Chapter 19
My first stop the next day is Widener. I need to tease out my new lead, based on the information Daerios revealed about the Shadow Elves.
A quick search through the library’s database reveals that, while no texts have been published specifically about Shadow Elves—unsurprising, given that the elves have hidden the monster-ridden state of their world from humans—the species is mentioned in several hundred books, papers, and dissertations.
All elf-written. All in Maevish or Lukkarin.
None of the texts are about Elaerion—also unsurprising, given that the elves rarely speak publicly about their realm.
The titles, when translated to English, are as varied as the library itself:
Flora and Fauna of Eastern Missouri
The Economics of Localized Famine
Stability and Instability of Transition-Metal Ions
Without Reservation: Women, Gender, and the American Restaurant
Death of Love at Midnight: A Novel
I scroll through pages and pages of literature, clicking on digital previews to see where and how Shadow Elves are mentioned.
To my dismay, they never appear more than once or twice per text, and always as an afterthought.
A footnote, or a comparison, or within a comprehensive list of species.
It’s as if the elves don’t really want to bring the Shadow Elves up, but can’t help themselves.
Eventually, I tire of looking at the computer screen and decide to print off a hundred pages, each one a separate instance where Shadow Elves have been mentioned.
Perhaps, I figure as I wait for the archaic printer to chug out a stack of black-and-whites, if I spread before me every half-baked mention of Shadow Elves, every jagged sliver of information, they will tell a complete story.
I secret the stack of papers over to one of the darkest, mustiest corners of the lower stacks, a place I deem Daerios least likely to materialize behind me. Then I go to work.
I highlight. I underline. I circle every instance that Shadow Elves—Zolae Aldar in Maevish; Pareth Alfhen in Lukkarin—appear in these texts.
Then, on a blank sheet of printer paper, I copy every sentence containing those words, one after another, each one entirely unrelated to the one before.
By the time I reach the bottom, the document before me is a carefully-crafted treatise of utter gibberish.
I sigh, running a finger down the bulleted sentences.
So much for a new lead. In the last hour, I’ve learned the best method for navigating localized famine, how to plot the migratory patterns of white-throated sparrows, the intricacies of gender division in public dining in the 1910s, and—especially thrilling—a brief comparison between Shadow Elves and nocturnal mammals.
Useless. Absolutely useless.
I’m about to give up entirely, to shred the evidence of my research and head back to Quincy, when I notice something strange on the printed document closest to my elbow.
It’s the elvish novel, the one titled Death of Love at Midnight.
In the sentence immediately following the offhand mention of Shadow Elves, the author makes a grammatical error. A small one, but notable nonetheless.
In Maevish, to form either the nominative plural or the nominative dual, you add one of two possible endings: For plural, -r if the noun ends in any vowel, but -e and -i if it ends in a consonant. For dual, almost all nouns add -t, unless the word ends in t or d; in that case, a -u is added.
Though both cases refer to plurals, the nominative dual is slightly different—it refers to natural pairs, such as two eyes belonging to the same person.
In the sentence at which I’m staring, which translates, roughly, to, “He tied his shoes,” the author translated shoes as hyapati, when it should be hyapatu.
After all, a pair of shoes is not a plural; it’s an obvious dual.
I stare at the flaw. How is this possible? Human authors make grammatical errors all the time, but these are elves we’re talking about. They don’t publish anything short of perfection.
I remember the error I found when I was reading Everything We Know About Elaerion. I’d written it off as likely the result of the humans transferring the original text to their collection. But this? Direct from the source material?
At first, I want to laugh. To run out of the library, waving the printed document in everyone’s faces, evidence that elves are human too.
I mean, sort of.
I flip over the page, curious to see if I can find any errors in the other documents. This one is a section of an elvish dissertation on methods of communication in the late 1950s. I read carefully, hunting through each letter. And then—
There.
A reference to three messages, translated as mentat, as if it were a dual. But it’s not.
I scan further down the page, only to find the same mistake repeated two lines later. And, three lines after that, a slight mix-up in the past tense and present.
What the hell?
Abruptly, I stand. I march back over to the slow-churning Microsoft computer across the stacks. I pull up the rest of the dissertation on communication. I hit PRINT ALL.
In minutes, I’m back at my desk, searching for more errors in the paper.
I find them. In fact, they’re everywhere—hidden in misplaced vowels, in singular rather than plural, in infinitives and gerunds and partitives and datives.
I circle each and every one with thick red marker.
When I’m done, I flip through the pages, looking for some sort of pattern.
At first, nothing jumps out at me. It’s only after several perusals that I notice the obvious. The thing staring straight out at me, underlined twice in black Sharpie.
Zolae Aldar.
The dissertation’s mention of Shadow Elves happens on page five. When I flip back through the previous four pages, they are completely clean of errors. It’s only after the author mentions Zolae Aldar that the mistakes begin.
Holy shit.
I stuff the dissertation into my backpack, then turn back to the other printed pages.
First, I see the novel: second sentence after the mention of Zolae Aldar, a mistake.
I flip the page. An academic paper on the economics of developing nations.
Four lines after the mention of Zolae Aldar, a mistake.
I flip the page. Again. And again. And again. Every time, the pattern repeats.
It’s like mentioning Shadow Elves precipitates the errors. Like it’s a prompt of some sort.
A trigger.
And I would bet my nonexistent hat that, were I to print off the rest of these full texts, I would find similar strings of subtle but, to a linguistics major like me, remarkable errors. Well-hidden, on the part of the elves.
Breath heaves in and out of my chest. I stand up, and stars dance at the edges of my vision. Balance leaks out the holes in my ears. I stumble, catching myself on the cluttered wooden desk. By now, it’s nearly noon, and I’ve eaten nothing today.
But there’s no time for food right now. No time for anything but celebration, because I’ve done it.
I’ve figured it out. Why the elves flooded the Universities when they arrived on Earth.
Why they ingratiated themselves into our libraries and built their own system of publication.
It wasn’t just for the access to information.
It was a disguise, too. A front. A pretense of academic research.
These aren’t errors.
They’re a code.