Chapter 9 #2
The last staff member exits, locking the main entrance. Vale nods toward the building. "Side entrance. Staff access. Come on."
They cross the street quickly. The side door requires credentials, and Vale's badge, a relic he rarely uses but that opens most institutional doors in Haven, makes the lock click open with a chime.
"Show-off," August mutters, but there's no heat in it. "That get you in everywhere?"
"Works better than my people skills," Vale says flatly, holding the door.
The library interior is dark and silent, emergency lighting casting long shadows that bend toward August as he passes, reaching for him, curling around his ankles. Vale navigates from memory, leading them through the stacks and up the stairs to the third floor.
Their silences have changed. In the beginning, quiet between them had been charged with wariness, August bracing for threat, Vale assessing for danger.
Now the silence is companionable, broken only when one of them has something worth saying.
Vale is a man of few words by nature, and August is accustomed to moving through the world without drawing attention, so quiet is their default.
Vale has come to value the moments when August speaks unprompted, small observations, dry asides, pieces of himself offered without being asked for.
August moves silently beside him, jacket trailing, steps a fraction slower than they should be.
He's still drained from the gymnasium, even with the extended healing, and the fatigue accumulates regardless.
He keeps close to Vale without being asked, maintaining a proximity that keeps him within the radius of Vale's aura, but it's not the same as touch.
Vale's hand finds August's shoulder as they climb the last flight of stairs. August doesn't flinch. Doesn't tense. Just walks a little steadier.
The restricted section is behind a locked glass door marked with glowing warning symbols. Vale's credentials open it, and the door swings inward on silence.
"This is impressive," August says, looking around at the rows of ancient texts, leather-bound, cloth-wrapped, some sealed behind glass, the air heavy with the dust and weight of centuries. "Are the Order's archives like this?"
"Less extensive. Better organized. But you can't access anything without the archivist's approval and a documented reason." Vale moves toward the section marked Historical Dark Arts, Pre-Order Era. "Here, there are no such restrictions."
August trails his fingers along a tome's spine with the reverence of someone who understands what books are worth. "I thought you were supposed to document what you research and why."
"I'm supposed to do a lot of things I don't do."
"Like turn in illegal necromancers?"
"That's not something I've made a habit of." Vale pulls a heavy volume from the shelf. "You're a unique case."
A pause. Long enough that Vale thinks it's the end of it. Then August asks, his voice quiet in the dusty stillness: "How many necromancers have you killed?"
Vale looks at him across the narrow aisle.
August is backlit by the emergency lighting, dark hair slightly disheveled, features serious.
The grey veins on his hands are barely visible, kept at bay by hours of Vale's touch.
He looks young and tired and guarded, and something in Vale's chest turns over.
The question isn't idle. It's a calculation.
August is measuring the distance between himself and the seventeen people who came before him, trying to figure out which side of the line he's standing on.
"Seventeen," Vale says. He owes August the truth.
August's expression doesn't change, but something behind his eyes shifts. A recalculation. A reassessment of the man he's chosen to trust with his life.
"They weren't like you, August." Vale is surprised by the gentleness of his own voice.
"They were practitioners who used death magic to prey on the living.
Who raised the dead as weapons. Who sought power at any cost, including the suffering of others.
" He pauses. "You're not like them. You've never been like them. "
He knows it probably doesn't help. Knowing that the necromancers Vale killed were monsters doesn't change the arithmetic: August is a necromancer, Vale kills necromancers, and the only thing standing between August and that pattern is a connection neither of them can explain and a choice Vale could reverse at any moment.
August knows that. Lives with that knowledge every time he lets Vale put his hands on him, every time he falls asleep in an apartment with a Templar in the next room.
The trust August has placed in him is an act of faith so enormous that Vale isn't sure he deserves it.
August bites his lip and turns back to the stacks without a word.
Vale lets it sit. Some truths need time to be absorbed, not argued.
***
They search for hours. Vale pulls books and scans indices while August works through the Old Script texts, slowly at first, then with increasing fluency that surprises Vale until he remembers that August has been stealing from university restricted sections for years and has probably taught himself half the dead languages in the building.
Self-taught, self-directed, self-sustained.
Everything August is, he built alone. The thought makes something in Vale's chest ache with complicated admiration.
The references to the Mortis Cabal are extensive but familiar. Rise to power. Conflict with the early Templars. Ultimate destruction. The official histories paint them as unchecked necromantic tyrants, power-hungry and cruel, brought down by righteous holy warriors. Standard.
But there are gaps. Inconsistencies. Things that don't add up when Vale cross-references them against what he knows of the Order's founding. Dates that don't align. Accounts that contradict each other. The narrative has been curated, and not subtly.
"Vale." August's voice is tight with discovery. "I think this is something."
Vale crosses to where August stands over a heavy tome open on the reading table. The text is Old Script, the formal language that predates the modern era, and Vale can read it well enough. He predates the modern era too.
"Here," August says, pointing. "The Cabal's primary artifacts.
The Mortis Crown, granted the wearer dominion over death within a localized area.
The Binding Chains, could anchor spirits to the material world, willing or otherwise.
And this," his finger traces a passage, "the Soul Lens.
Allowed the user to perceive through the veil permanently.
To see death and the living simultaneously, without cost."
"All of which are in the Order's vault," Vale says.
"All of which Maren Voss spent years guarding." August looks up at him, and his grey eyes are sharp with understanding. "He doesn't just know what's in there. He's studied them. Probably for decades. He knows exactly which artifacts he needs and exactly what they'll do."
"The Crown," Vale says, following the logic. "If it grants dominion over death within a localized area—"
"Then it might negate the corruption. Make the cost of death magic irrelevant within its range.
" August's voice is quiet with the weight of it.
"He doesn't just become immortal. He becomes a necromancer with unlimited power and no price.
Every spell he casts, every undead he raises, every rift he opens, none of it touches him. "
The silence that follows is the kind that accompanies the realization that things are worse than you thought. Which, in Vale's experience, happens with a frequency that suggests the universe has a sense of humor and it isn't a kind one.
"We need to document this." Vale turns the book toward the light. "Do you have a phone? Can you photograph the page?"
August produces a phone from his pocket that looks as though it's survived several near-death experiences of its own. He raises an eyebrow at Vale as he frames the shot. "Too old-fashioned to keep up with technology?"
"The last thing I need is to be more accessible. It's bad enough my partner can track me."
They keep searching. The hours unspool around them, the library silent except for the rustle of pages and the occasional murmured observation passed between shelves.
Vale hadn't expected to find anything of real value, and the steady accumulation of useful fragments keeps them both longer than planned: ritual diagrams, Cabal organizational charts, references to artifacts that might still exist in the vault and whose capabilities the Order may not fully understand.
It's nearing two in the morning when Vale remembers there's a rift opening tomorrow night that they need to be prepared for.
He shelves the book he's been reading and rounds the corner of the aisle to find August.
August is standing at the end of the row, one hand gripping the shelf in front of him, the other pressed against his chest. He's shivering, a fine, continuous tremor that runs through his frame, and even in the low light Vale can see the tension in his jaw, the carefully controlled breathing of someone managing pain they don't want to show.
The corruption has been rebuilding all night. Hours of research without contact, the healing slowly losing ground, the familiar ache reasserting itself one degree at a time until it's become a problem August can no longer hide behind focus and adrenaline.
"How long?" Vale asks quietly.
August's jaw tightens. "A while."
"And you didn't say anything."
"You were reading. I was managing."
"You were suffering in silence three aisles away because you're too stubborn to—" Vale stops himself. Takes a breath. Arguing about August's self-destructive stoicism is a battle he's going to be fighting for as long as he knows this man, and right now it's beside the point.