Chapter 24
The Restricted Wing
He went on the fourteenth night.
He'd been thinking about it since the orientation â€" since the
administrator had mentioned the restricted archive with the particular
emphasis of someone listing a rule they expected to be broken. The tone
wasn't warning so much as it was a note for the record: we told you,
when you get caught, we told you.
He'd spent the intervening time learning the library's layout. The
Academy's main library occupied the ground and first floors of the
central tower and was accessible to all students during standard hours.
The restricted wing was on the second floor, behind a mana-locked gate
at the end of the east corridor. Bronze-level lock from what he could
feel when he walked past it during the day â€" not strong, just
consistent. Designed to keep honest people out, not determined ones.
He went at the third hour after midnight.
The corridor was empty. The lock took about thirty seconds â€" he pressed
his palm against the mana-seal and drew from it slowly, carefully, the
way Fen had showed him deliberate release worked in reverse. The seal
depleted rather than disengaged, the enchantment starved of the mana
that kept it active, and the gate swung open with a sound like a sigh.
The restricted wing smelled different from the main library. Older. The
particular smell of documents that had been kept in low-mana
environments to preserve them â€" slightly dry, slightly cold, the smell
of deliberate preservation.
He didn't use a light. The ambient mana from the enchantments in the
walls was enough for him to navigate by now, though he couldn't have
explained how that worked to anyone else.
He moved through the stacks methodically. Most of the restricted
material was exactly what you'd expect: advanced spellwork
documentation, historical records with political sensitivity, financial
archives. He wasn't interested in those.
He was looking for something specific. He wasn't sure what, exactly.
Something about the Runestone system. Something about null results.
Something about the category of ability that the standard measurement
framework didn't have a name for.
He found the relevant section in the third aisle â€" a shelf of older
texts, some of them considerably older, with a layer of dust that
suggested they weren't consulted frequently. Most had titles. A few had
their titles scraped off, the leather of the spine showing the raw marks
where a blade had removed the text.
He reached for one of the untitled ones.
It crumbled.
Not dramatically â€" not dust and nothing, but a collapse, the binding
giving way, the pages folding into themselves, the whole thing becoming
structurally incoherent in his hand before he'd fully gripped it. He
pulled his hand back and the remnants settled onto the shelf in a loose
pile of fragmented material.
He stared at it.
The book hadn't been old enough to be that fragile. He'd handled
pre-Saint era documents at the monastery that were in better condition.
Whatever had happened to this one was specific. Either it had been
damaged by something over a long time, or â€"
Or it had been destroyed by contact with him.
He looked at the other untitled spines. There were seven of them.
He did not touch any of them.
He stood in the restricted archive and thought about what it meant for a
book to crumble in his hand, and whether the thing that crumbled it was
the same thing that cracked the Runestone, and whether the information
inside those books was gone now or whether gone was even the right
concept for what had happened to it.
Then he heard footsteps in the main library below.
He moved quickly and quietly back through the wing, pulled the gate shut
behind him, and pressed his palm to the lock to restore the mana seal as
best he could. It wasn't perfect â€" the seal felt thinner than it had
before â€" but it would pass a casual inspection.
He was halfway back to the dormitory when he realized: the crumbled
book. He'd left the fragments on the shelf.
He stopped.
He went back to bed.
There was nothing he could do about it now, and panicking about things
you couldn't change was the most wasteful thing a person could do with
their energy.
He lay in the dark and thought about seven books with their titles
scraped off, and one of them in fragments on a shelf, and whatever had
been written inside them that someone had decided shouldn't have a name
anymore.