The fourth page tasted like an argument.
Not metaphorically. The membrane had been inscribed by two different hands — I could tell by the pressure variance in the notation, one stroke heavy and certain, one lighter and inclined to bracket the first writer's conclusions with pointed qualifications — and the argument between them was encoded so thoroughly into the material that the disagreement had become a flavor. Astringent on the left margin. Faintly bitter where the annotations crowded each other.
I consumed it in approximately four seconds because the dust was still falling and my skin was still broadcasting my location to anyone within arm's reach of the eastern wall, and luxury of attention was not currently available.
The axiom from the third page recognized what I had just eaten and did something I did not have a word for yet.
It organized.
Here is what the fourth page contained, rendered in language rather than the direct geometric comprehension in which I received it:
Mana, in its natural state, seeks expression. This is not a property of mana in the way that wetness is a property of water; it is closer to a tendency, a preference, a deeply ingrained habit developed over whatever span of time preceded the existence of beings who noticed it doing this. Left alone, mana dissipates into the world as ambient energy. Directed, it becomes a spell. But there is a third state, almost never discussed in elementary texts because it requires a baseline understanding of mana architecture that most students never develop: mana can be contained.
Not stored. Contained.
The distinction, which the heavier-handed of the two authors had spent considerable effort establishing over what appeared to be the remnants of a long professional disagreement, was this: storage implies a vessel external to the practitioner, a bottle, a stone, a shaped channel carved in metal or crystal. Containment is the practitioner becoming the vessel. Collapsing inward instead of expressing outward. Learning to hold the pressure of unshaped mana inside one's own channels without releasing it as light or heat or the involuntary casting of whatever spell sits closest to the surface of one's mind.
The lighter hand had written, in the margin, in letters so small I absorbed them almost as texture rather than text: this is why untrained mages dream in fire.
I did not have time to find this as interesting as it deserved.
The axiom took the containment principle and installed it in the architecture it had already built. I felt the channels the second page had carved into me narrow further — not close, not seal, but tighten, the way a fist closes without clenching. The mana that had been leaking outward in visible light turned and went inward instead, coiling into a space between my physical body and whatever was beginning to exist adjacent to it, and the glow stopped.
Not gradually. Between one moment and the next, I ceased to be visible.
The dust continued to fall.
"Penelope."
Master Greaves's voice was close enough now that I could resolve individual resonances in it. He was standing, I estimated, approximately eight inches from my position. The plaster between us was not thick. He had good hands for this work — the sound of his movements suggested economy and certainty, no wasted motion, no hesitation.
"There's something strange in the wall."
"The trails?" Penelope's voice came from slightly further away. She was holding something that clinked softly when she moved — the powder applicator, most likely, a long-nozzled instrument I had seen described in the pest management volume and had not, until recently, had cause to consider from the perspective of the pest.
"Not the trails." A pause. The particular quality of a person looking more carefully at something. "There's scorching. On the inside face of the plaster. Faint, but — come look at this."
The sound of footsteps approaching.
"That's a burn mark," Penelope said.
"Yes."
"From inside the wall."
"Yes."
A silence with texture to it.
"Can bookworms—"
"No," said Master Greaves. "They cannot."
Another silence, differently textured. The first silence had been the silence of someone encountering an anomaly. This second silence was the silence of someone revising a category. I had eaten enough academic texts to recognize the sound of a mental model being adjusted under duress, and I found, to my considerable surprise, that I felt something adjacent to sympathy. He had come to this wall expecting a worm.
He was still dealing with a worm. Just not the variety his experience had prepared him for.
"Mage-fire?" Penelope asked.
"The restricted collection has been sealed for forty years. The last mage with access was Aldric himself, and he has been dead for thirty-two of those." Master Greaves's voice carried the flat affect of a man stating facts as a substitute for conclusions. "What we are looking at is a burn mark on the interior face of a wall that has not been opened since before you were born, in a section of the library where the only documented non-human presence is a bookworm infestation."
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
"Should we get someone?" Penelope asked.
"Who would you suggest?"
"The Mage's Collegium?"
"And tell them what, precisely?"
I listened to her not answering, which she did with considerable eloquence.
"Apply the powder," Master Greaves said. "Carefully. And then go to my office, look in the lower left drawer, and bring me the book with the green cover. Don't open it."
Footsteps receded.
The nozzle of the applicator appeared at the crack above me.
I had, at this point, three things:
A cantrip I could not cast without hands or voice or any of the physical mechanisms through which magic was conventionally expressed.
An axiom about the deep grammar of illumination magic that I understood completely and could apply exactly nowhere.
A containment principle that was currently the only reason I was not glowing like a festival lantern in a space the size of a boot.
I also had, pressing against the edge of these things like a question that had not yet found language, the awareness that I had just heard two human beings discuss me as an anomaly and reach for a green book that I was not permitted to know the contents of, and that this represented, depending on how the next several minutes proceeded, either the beginning of the most significant event in the documented history of this library, or the end of me specifically.
The nozzle depressed.
The first curl of desiccant entered the channel.
I felt it hit the outer edge of the containment field — because that was what I had, I understood now, not a party trick of compressed light but a genuine field, a shaped boundary between inside and outside — and stop. Not harmlessly. The compound was designed to seek moisture and magical trace and destroy both, and it recognized immediately that there was something here worth destroying. It pressed against the containment with the patient insistence of a professional.
The containment held.
Barely.
I became aware, in the way one becomes aware of the structural integrity of a floor by the sound it makes under one's weight, that I could not sustain this indefinitely. The containment principle was new — the ink was barely dry in my nervous system — and the channels supporting it were not yet load-bearing in any serious sense. I was holding a considerable amount of mana inside a body that had been designed, by nature, to hold nothing more complex than a digestive system and a moderate quantity of ambition.
Something would have to change.
I looked at the remaining thirty-eight pages of the spellbook.
Then I looked, in the way that I was beginning to understand I could look at things without eyes, at the axiom sitting in the architecture of my mind like the first stone of a wall that was going to be very large.
The axiom, I realized, was not waiting for me to eat more pages.
It was waiting for me to use it.
I want to be clear that I did not know what I was doing.
I had coherence. I had a growing architecture of magical theory. I had the containment principle holding a field against a desiccant designed to kill me. What I did not have was experience, or training, or any of the slow accumulation of practice through which mages learned to do intentional things with magic rather than falling forward into it and hoping.
What I had instead was the axiom, and the axiom knew something about light that no cantrip had ever been designed to know: that illumination magic, at its root, was not about producing light.
It was about directing perception.
Lux Perpetua — my first spell, the cantrip, the nightlight in academic Latin — produced light that traveled outward from a source and bounced back and told observers where the source was. This was the conventional application. This was what the spell had been designed for and what every student who had ever absorbed it had done with it.
The axiom said: you have assumed that light must go toward what you want seen. There is a direction available to you that the cantrip does not document.
I held the containment with one part of my mind and thought with another part — discovering in the process that I had parts, that the mind which had assembled itself over the last several minutes was not a single continuous surface but a series of rooms — and in the space between these two things, I asked the axiom a question that I did not yet have words for but that was structured, in rough translation, as: what is the other direction?
The axiom answered.
And I turned the light inward, and downward, and directed it not outward into the wall where Greaves and the desiccant and the green book and everything that wanted to find me was waiting — but into the page.
Into the thirty-eighth page of the spellbook, which I had not yet eaten.
And the page lit up from the inside with a soft, completely contained, entirely invisible-from-the-outside illumination that allowed me to read it.
I had not previously considered the possibility of reading.
I was a worm. Reading was not, historically, something that had fallen within my area of operations. I ate pages. Pages became knowledge. The intermediary step of engaging with text visually had simply never been relevant.
But I was no longer operating in the historical mode, and the page in front of me — lit from beneath by a spell I had repurposed in a direction its author had never considered, held steady by a containment field I was maintaining with approximately the same confidence with which a student holds a new language's subjunctive tense — contained something I did not want to absorb through consumption before I had a chance to evaluate it.
The title, in the heavier hand from the fourth page, read:
On the Theoretical Maximum Intelligence Capacity of Non-Human Biological Systems, With Appendices on the Matter of Personhood.
Below it, in the lighter hand:
Revised, substantially, because Aldric's original conclusions were wrong in three important ways and I have the citations.
The nozzle of the applicator shifted above me. Greaves was patient. Greaves was methodical. Greaves was eight inches away and had sent his assistant for a book that I was increasingly certain had something to do with magical anomalies in enclosed spaces.
I began to read.