Caelan didn't look for a table. He simply sat down right on the floor, leaning his back against the bookshelf, placed the heavy tome on his lap, and began to read.
There were no metaphors here. The very first chapter began with dry, technical precision: "Chapter 1: Types of Runic Matrices. A first-order matrix (a single rune) serves to execute one simple, continuous will...".
This was a language he understood. He turned page after page, his brain greedily absorbing the structure.
"Whoa."
The quiet, surprised exclamation made him lift his head.
Leo was standing over him. He was curiously peering into the book over Caelan's shoulder.
"There are… there are no pictures in it," he whispered, as if sharing a great secret. "My brother Darian said this is the most boring book in the entire library."
He crouched down next to Caelan, not as scared anymore. His childish curiosity had overcome his shyness.
"Do you… do you understand what's written in there?"
Caelan nodded.
"Yes. It's about how to make a stone get warm. You just have to draw on i—"
He stopped.
Mid-word.
His mind suddenly went completely silent. Empty.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.
He slowly lifted his gaze to Leo, but his eyes were looking right through him. He saw the letters on the page. He understood them. He was speaking the words. But he shouldn't be able to. He just... shouldn't.
Leo tilted his head in confusion.
"What's wrong?"
No answer.
The four-year-old boy in front of him seemed to just… turn off. The focus in his blue eyes vanished, leaving two empty, glassy pools. Then, very slowly, Caelan lowered his head. The afternoon sun, streaming through the high window, was perfectly positioned. It caught his ash hair, casting a sharp shadow that completely obscured the upper half of his face. His eyes disappeared into an impenetrable darkness.
The atmosphere in the sun-drenched, cozy corner of the library instantly turned cold.
With an unnervingly fluid movement, Caelan closed the heavy tome on his lap. The THWACK of the cover was sharp and loud in the dead silence, making Leo flinch. He placed the book on the floor and rose to his feet with a predatory grace that sent a shiver down Leo's spine. The boy in front of him was no longer just a boy. He was… something else.
Leo's heart began to pound. He clutched his own green book tighter, like a shield.
Caelan took a slow, deliberate step towards him. He didn't look angry. He looked utterly, terrifyingly empty. It was like watching a beautifully crafted doll whose strings were being pulled by an unseen, malevolent hand. Leo instinctively took a step back, his heel bumping against the leg of the armchair. He was trapped.
Caelan stopped right in front of him. The shadow still hid his eyes. Leo could only see the thin, pale line of his mouth, pressed into an unreadable expression.
Then, Caelan raised a hand, his movements slow, hypnotic. He reached for the book Leo was holding. His slender finger extended and gently, almost reverently, tapped the golden leaf embossed on the green cover.
A whisper escaped his lips, quiet, raspy, and filled with a strange, chilling certainty.
"The words…"
Leo stared, completely bewildered, fear warring with confusion. He didn't understand.
Caelan's finger remained on the book. His head tilted slightly, as if he was listening to the very pages themselves.
"...they want out," he finished, and the whisper itself seemed to crawl under Leo's skin.
Leo's breath caught in his throat. His mind raced, trying to make sense of the words. Want out? Like a curse? Like a spell trapped in the pages? His imagination, fueled by a hundred fairy tales about haunted artifacts, painted a terrifying picture. He stared at the small, shadowy figure before him, his heart pounding against his ribs, convinced he was about to be devoured by some ancient evil.
Caelan slowly lifted his head, the shadow sliding from his face. He was about to add another cryptic detail, to stretch the strange, thrilling joke a little further, but the words died in his throat the moment he truly saw Leo's face.
Pale as parchment. Eyes like two wide, terrified moons. Lips slightly parted, trembling. He looked like he'd just seen a ghost.
For a single, silent moment, Caelan just stared.
And then, it broke out of him.
Not a chuckle, but a full, bright, bubbling laugh that shattered the tense silence of the library. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated absurdity, tearing its way out of his small chest. It was the first time in this world he had laughed like that. Truly laughed. He laughed so hard he had to press a hand to his stomach, his small body shaking.
"You should see your face!" he gasped out between bursts of laughter, pointing a trembling finger at Leo.
Leo just stared, his mind struggling to keep up. The monster was gone. The chilling emptiness had vanished. In its place was just a boy, doubled over with laughter, tears of mirth streaming from his eyes.
"I'm kidding!" Caelan finally managed to say, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He tapped the book again, this time with a playful flick. "I just meant the book is so thick! The words must be tired of sitting inside all day. They probably want to go for a walk!"
The explanation was so stupid, so deeply, profoundly childish, that it completely broke Leo's brain. And in that moment of stunned silence, his mind made a strange, unexpected connection. This felt… familiar. Not the words, but the feeling. The sudden switch from intense and scary to something else.
It was like Lianna.
When she got angry and the air grew cold, and then a moment later she would laugh, the danger gone as if it had never been. He was afraid of her then, too. But he knew she was just… playing. In her own strange, powerful way. This felt like that. Just another game he didn't understand the rules to.
He looked at Caelan, who was still trying to stifle his giggles. And a slow, hesitant, yet genuine smile crept across his face. The tension drained out of his shoulders.
The crisis was over. The silence that returned to their corner of the library was no longer heavy and threatening, but light and a little awkward, filled with the unspoken beginning of something new.
Leo, still holding his book like a shield, was the first to break the silence. His voice was quiet, but now it held no fear, only genuine, childlike curiosity.
"So… you really understand what's written in there?"
Caelan looked at Leo, then at the heavy tome about runes on the floor. Busted. The thought was cold and simple. There was no point in lying. He saw not just a book, but a report on a titanic effort. Hundreds of years of trial-and-error experiments, all collected in one place. Baldrim hadn't understood why it worked, but he had perfectly documented what worked.
Instead of answering, Caelan stood up.
"Let's play a game," he said.
Leo blinked in surprise.
"Imagine you're a stone," Caelan continued, looking at him with perfect seriousness. "Just stand still."
Leo obediently froze in place.
"Good," Caelan nodded. "Stone, get warm."
Leo just furrowed his brows in confusion. "How?"
"Exactly," Caelan said, a spark lighting up in his eyes. "That's a bad expression of will. A blurry one. It's a wish, not an order. And now—a new expression of will."
He walked over to Leo and took his hands in his own.
"Rub your palms together. Like this. Now faster. Even faster."
Leo, caught up in the game, began to rub his palms together quickly. After a few seconds, he stopped, looking at his hands in amazement. They were hot.
Caelan pointed a finger at Baldrim's book on the floor.
"See? To say 'get warm' is a weak will. But to say 'rub your palms at this speed'—that's a clear, precise will. And it works."
He looked directly into Leo's eyes, and his voice became quiet, almost a whisper, but now there was nothing creepy in it—only the pure excitement of discovery.
"This book… it's about that. About finding the best words to express a clear will. The author realized that some words work better than others. He writes that he tried words in Old Dwarvish… and in our language, Etherian."
Leo slowly lowered his gaze to his warm palms, a look of pure wonder on his face. He then shifted his gaze to the thick, boring tome on the floor. And for the first time, he saw in it not just a collection of incomprehensible symbols. He saw a secret language. A code for talking to the world.
He looked up at Caelan, his eyes shining, and in that moment, he realized that his new, strange brother was the most interesting person he had ever met.
Leo, as if sensing this shift in the atmosphere, took a step further. He opened his green book again.
"It's like my plants," he said quietly, but his voice was confident now. "And the animals… and maybe even Chaos?" He uttered the last word uncertainly, as if asking himself a question.
Chaos? Caelan had heard that word from the Duke. It was what they called monsters here.
"Everyone says they just exist," Leo continued. "But that's not true. They reach for the sun. They search for water. They… they have a will too."
The words struck Caelan's consciousness. He had expected a childish analogy, but instead he got an attempt to build a universal theory of life. He was looking not at a child, but at a true, albeit young, philosopher-naturalist.
At that moment, Leo's gaze slid down Caelan's arm and stopped on the dark marks peeking out from under his sleeve.
"What's that?"
Caelan instinctively tried to hide his arm. "Nothing."
Leo gently touched his forearm. "It's trying to heal," he whispered, looking at the bruise with deep seriousness. "All living things do. It's their will… to become whole again."
"I've only tried this on plants and animals," Leo murmured, more to himself than to Caelan, his eyes lighting up with a researcher's curiosity. "But… it shouldn't hurt to try."
"Try what?" Caelan asked, but Leo was no longer listening.
He carefully, almost weightlessly, placed his palm on Caelan's bruise. He didn't chant any spells. He just closed his eyes, concentrating.
Instantly, Caelan felt two processes at once.
The first was a betrayal by his own body. From his internal reservoir, from his very core, mana began to flow out. Unstoppably. Uncontrollably. A feeling of invasion. As if a stranger had reached not just for his skin, but deep inside, to the very source of his power, and began to draw from it without permission.
The second was a strange, pleasant cold spreading across the skin beneath Leo's palm. It wasn't the cold of ice or metal. It was like touching cool marble on a scorching summer day—a sensation so contrary to the surrounding heat that it felt like a perfect chill.
His first reaction wasn't curiosity. It was an instinctive, almost animalistic alarm. He sharply, but not roughly, pulled his arm away.
"What are you doing?!" he exclaimed, looking at Leo with a mixture of shock and outrage. "To my reservoir! I… I can feel it draining!"
He instinctively glanced down at his arm, bracing himself to see something terrible—a burn, a wound, the mark of foreign magic.
But there was nothing there.
Only clean, white, undamaged skin. The bruise was gone.
Caelan froze. He shifted his gaze from his own, perfectly clean hand to Leo, and then back to his hand. His mind stalled, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable: this invasion, this theft of his energy… had resulted in a miracle.
Leo stood, a little frightened by his sharp reaction, but at the same time with an expression of quiet, satisfied curiosity on his face, as if his experiment had succeeded.
Silence.
Two geniuses, one of engineering, the other of life, stared at each other, having just discovered something absolutely new and incomprehensible in one another.