50. The Survivor in the Library
THE SURVIVOR IN THE LIbrARY
TALIA
My power lasted just long enough to reach these fluxless shores. Now I’m going gray at the temples like a fucking mortal merchant. The irony! I survived the fall of my homeland, just to die somewhere worse. On the bright side, everyone wants to fuck a god.
Riven hadn’t exaggerated. Behind the wide bronze doors, the Grand Library rose up like a temple inside the citadel.
Columns carved with spiraling script held up galleries stacked three floors high.
Flux ran between marble tiles in faint blue lines, humming softly.
The air was cool and dry with the scent of paper, dust, minerals, old magic.
There was no fake food here, no scenes of violence phasing in and out, no figments that Talia could see. For the first time since she entered Valrotala, the world felt solid under her feet. She pressed her palm to the nearest pillar, and something relaxed in her chest.
The library was real. And it really did contain a lot of books. The mosaic floor brightened under her boots, sigils waking briefly at each step.
She pulled a tome from the shelf, and the wood binding creaked softly. Inside, ancient Starscript filled the page in tight lines: lists of spices and teas, furniture and lighting fixtures. For a moment, everything inside her steadied.
Then she turned the page, and a single line snared her attention:
— Transfer of 20 thuolev units to Chamber Three —
She blinked. Read the line over again. The word thuolev translated to “mortal,” as in fae with no magical abilities. She rubbed the back of her thumb over the ink, thinking about the implications. Referring to people as “units” was strange. She could have the translation wrong.
A rustle sounded between the shelves behind her. Talia closed the book gently.
“Hello?” she asked.
A chittering sound. Then a tiny head poked out around the stack. It had wide black eyes and silver-white fur, and its whiskers were trembling. The creature was no bigger than a squirrel, tail tipped with a faint flux blue shimmer. They crept out on cautious paws.
“You read the old script?” they asked in a breezy whistle.
Talia knelt down. “Starscript? Yes, I can read Starscript.”
They edged closer, clutching a curled scrap of parchment.
“Good,” they said. “The books need reading. Pip keeps the lights awake, but Pip cannot read them.”
A curl of loneliness filled Talia’s nose and prickled in her throat like unshed tears. “How long have you been here, Pip?”
Pip’s silk tail twitched once. “One hundred and forty-six thousand nights,” they squeaked. They looked up at the high shelves as if counting. “Maybe more. Pip loses count sometimes.”
Four hundred years alone here.
Talia kept her voice gentle. “Pip, can you help me find records about what happened here when the city fell?”
Their whiskers twitched, eyes jumping to the exits, the shadows, her hands.
“You are not like the others,” they said finally. “What are you?”
“I’m a scholar.”
Their tail twitched. “Scholars read. Pip shows the reading place.”
They led her deeper into the stacks, staying close to the shelves, tail brushing each aisle marker as they went.
Pip stopped beside a narrow reading table. “These,” they said softly. “The youngest ones.”
Talia set down her satchel, pulled out a heavy wooden chair from a reading desk, and unrolled the first scroll: Extraction Protocols, Lower Chambers.
She pulled a few books off the table and weighed the scroll down.
It was dense with diagrams and sigil-grids designed to draw energy from living bodies.
Notes comparing “yield efficiency” across different varieties of elein.
One of the illustrations made her pause.
It was a wall of smaller cages, interwoven with tubes, almost exactly like what they’d seen at Haven.
The next stack of documents appeared to be a census. Pip had pushed it toward her while she was reading. It opened with columns of names, then categories:
ELEIN
Flux generating: dragons, lesser beasts
Labor: oxen, horses, thuolev
Talia’s throat tightened. There was that word again, thuolev, listed alongside livestock. On the right, a column denoting ownership. It appeared to list family names, which would make sense if elein were considered household property.
She pressed her palms flat to the table until her hands stopped shaking. If she was understanding correctly, thuolev were mortal people born without magic and elein were sentient shifters with an abundance of magic. The fae had enslaved them both.
The next document was different. It was written in hurried, imperfect Starscript:
We are not collateral. We are not tools. When the collar breaks, we choose freedom or death. There is no third path.
The pile of documents was getting thin. This must have been one of the last records captured.
“Pip,” she said quietly, “who wrote this?”
“Peoples,” they said. “In the lower halls. Pip hid under the shelves so they would not think we listened.”
She turned the page to a table with short, time-stamped entries.
We are grossly outmatched. The white dragon says she can reverse the core arrays to ignite the flux channels. Break the collars. Free the elein. A desperate plan, but we have no choice.
Talia’s pulse quickened. This wasn’t what she’d imagined when Riven had described the elein as killers and aggressors. These people were desperate, but whatever happened in the end, she found it hard to imagine they’d been on the wrong side of history.
The next entry, written just a few hours later, hinted at an answer.
Dragon’s light—blinding. When sight returned, fae positions empty. Beasts in a killing frenzy—bloodlust? We are overrun, must quit the city.
Whatever they had done to free the elein seemed to have gone horribly wrong. The elein must have been turned to fluxborn, but that wasn’t anyone’s intent. It was a tragedy more than anything.
“Pip. Do you know what happened to the white dragon?”
Pip’s ears flattened. “Everything fell. Shelves. Lights.” They shivered. “But Pip heard her after. Crying. Quiet crying. Down below.”
Talia went back through the documents one at a time, looking for patterns. Time slipped. She didn’t know how long she’d been reading when the door creaked open.
“Talia?”
Riven stepped inside, carrying bread wrapped in cloth in one hand and a carafe in the other. He took in the table—scrolls spread out, books holding down the edges. Then he saw her face.
“Talia.” He said it with an edge of concern.
She didn’t trust herself to talk, so she slid the extraction protocol documents across the table to him.
He set the food down and read without sitting.
His face was as impassive as ever, but his jaw twitched.
He picked up the census. Then the manifesto.
Then the rough notes. When he reached the entry about the dragon, he inhaled sharply.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Riven’s throat worked once. “The white dragon. Her name was Ehrue,” he said finally. “She was Dawn’s mate.”
Dawn’s mate had helped lead the uprising. Talia tried to imagine explaining this to Dawn, to picture how she would react. Then she remembered what Pip had just said.
“I think she’s still alive.” Talia was almost afraid to say the words. “Pip said he heard her crying.”
Riven closed the logbook with one careful hand. She had his full attention.
“Dawn thinks the fluxborn killed her mate,” Talia said. “That’s not what happened.”
“No,” he agreed.
“Ehrue created the fluxborn somehow. And the fae…” She gestured to the spread of documents. “They didn’t fall to the fluxborn either. The blast—whatever it was—”
“Ended them,” he said, finishing her thought. “Except for the thirteen who made it out.”
“What thirteen?” She sifted back through the papers on the table, but she was sure she hadn’t read that.
“The ones you call gods.” He tapped his fingers on the table as he said it.
“That wasn’t in these records.” She stared at him, shocked, but it made sense, didn’t it? If thirteen magic-wielding fae had escaped from Valrotala, they would appear godlike to people without magic.
It would explain why the religious texts and faerie stories echoed one another. They were two sides of the same history.
She thought about the churches built over the years. All the children raised in the faith. The people who’d been executed for heresy.
“We need to tell the others,” she said finally. “We have to tell Dawn that Ehrue is alive and the elein didn’t kill everyone.”
Riven didn’t answer at first. “It doesn’t have to be you,” he said finally.
“Yes,” she said. “It does.”
She’d uncovered these truths, and she was done avoiding hard conversations.
She gathered the documents and slid them into her satchel. Pip watched from their shelf with wide eyes.
“You’ve done something important,” she told them. “Keeping this place awake.”
They dipped their head. “Pip remembers,” they whispered. “Even when it hurts.”
Talia reached toward them but was careful not to touch. They quivered a little, and she could have sworn they smiled.
“Thank you, Pip,” she said.
Riven stepped beside her, and she reached for his hand. He squeezed lightly.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I guess I’ll have to be.”
Pip padded after them until the doorway. They stopped there. “Will you come back?” Pip squeaked.
“If I can,” Talia said.
They gave a small nod. “Pip will keep the lights awake.”
She pushed open the bronze doors, and together, they stepped into the corridor. Dawn was waiting right there in the hall. She looked up, her face flashing from annoyance to relief, then concern. Talia took a deep breath and got ready to break her friend’s world open.