Once they left the room, Adam moved with determination through the corridors of that small floating city.
"Uhhh…" Fidelis said, a hint of doubt in his voice as he jogged to keep up with him. "Sir, where are we going?"
"To uncover this place's history!" Adam replied, marching toward the ship's reception area.
Upon crossing the doorway, he stood right in front of the young woman working there. She was crouched, organizing some folders, her back turned to the entrance.
"Miss!" he called out, lifting his voice a little—without aggression, just enough to catch her attention.
The young woman flinched and lightly bumped her head against the furniture, but quickly turned to assist him.
"Yes, young man… excuse me, how can I hel—?" she began, but he cut her off.
"Yes, yes, I want to know if there's a library inside these facilities," Adam asked, not giving her time to finish.
In his haste, Adam failed to notice a board with the building layout mounted on the nearby wall. With polite clarity, the receptionist explained the location of the library and then pointed to the board he had ignored.
Adam stopped in front of it, his eyes racing eagerly over every line and every drawn plan. The different levels of the flying machine were laid out there: the workshops, the common areas, the observation towers, and several points marked as "sites of interest." Every detail seemed to call to him—as if an invisible thread were guiding him toward some secret the city kept.
Meanwhile, Fidelis lingered behind, uncomfortable. He approached the receptionist with careful steps.
"Excuse me…" he said, lowering his voice. "My companion… he didn't mean to be so abrupt."
The young woman nodded with a faint smile, accepting the apology, then returned to organizing her folders with no resentment. Fidelis sighed softly, muttered a quick "thank you," and turned to follow Adam.
But Adam, completely absorbed in the diagrams, barely blinked. After a long look, tracing each hallway and room with his eyes, he reached into his coat, pulled out the book, snapped it shut—then bolted toward the library at alarming speed. Without even glancing back, he shot off like an unstoppable ray of curiosity.
"Adam, wait!" Fidelis shouted, running after him. His heart pounded as he tried to keep up. "Come on, I can't lose you!"
Fidelis could barely maintain Adam's pace—and Adam's surprising handling of arcana didn't help. After a long run through corridors and stairways, Fidelis finally emerged into a common area where some people were stretching their legs and socializing in small groups. Asking questions here and there, he managed to keep Adam's trail amid curious glances and murmured commentary from the inhabitants.
After another exhausting sprint, he reached the library. It wasn't small, but it couldn't be called extensive either: aside from the walls with built-in shelves, six rows of neatly ordered bookshelves filled with volumes of all sizes and colors formed a perfect rectangle in the center of the room.
Adam was there, absorbed, giving quick glances at book covers as if each title offered him a clue. Fidelis leaned against the doorway for a moment, trying to catch his breath.
"Sir," Fidelis said, still breathless, "please… I told you not to do that." He took another gulp of air. "Remember that, since you come from outside, your arcana is different, and I can't keep up with you."
After a moment to breathe, he finally stepped forward to help Adam.
"My lord, what exactly are we searching for?" he asked, trying to look for books similar to the ones Adam had grabbed.
"The history of this place—its mythology, religions, traditions…" Adam answered, slipping another book under his arm.
"About the flying city?" Fidelis asked, incredulous.
"No, no, no," Adam replied, with a light smile. "About these lands." He lifted another book, and a spark of excitement flared in his eyes, as if each one contained a piece of the puzzle he was after.
"And what good would that do us?" Fidelis asked again, doubtful. This wasn't the first time Adam had strange ideas.
"The word was Ignis—the one that showed me the card," Adam said, with a confident, almost silly smile. "I know Ignis is related to fire. Maybe a catastrophe… maybe an event… or maybe the name of a general, I don't know." His gaze gleamed, as though he were praying to be right.
"All right…" Fidelis said, defeated, lowering his head.
Adam let out a long sigh and, almost without noticing, began talking while scanning the shelves.
"I don't know if you knew," he said with an arrogant tone. "But before… before all this, when I lived with my father, he had a library of his own. Not just any library. Every book in there… was full of secrets. Magic contained in words, ancient spells written."
Fidelis looked at him with a mix of curiosity and skepticism.
"And… and what does that have to do with what we're looking for here?" he asked cautiously, while helping put back the books Adam had taken in such a rush.
"Everything has to do with it," Adam said, with that spark of enthusiasm that always preceded one of his impossible theories. "What I want to do… is what I always did at home. Look for patterns, connect the dots, find connections."
Hours went by. Adam moved from one shelf to another, spreading sheets around, taking notes of names, dates, and symbols on an improvised parchment. With every new page, his map grew more complex, more confusing. Fidelis leaned over it to read the notes. At first he wanted to believe him—he wanted to trust the annotations, he wanted to think Adam might be right—but sooner or later, he realized he wasn't.
"Adam… none of this makes sense," he finally said. "None of these things connect. This 'Ignis' you wrote here has no relation to the city or to these historical events, and… that thing you drew here is an alchemy symbol, not a cataclysm."
"But look!" Adam shook the parchment. "If we connect this with that… and this other symbol…" His finger traced chaotic lines, as if he believed in a secret logic only he could see. "It has to mean something."
At times like this, it almost seemed Fidelis was the older one. Adam, despite his age, often behaved in a capricious and careless way, without measuring how his actions affected others.
Fidelis sighed, defeated, and leaned back against the bookshelf.
"Sir… even if I wanted to, it doesn't make sense," he said, resigned, bracing for another outburst from Adam.
Adam lowered his gaze, frustrated—but not defeated. He still wore that silly smile, the kind of smile from someone who knows that even if the world makes no sense, he'll keep searching anyway.
"Maybe you're right…" he murmured. "But I can't help trying."
After a long pause, Adam looked again over the hand-drawn map he had put together over the past few hours.
"Well…" he finally said, standing up. "We've only analyzed half of this library." His tone drifted somewhere between pleading and mocking.
Fidelis stared at him, almost trying to figure out whether he was serious or joking. The seconds stretched longer than they should have.
"My lord…" he finally said, incredulous, with a half-smile that bordered on a laugh. "If this 'Ignis' really existed, or were important, I don't think we'd find it in the library of just any ship."
"And what about this?" Adam challenged, picking up a book Fidelis had set aside. "Look closely." He opened it without even glancing inside and showed him the pages.
"It can't be!" Fidelis exclaimed, leaning in with exaggerated excitement.
"See what I gave yo—" Adam began, smiling victoriously.
"It's a children's story," Fidelis cut him off, chuckling under his breath. He didn't need to read more than the first words. "I was the one who set it aside when I started helping you, sir."
Adam shut the book abruptly, his face hardening.
"If you're not going to help me for real, then don't get in the way."
Fidelis froze for a few seconds. The smile faded from his face, slowly, as if the words had hit deeper than he expected. He lowered his head, murmured a faint "All right… sorry," and stepped out of the room.
Adam watched him from the corner of his eye as he left, a sudden knot tightening in his stomach. He knew he had crossed a line—that he'd been unfair. Guilt gnawed at him, but he smothered it quickly, turning his eyes back to his notes. The annotations remained spread out before him, full of symbols, names, and connections. It was easier to cling to that tangled web of theories than to face what he had just done.
He adjusted his coat and resumed writing quickly.
The silence between them grew heavier than ever, broken only by the flipping of pages and the scratching of the quill.
Dozens of meters away, still within the same vessel, a small group advanced silently. They moved with the stealth of those who knew the corridors well, although their footsteps echoed faintly, muffled by the constant hum of the machinery.
The group—four hooded figures—stopped in a rarely visited maintenance room. The air there smelled of hot metal and oil. They began laying out small glass containers filled with various materials, along with black chalks.
The tallest of them knelt first. With a precise and swift movement, he traced a circle onto the metal floor. The marked lines took on the appearance of red powder that crackled when completed and came into contact with the energy-charged surface. Then he began arranging the remaining materials. The others imitated him, forming several rings connected by runes incomprehensible to anyone without knowledge of combustion-fire alchemy mixed with shades of summoning magic circles.
"Quick…" muttered a coarse voice from beneath a hood. "Before someone notices the alteration in the flow."
The air began to change. At first it was a faint heat, barely noticeable, but bit by bit it became suffocating and dry. The runes glowed like stirred embers, and the lines of red powder turned into a burning radiance. The ship's hum blended with a strange crackling—like firewood igniting and popping, though nothing there should burn.
From the cracks between the symbols came a flash, then another, each connecting to the next. In seconds, shapes began to define themselves: small burning bodies—compact flames with limbs and incandescent eyes. Fulgoris Incendia, one of the conjurers whispered as he watched them emerge. All the summoning material finished consuming itself the moment the creatures' name was spoken.
Each elemental shared the same essence: fire contained in an unstable form, like living embers with will of their own. Their gait was clumsy; the primal fury that had birthed them pushed them forward, searching for something to consume.
The circle kept vomiting more creatures. Around twenty flaming figures rose in the room.
"Now… let them do the rest," whispered the tallest one, his voice laced with dangerous satisfaction.
And without another word, the group slipped back into the corridors, vanishing into them, while the Fulgoris Incendia began to advance.