NINETEEN
Silas spent the afternoon holed up in his own corner booth in the Lux Spire’s grand library. He’d used a public Wayglass to contact Aurora, reassuring her of his safety following his rather thrilling exit. Aurora had confirmed she would be sending the journals and some of Silas’ belongings his way.
If he had expected Amelia to find him in the library after their encounter, he continued to be disappointed.
Silas sighed, pushing yet another stack of books aside, having found no mention of the Midnight Realm, the blades, or pair bonding. It seemed the phenomena were woefully under researched, which did not help in the slightest.
He stood, wandering back to the stacks.
The library was an absolute marvel of architecture and knowledge.
Called the beating heart of Ivory City’s intellectual elite, it spanned multiple floors and was the most revered repository of books, scrolls and arcane texts.
Like the rest of the city, it was built from ivory-hued stone, supported by towering columns and a great domed ceiling inlaid with shimmering silver constellations, giving the impression of standing beneath an eternal night sky.
The expanse of polished marble floors was softened by the sprawling rugs laid out in every entry and aisle. Enormous stained-glass windows filtered weak sunlight into the space, casting shifting patterns across the labyrinthine shelves.
Silas turned into an aisle he hadn’t ventured into yet, browsing the spines. The air smelled of parchment and ink, a combination he loved. It was the fragrance that spoke of centuries of accumulated knowledge, reminding him of hours spent with his father surrounded by books.
He plucked up a few tomes that might be of interest, one in particular felt promising: ‘ Legends of the Lost Gemino Tribe’ .
He held the small stack in his arms and walked back out to the main hall, glancing around in awe at the infinitely lined towering bookshelves that reached for the ceiling.
He walked past sliding ladders and glass cases runed with magic to preserve the contents of decay, holding ancient tomes in dead languages or artefacts from first civilisations.
He passed a glyph-locked door, hiding the restricted archives, only accessible to the high scholars.
It was said to host knowledge of the most powerful and dangerous, but everyone was tight-lipped about the actual contents held behind those doors.
Silas had a feeling there would be some important answers somewhere in there, and had even tried the handle, only to be zapped painfully.
He made his way back to the study tables scattering the outskirts, each laden with glowing arcane lamps.
Silas sat quietly, spreading out the books he had taken.
The silence in the library was almost sacred, making him overly conscious not to make noise.
The silence was only broken by the hushed murmurs of scholars, the light scratching of pens on paper and the occasional fluttering of pages when turned a little too eagerly.
He skimmed through the books, wasting away another few hours.
It wasn’t until he was thumbing through the final book, when he happened across a few sentences that held some relevance. His heart hammered in his chest as he read the lines a few times, before he marked the page and swiped the book from the table.
Silas ordered the book under Amelia’s name before leaving the Spire in a hurry.
He knocked twice at her door but didn’t wait for a response before pushing it open and walking inside.
Amelia was cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by open books. She looked up the moment he entered with a startled expression.
“You’ve been gone awhile,” she remarked.
“Observant as always,” he quipped, moving over to her. He eyed the open tomes in front of her. “Where did all these come from?”
“I visited Halpert. Borrowed some books.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You told him?”
She shook her head, shutting the book she had been reading. “No, but I asked about the history of pair bonding. He thought these ones may help. He might be a tad suspicious.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Silas said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I was wondering…do you think Halpert might be able to grant us access to the restricted archives?”
Amelia twisted her lips to the side. “He’s never had access, no one I know does, except…”
Silas raised his brows.
She sighed, glancing away. “Uh, my father does.”
He straightened with a jolt of excitement. “Really? Do you think he could get us in there? I know it’s a bit of a mystery what’s behind those doors, but what if there’s something we can use in there? Could you—”
“No.”
Silas paused, watching with confusion as she stood abruptly and wandered away from him, plucking up a book from the table.
He followed her to the wingback chairs where she sat. “Winslow…”
She thumbed a page over as she shook her head. “No.”
“Access to whatever is in there could give us some valuable information.”
Amelia turned another page. “My parents don’t live here anymore. In fact, I don’t know where they are.”
Silas frowned. “I thought they worked in the Spire?”
She shrugged, refusing to look at him.
He tucked the library book under his arm as he slowly took a seat, scrutinising her. “You don’t get along with them, do you?”
She released an irritated breath through her nose and didn’t respond.
“Okay, fine. We’ll revisit that. But I did find this book in the Spire. Here, look—”
He flipped open the pages and shifted forwards, holding it out for her. His finger tapped at the sentence.
Amelia frowned at the pages, pulling it into her lap and leaned over it, reading aloud softly.
“The most famous instance of a magically bonded pair, referred to as ‘the inseparable lovers’ , were rumoured to be united through a bond of unknown origin that claimed to be ‘more than a simple bonding, but a melding of souls’ . The incident in East Town has never been categorically confirmed as accurate, though some reports noted ‘wicked displays of magic that went far beyond the natural’ which destroyed a section of the town. They were presumed to have been rune-bound (skin carvings: for more on this outlawed practice, see pg. 319), driven mad by the imbued magic that they could not wield without destruction to themselves or others. The lovers disappeared after the incident and were never heard from again, taking the truth with them.”
She was quiet as her eyes scanned it again, before looking up. “Inseparable lovers? Was that the last two before us…Lyana was her name?”
He nodded. “Based on the vision with the mage, yes.”
“They would have been trying to fix it…bring balance,” Amelia said. “They sacrificed everything…and they’re nothing but an unnamed footnote in history riddled with errors. They weren’t runed…they were like us.”
She snapped the book shut fiercely, setting her hands atop the worn cover. “Is that our destiny? Just another bonded pair, doomed to failing, becoming lost to history?”
Silas swallowed as the arcane lamps in her room began flickering, sending the space pulsing briefly between light and dark before returning to normal.
He shook his head. “I don’t think we have a choice,” he said slowly, choosing his words with care. “If the purpose of the bond is to bring some kind of balance…we have to try, or…”
Silas didn’t have to finish. Amelia covered her eyes with a hand, leaning back with a weary sigh.
If they didn’t fix the magic, it was not only them who may be lost.
Amelia showed Silas her laboratory the next morning. It was so much like his own that it felt like coming home as he stepped inside the large space, except for the cleanliness and order in the way her worktable and shelves were arranged.
The blades were set down carefully on the central table, spending most of the first day studying the effects of other materials when in contact with each stone that made up the blades. They had been unsuccessful in taking scrapings of the stone, the steadfast material seemed utterly impenetrable.
As they had already discovered from previous testing, they didn’t react to extreme heat or cold, nor did encasing them in any kind of other metal, runed or not, work to control the magic within them, that magic which sang in their own veins.
They would also discover that the blades did not react to light in the usual way.
The dagger cut from the Southern Monolith was not surprising, the jagged material like a black hole which absorbed light itself.
But the dagger cut from the Northern Monolith, its golden hue, didn’t reflect light in the way they would have expected.
Silas didn’t know how they hadn’t noticed already, but when pointing a concentrated beam of light at the edge, it seemed to absorb it just like the dark, with no evidence of the light hitting the metal, no reflection to be seen.
It was yet another anomaly that set the magical weapons apart from anything else that came from the material world, proving its otherness.
That day passed in a blur of failed research in the Spire, of more tests of their magic (to which Amelia became increasingly frustrated when hers barely worked).
Amelia and Silas worked together in an uneasy silence. He had asked again about the runes on her back, but Amelia remained tight-lipped, only mumbling a noncommittal response before disappearing into the bathroom. She only brought it up again when asking for help to rub the salve into her skin.
The next night, Silas slept uncomfortably on the floor in Amelia’s apartment, only broken by midnight, where they touched hands to reduce the pain of the pull.
She could not have moved away from him quicker afterwards, rolling over in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.
He tried not to take that personally, but it was difficult considering he had all but confessed that he had been attracted to her before the bond.