64. Seb
SEB
He was a little afraid. The more he beheld Windermere’s prescience, the more wary he became. The school’s founder had an endgame, and it wasn’t to bestow a boon on some random student three hundred years in the future.
By the time they made it back down to the lobby, the librarian had disappeared.
The light was dim from the storm, casting everything in soft, gloomy shadows.
They skirted the perimeter of the design inlaid in dark and light stone, outlined in veins of brass.
He had walked over this swath of floor hundreds of times, barely sparing it more than a passing thought, and now everything hung on its unexamined intricacies.
“Do you…do you think we can walk on it?” Lily said, a little sheepishly.
“We must be able to,” he said, sounding more sure than he felt. “People walk on it all the time.”
Lily followed the pattern toward its center, crouching before the dark stone pupil of the design.
He joined her in the examination, hesitating before reaching out and tracing the bright metal bands depicting Windermere’s crest ringed by alchemical symbols.
These he knew thanks to Chant’s class—they were some of the more common sigils used to denote the various alchemical processes.
“Now what?” Lily turned to him. “How do we make it work? Is there a button somewhere?”
“Not on the floor, I wouldn’t think. Too easy to accidentally activate. Try the disc?”
She fished it from beneath her shirt and held it up to her eye, scanning the floor.
He could tell when she found the thread of magic, or the difference in the air, because she followed it across the floor and to the walls.
She pointed at one of the faded unicorn tapestries hanging next to the circulation desk.
Behind the tapestry was a small brass button.
Seb pressed it as they exchanged a glance.
Both of them jumped as the floor of the library shuddered and a great grinding of stone echoed off the columns and faraway ceiling.
Once the library settled, they approached the set of spiral stairs that had appeared, sinking into the floor like the keys of a giant’s twisted piano.
They gazed down into a deep, yawning darkness.
“Here goes.” He adjusted the backpack of supplies containing rope, snacks, Lily’s lock-picking set, water, a first-aid kit, a USB charger, and a multi-tool. Seb grabbed her hand. Their palms were already clammy.
They descended.
Pressed shoulder to shoulder, they inched their way, trembling, into the void.
Neither of them said anything, but they were terrified.
The darkness was a swallowing thing. In such close quarters their lights could only illuminate that which was directly before them.
It was impossible for him not to think of those others who had undertaken a katabasis—Aeneas, Odysseus, and too many other Greeks to count, Enkidu, Dante, Inanna, and Izanagi—and the mysteries and terror they encountered therein.
Their journey downward felt as though it took several eternities, though in reality it could only have been a handful of minutes.
Each step forward was a conscious choice, a decision they forced upon themselves ten, twenty, fifty-six times.
Seb lost track of how many full turns they had made; he knew only that by the time they emerged into the open darkness of the hypogaeum, they were deep, deep underground.
Steeling themselves, they moved forward slowly, following the map.
The yellow sweep from her flashlight and the blue pulse of his phone’s light crossed and braided, illuminating a strange amalgam of Hermetic carvings and statuary, and ancient and broken furniture—dusty shelves, tilted desks, chairs missing legs.
“We have to go north here, then…west after an eighth mile. You have your distance tracker thing on?”
“Yeah.”
Fingers twined together, sweating even in the frigid basement, they blundered through the labyrinth in the bowels of the school.
The architecture and occasional statuary reminded Seb of a catacomb.
What purpose had all of this secret space served?
Eventually, they realized they’d moved beyond the library and stood below the quad.
At one point, Lily’s flashlight caught the grotesque visage of an old gargoyle with half its face caved in, and she screamed so loudly that it echoed down the passageways and then all the way back.
She trembled in his arms for a full minute before she could remove her face from his shoulder.
The fact that they’d packed snacks seemed ridiculous now.
“This is it,” Lily said after another eternity in the darkness, bouncing her light off the walls of a dead-end corridor. “But—”
“Wait.” Seb reached out, steadying her hand. “Look.”
A pair of arched double doors, framed in curls of black iron, were set into the far wall. Next to him, Lily froze. Her face, already pale in the light of his phone, was ghostly.
“What is it?”
“I…” she breathed, her voice shaky, “I think I’ve seen this door before.”
Cautiously, they approached. Lily broke out her lock picks, but there was no keyhole, no handle, only a circular piece of brass roughly at chest height. Even with his ability to see AEther, Seb found no trace of obvious wards.
None of Lily’s magic, meant to bring down wards or break thresholds, made a difference. Neither did Seb’s. They tried and tried again to no avail, their nerves rising and their magic fraying all the while.
“I don’t understand. Why doesn’t this door want to be opened?”
Seb leaned against the wall, checking his watch.
They’d been down here well over an hour.
It felt like a week. He’d read a book last year about man and time and thought of it now.
There had been an entire chapter on darkness as the absence of time, how it made it impossible to know when you were.
There had been studies cited on how poorly humans were able to track hours without light.
“Maybe it’s got a different sort of seal on it. Or maybe it’s not what we’re looking for.”
Lily slammed her fist against the door. Seb jumped.
Head in her hands, she slid to the ground, back pressed into the wood.
Her flashlight slipped from her hand. It rolled in an arc across the dust-caked floor, catching the motes that it unsettled in its beam.
He sat next to her, pressing his shoulder into hers.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just…how many more goddamn tunnels are we going to have to crawl down?”
Seb rested his cheek on her head. “I’ll crawl down as many tunnels with you as it takes—I…it’s not the door.”
“What?” She followed his gaze to the wash of her flashlight on the ground, illuminating what they’d missed in focusing on the door. “Oh. Well, okay then.”
They swept her flashlight across the text carved into the floor circling Windermere’s Chalice, turning slowly to read the partial text of the second clue:
The name alone may break the seal
To heedful minds admit archive.
“‘To heedful minds admit archive?’” Lily brought her beam up, accidentally blinding Seb. “What…”
For the first time in the darkness, he smiled. “The name alone. Her name alone.”
“Her name? Her name!” Lily’s voice lilted up.
“I bet you I know exactly what’s under there. On the count of three?”
They counted together, then: “Selene!”
Their voices echoed wildly off the tunnel walls, drowned out momentarily by the rasping of stone on stone.