Ten days had passed since I arrived at the Waiting Grounds.
And in those ten days, I had made the library my home. Not metaphorically, but literally.
After lengthy arguments with the old librarian, a man with cracked spectacles and an irritatingly rigid bearing, and after notifying Kyle with some insistence, two formal requests and a patience I hadn't known I possessed, I managed to secure permission to take over the quarters reserved for the assistant librarians.
It wasn't as easy as I would have liked. But it wasn't as hard as I had feared, either.
The building across from the library was nothing luxurious: a firm bed, a writing desk, and just enough light not to ruin what little remained of my eyesight. But it stood less than a minute from the main entrance, and that was worth more than any comfort. My original quarters were half an hour's walk away. Half an hour there, half an hour back, an eternity wasted on someone with books to devour.
Against all my expectations, no one bothered me.
Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps out of fear, or pity, or plain disinterest. Perhaps they were plotting something and preferred to keep me busy and quiet. I never found out. And, honestly, I made little effort to investigate. The library was silent, empty, calm and monotonous, exactly as a library should be.
But I couldn't say the same of my inner state.
A sigh, heavier than I'd intended, slipped from my lips. My free hand rose unbidden to my hair, still partly tied back with the makeshift shoelace I'd been using since the first week. A few stray locks had already fallen along the sides of my face, brushing my eyebrows and blurring the edges of my vision, but I paid them no mind. I was used to that small irritation by now. Strangely, it had become familiar.
Outside, the leaves of the nearby trees rustled in the wind. In here, there was only the sound of pages turning.
My pages.
✦ ✦ ✦
Reading over those ten days was, I must admit, a voluntary headache, and a thoroughly addictive one.
The book the librarian had given me was no simple thing. It was written mainly in Jotundrim, but sprinkled with other languages without warning or ceremony, as though the author expected the reader to simply keep up. Deciphering each passage was an exercise in patience, intuition and, often, barely contained frustration. It was like being back in the old library inside the city in Erebus's demonic mirror, that labyrinth of knowledge that had absorbed me completely and spat me back out with a full head and bloodshot eyes.
But the content...
The content made it all worthwhile.
The volume held tales. Stories of knights, princesses, dragons, castles and fortresses, the kind of narrative that, at a glance, would seem meant for children. But one only had to dive into the first page to realize there were layers here, layers that time and successive translations had only made denser.
The first tale to truly grip me was about Aldric, the Shadowless Knight, a warrior who had made a pact with the Lord of Thresholds never to feel fear again. He won battles no man should have won, toppled tyrants, freed cities.
But the story wasn't about his victories. It was about the silent price: without fear, he had also lost the ability to love what he protected. He entered the final castle not as a hero, but as a blade with no master, and the princess awaiting his arrival had to choose between being saved by an empty man or facing the dragon alone with everything she still felt.
The second cost me two whole days of deciphering. It was written almost entirely in an ancient variant of Jotundrim, with pictographic symbols scattered through the margins.
The Tower of Mireyn told of a princess who had not been imprisoned by any villain. She had built the tower herself. Stone by stone, over years, she had raised her own walls to protect herself from a kingdom that wanted her as a piece on its board, and she spent decades turning away every knight who climbed up to her, not out of cruelty, but because she had learned far too young that being rescued and being possessed were, often, one and the same. The knight who finally stayed did not try to rescue her.
He simply knocked on the door and asked if he might come in.
She let him.
The third was different from the others, shorter, almost brutal in its economy of words. The Last Dragon of Caer Voss had no princess, no fortress, no grand final battle. It was the perspective of the creature itself: old, exhausted, the last of its kind, watching from a distant mountain as a young knight, determined to be remembered, advanced upon it.
The dragon moved neither from malice nor from instinct. It moved because it had understood something the young man did not yet know: that some stories end not in glory, but with the soft sound of something ancient vanishing from the world, and no one around notices until long afterward.
Yet what truly hooked me, what made my hand stop halfway through turning a page, was none of the stories I had expected.
It was the second to last.
The Fortress of Ashenvord and the Family That Prevented the Return of the Blood Beast.
I let my eyes rest on the title a moment longer than necessary. There was something about it, a strange anticipation, like the silence before a thunderclap you know is coming.
I swallowed hard, and began to read.
✦ ✦ ✦
The story did not begin with a battle. It began with winter.
A winter that should never have come, early and savage, covering the plains south of Ashenvord in ice. Ashenvord was the great fortress raised in the heart of a land the maps no longer even name properly. Its walls were of dark stone quarried from the very mountains that ringed it, and its towers, seven of them, each dedicated to one of the seven oaths of the line that dwelled within, brushed the clouds with the quiet arrogance of something built to last for centuries.
The family that guarded it was not known for glory on the battlefield. They were not conquerors.
They were guardians.
The Dracknum.
My hand stopped.
My finger rested on the name as if I needed to touch it to confirm it was truly there, printed in ink on ancient paper, inside a book I had found by chance in a place I should never have reached.
Dracknum. It wasn't a surprise, not exactly. From the moment the family that prevented the Blood Beast's return had been mentioned, I had somehow known the name would appear. It was inevitable, like the end of an equation you begin solving without meaning to.
But seeing it written was different.
I continued:
The story unfolded in layers: part epic legend told around campfires, part cold chronicle set down by some scribe who plainly preferred facts to poetry, part elegy for something that had been lost before anyone nearby noticed in time.
The Dracknum had sealed the Demon Forest generations ago. Not with armies, but with blood, oath, and a magic the text described only as "the price that only one family can pay." The seal was not a victory. It was a sacrifice, formally recorded, accepted with the coldness of those who knew exactly what they were signing.
Ashenvord was the linchpin of that pact. As long as the fortress remained standing, the seal would hold.
And for centuries, it held.
Until it did not.
The text did not say how the seal broke. There was a deliberate gap there, a few lines struck out in different ink, as though someone, at some point, had decided that this particular part should not be read by just anyone.
What followed was the weight of the consequences: the demon realm spilling through the Black Forest like water through a burst sluice gate, sweeping over everything that had been built in the safe shadow of the old pact.
And the Dracknum, at the center of it all, losing.
Not just battles.
Losing everything.
The Blood Mausoleum, which the text mentioned only in passing, the way one mentions a wound that still hurts too much to describe, had been the first to fall. What was lost there, the book did not say. Perhaps it did not know. Perhaps it preferred not to say.
But the fortress was the last to go.
Ashenvord was not destroyed all at once; it was forgotten. Gradually, like a word slipping out of a living language, it lost its outline, its name, the weight it had carried. Other structures rose upon its foundations. Other stories were told in its halls, without anyone knowing there were older corridors, deeper ones, breathing in the shadows below.
And what had been raised to guard became merely a place where things waited.
The text closed with a single line, in an old dialect of Jotundrim that took me nearly half an hour to decipher:
"She will wait, as she has always waited, until what was lost finds her again."
✦ ✦ ✦
I closed my eyes.
Not the book, my eyes. The book stayed open before me, its pages slightly curled from the weight of days of reading, the name Dracknum still visible in the corner of the left page if I cared to look.
I didn't. Not yet.
There was an irony here too large to be an accident and too small to be destiny, or perhaps it was exactly the right size to be both at once. Sylas, god of deception and luck, had a sense of humor I would never know whether to admire or to hate.
Because I was here. In the Waiting Fields.
Standing atop Ashenvord.
Atop what had once been Grounds.