The "Tome and Trinket" bookstore was, for the first time in its century-long existence, a fortress.
Seraphina moved through the canyons of books not like a person, but like a whisper given form. To a normal eye, she was a flicker in the periphery, a shadow that moved too fast. To her own honed senses, this place was a death trap of terrifying proportions.
This floorboard creaks with a precise D-sharp note, she analyzed, flawlessly shifting her weight to avoid it. A sonic trigger for a trap. Obvious.
She saw a spiderweb in a high corner. A tripwire made of animate, soul-ensnaring silk. Clever.
A single dust mote danced in a sunbeam. A psionic sentinel, observing all who enter. I must shield my intent.
Valerius Zathra's earlier ramblings about "latent realities" had primed her paranoid, genius-level assassin's mind. She didn't see a dusty, quiet bookstore. She saw the most deviously, subtly trapped bastion she had ever encountered. The Master's choice of lair was, like all things about him, profoundly layered.
Meanwhile, Valerius floated the still-unconscious Lyno up the creaking staircase. Each groan of the wood was, to him, a note in a sacred hymn of ascension.
They reached the "Chamber of Stillness." Seraphina materialized on the windowsill from the outside, having scaled the wall in utter silence rather than risk the "warded" staircase again.
With the reverence of priests placing a relic on an altar, they gently lowered Lyno's body onto his lumpy bed—the Altar of Dreams. He landed with a soft foomph.
"The Master has returned to his sanctum," Valerius whispered, stepping back. "His meditative processing is reaching its crescendo. Look."
He pointed to Lyno's face. A single, tiny bead of sweat was rolling down his temple, a result of his body's natural reaction to the stress of fainting.
"The forge of the soul runs hot," Valerius interpreted with absolute conviction. "He is burning away the dross of your former life, Shadow, reforging your karma in the crucible of his will. The spiritual effort must be immense."
Seraphina's heart clenched. He was undergoing this trial... for her. Her devotion, already absolute, somehow deepened into something akin to worship.
They stood in silence for what felt like an eternity, guarding their slumbering deity. One was the shield, one was the scribe.
Then, Lyno's eyelids fluttered. A low, pathetic groan escaped his lips.
"...nnngghhh..."
[My head... what happened? Did I finish my sandwich? I remember an assassin... and a knife...]
His vision swam back into focus. The first thing he saw was the familiar, dusty ceiling of his own room. Relief washed over him.
[Oh, thank heavens. It was all a horrible dream.]
Then he turned his head.
Standing ramrod straight in the corner was Valerius Zathra, stroking his beard, his eyes glowing with the intensity of a furnace.
Lyno's heart stopped.
Then, a flicker of movement from the window. Perched on the sill, backlit by the setting sun, was the impossibly beautiful, silver-haired assassin. She wasn't holding a knife. She was simply... watching. Like a predator guarding its territory.
Lyno's heart, having just stopped, decided to attempt to beat its way out of his ribcage.
[IT WASN'T A DREAM! THE LUNATIC AND THE MURDERER ARE IN MY BEDROOM! THEY FOLLOWED ME HOME! THIS IS IT. THIS IS HOW I DIE. HOSTAGE IN MY OWN APARTMENT!]
He whimpered. A small, miserable sound.
Valerius and Seraphina exchanged a look of profound understanding.
"He returns," Seraphina stated, her voice a reverent hush.
"The process is complete," Valerius added. "He returns to his vessel."
Lyno, in his mounting terror, was developing a splitting headache. He instinctively brought a shaky hand to his temple and rubbed it, groaning again.
"Ohh, my head..."
The gesture, so utterly mundane, was a thunderclap of meaning to his two followers.
"A focusing gesture!" Valerius gasped. "He is consolidating the torrential flood of cosmic data back into his physical form! Do you feel that, Shadow? The very air in this room grows heavy, dense with purpose!"
Seraphina did feel it. Or rather, she thought she did. The power of suggestion was absolute. "He purges the ambient chaos. As expected. His every action brings order from disorder."
Lyno just wanted the pounding in his head to stop. He also wanted the two terrifying people in his room to leave. Desperately.
His bleary eyes scanned the room, looking for some anchor to reality. They landed on the new, gleaming tea set Valerius had placed on his table. It looked alien. Wrong. He wanted his own cup. His simple, chipped, comforting earthenware mug.
It was on a small shelf near his bed.
Without thinking, he lifted a weak, trembling arm and pointed a single finger towards the shelf. His throat was dry. He could only manage two croaked words.
"My... cup..."
The request hung in the air. Valerius and Seraphina froze.
This was it. The first conscious command from the Master since he entered his trance. "My cup."
The simplicity of it was maddening. The hidden meaning had to be monumental.
Valerius's eyes widened, a universe of flawed logic exploding in his brain. "Not the new vessels... He desires his cup! The Chalice of Mundanity! Of course! A consecrated artifact that grounds his infinite essence, allowing him to interact with this fragile reality without shattering it! It is his anchor! Shadow, we must retrieve it for him at once!"
But before either of them could move, a consequence of Lyno's "trance" and subsequent awakening manifested halfway across the continent.
In the Imperial Citadel, Emperor Theron IV, ruler of the Aethelian Empire, stood before his most prized possession: the Oraculum Pool. A basin of liquid midnight, it could, under the guidance of his Arch-Scryer, show a glimpse of anything in his domain.
"Show him to me," the Emperor commanded, his voice betraying his anxiety. "Show me this 'Librarian.'"
The Arch-Scryer, a man whose eyes were permanently clouded from seeing too many futures, nodded. He began a low, droning chant. The surface of the pool rippled. An image began to form—the dusty interior of a small, unremarkable room.
At that exact moment, miles away, Lyno groaned and rubbed his temple. An infinitesimal, completely undetectable pulse of pure causality—a byproduct of his unique nature—flickered out from him. It traveled not through space, but through the conceptual links connecting things. And at that moment, the Oraculum Pool was conceptually linked to him.
For the Arch-Scryer, it felt as if the entire universe had suddenly turned its undivided attention directly upon him. He saw, for a fraction of a second, not Lyno, but an endless, silent, thinking abyss.
"GAAAAAHHHH!" he screamed, clutching his head as blood streamed from his eyes, nose, and ears.
In the throne room, a sound like a glacier calving echoed off the marble walls.
KRA-KLE-CRACK!
The Oraculum Pool, an artifact that had survived the Age of Chaos and witnessed the birth of the Empire, spiderwebbed with cracks. The liquid inside boiled away into black steam, and the image it held shattered into nothing.
The Emperor stared, his regal composure utterly obliterated. He was frozen in sheer, primal horror. He had not witnessed a simple magical backlash. He had witnessed a rebuttal. A cosmic slap on the wrist.
He had tried to look at the entity, and the entity, unconsciously, had looked back. And the mere reflection of its passive gaze had been enough to break reality.
"Your Majesty..." the bleeding Arch-Scryer sobbed from the floor, "It... it knew... It knew we were watching..."
Emperor Theron IV stumbled back, his face pale as death. All his plans, all his contingencies, all thoughts of control or opposition evaporated. You don't oppose a hurricane. You don't negotiate with an earthquake.
He looked at the smoking remains of the Oraculum Pool. The proof was right in front of him. Permanent. Undeniable.
He made the only decision a sane man could.
"We cannot fight him," the Emperor whispered, his voice shaking. "We cannot spy on him. To even perceive him is to invite annihilation."
He straightened his back, a desperate new plan forming in his terrified mind. A plan of utter and complete appeasement.
"Send for the Princess," he commanded, his voice ringing with a new, fearful urgency. "Prepare the Imperial Tribute. If a sage seeks his wisdom and an assassin seeks his protection... then the Empire will seek his favor."
The Emperor stared into the black steam rising from his broken artifact, his mind reeling with the implication of what he was about to do.
"He is not a man to be observed," the Emperor declared, sealing his Empire's fate. "He is a truth to be appeased."