Roy resolved,when my mind is clear for conjecture. But tonight is for me.
Grinning, he wandered over to the long stretch of shelves behind the orrery. Two tall glass cabinets stood in front of them, filled with relics: a dust-coated tablet; an abacus; a steel letter opener; a sheet of parchment, all black except for a large eldritch white symbol of some sort that dominated the page; a corroded metal device designed to decrypt coded messages; and a journal, opened to an entry written in looped cursive penmanship.
I am beset with grief, my love, for the life we might have had, the children we might have raised, the legacy we might have made. Are our hopes naught but fleeting dreams? Are we forever cursed with the agony of longing?
Were I not of the common folk, I wonder if our circumstances would be the same. Or if, in every alteration of events, however slight, we are forever doomed.
Stretch out your hand once you reach the Above, my dear. There, and there only, shall I find you. And perhaps then we shall begin life anew.
Roy wiped away the tears that had welled up in his eyes. He couldseethe strength of the author’s love, preserved upon the page. He understood their personal strife, their rage and hope and frustration, through the power of their message: If they recorded their doom, would it undo what had been set in stone?
Again, a small part of him wanted to go to the room he’d been promised, but as his exhaustion burned away, determination—and curiosity—seized him. He turned, his coat billowing behind him, and made his way toward the bookshelves.
His choices, he soon discovered, were boundless. There were books on literary theory and philosophy, etymology and linguistics. There were books written in unfamiliar alphabets, some of whose characters vaguely resembled the common language most Northgardians were taught in their classes at Rasileus Academy, where the professors eschewed expounding the more spiritually enlightening subjects in favor of educating students on military campaigns and the tenets of Governorship. On one shelf, Roy found an ancient clothbound volume bursting with densely packed lists of birth and death dates. By its length, he determined there to be hundreds of thousands of names, all scrawled in intricate symbols. Though the Orphic Basilica housed books from both the Age of Scribes and before, there was simply no telling from which age this book originated. For all he knew, this might be a record of anti-Scribe citizens declaring their involvement in a violent uprising, or even an inventory of rural farmers and their allegiances of trade.
The next aisle was no less versatile in its selection of literature, and random in its arrangement, than the last. He found a romance novel about two women oblivious to their ordained love. He found a horror book about the disturbing consequences of defying fate. He found an atlas of the known world, but all the illustrations had faded, leaving behind murky outlines of oceans and islands.
After a while, Roy looked about him, a little perplexed. Was there no cataloging system here? Perhaps he hadn’t done a thorough enough search of the library, but he was intimidated by the thought of navigating these shelves without some written guidance and directions. But he would address these worries again tomorrow, when he officially began his research on the Old Ones.
He pictured himself huddled in one of those study nooks he’d passed, piles of books teetering around him. Yes, his exploration of the Orphic Basilica might be restricted by the Governor’s requirements, and he would thus have to stay on task, but maybe when his duties were done for the day, Roy could continue to seek solace here, as he was doing now. He would soar to distant worlds and fall in love with brave princes and cursed warriors.
But as much as he loved fiction, Roy was utterly enamored with philosophy. Even though he had read only a few texts in his years, those few had begun his lifelong search for scholastic self-realization, a complete understanding of what it was,whoit was, he wanted to be.
However, he did not find many books upon the shelves that belonged to this category. He moved to the next aisle, hopeful, and was surprised to find three:The Maxims of Altruism,A Canticle of Being,andWhich Life to Critique?He was about to continue his investigation when a breeze skittered up the shell of his ear and swirled into the shelf. There, shoved behind the philosophy texts he’d discarded, was a decrepit, dog-eared red text entitledCrisis Inverted: An Examination of the Nonexistent.
Roy blinked, mystified. He reached forward, intrigued by the otherworldliness of the book’s title, the wind that he’d sensed moments ago fluttering around his fingers.
Then a shadow swept past the other side of the bookshelf.
He stiffened, his heart climbing inch by inch up his throat, and waited for the owner of the shadow to follow. He stood for long moments like this, his outstretched fingers just nearCrisis Inverted, tears trembling in his wide, unblinking eyes. He felt another shift in the air, the wind passing through and over him, and then he shuffled slowly back. After a moment, he glanced to the right, where the shadow had gone, and fear spread through his chest, coiling and twisting like black roots.
There was a monster at the end of the aisle. It wore the shape of a human, but all its contours and edges were made of shadow. Jagged chunks of burning scarlet light shone where its eyes should have been, like rubies excavated from the darkest trenches of Hell. It was hovering above the redwood floorboards, its unnaturally long hands splayed at its sides. As its gaze passed over Roy, scrutinizing him, the curve of its cheeks and the slope of its shoulders grew clear.
