~Chapter Fourteen: The Redhead and the Worldshaper~

The test rune taunted Eola.

Every morning, when she dragged herself out of bed a few minutes after Colin started knocking, it was there on her desk, Atta curled up on top of it. And every evening, it was waiting for her when she returned from Magical Dueling. The eight marks she’d found were all the progress she’d made in weeks. She was starting to believe Instructor Tarik had given her an impossible task.

On the other hand, she’d confirmed that those eight modifying marks definitely existed in the overall structure of the test rune. That was something, but it was getting frustrating to repeat the same line every day when the professor asked her for a progress report. “Nothing new, sir,” she’d say.

Instructor Tarik would nod knowingly. “Well, keep at it. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be an adequate test, Miss Lemiene.”

Then she’d leave, the runes she’d corrected in a small pile on the surprisingly neat desk, and go to Mana Studies. Madame Reyanna hadn’t called on her for so much as the answer to a basic question since the Mana lines incident, and Eola didn’t mind. She spent the class channeling Heavy Hold or turning over theories about the test rune in her mind while the class focused on streamlining their Mana lines for their specific attunements.

That was an art rather than a science—especially since the professors weren’t supposed to know their students’ attunements yet—and that meant the other students had lots of downtime while Madame Reyanna gave small groups pointers on different techniques that might work for them.

On the other hand, Introduction to Monsters had picked up steam. Instructor Clearance, the hamadryad who taught it, had started a unit on common monsters of the third floor of the library.

Eola knew about trogs from first-hand experience, of course, and she and Colin had encountered a feral book before. But there were other threats deeper in the library, and while the first-year students had all heard horror stories about the library’s third floor from older students, the professor’s descriptions felt much more trustworthy.

The third floor, according to the professor’s rough sketches on the dirt floor beneath her yew, was a maze of staircases, narrow bridges, and entire rooms suspended mid-air. The librarians kept the entrance under some semblance of control, but beyond a small area around the gate, the dungeon held sway. Staircases and entire rooms shifted randomly, and mapping the space was all but impossible. And the monsters…

Oh, there were monsters.

Most of the floor was unweeded, but feral books were shockingly rare. Some predators feasted on knowledge, and feral books were their second-favorite prey after students.

The Srilla was one of them—the ever-changing magical construct that Librarian Tagg had thought might have been hunting Eola. But it wasn’t alone. There were Dalyns and Daveks, the paired mantis-spiders that stalked the floor, and Mana Mites. They didn’t seem like a threat—they were far too small—but in great enough numbers, they’d swarm a mage under and devour every drop of Mana in their soul in seconds. And, of course, some books had been feral long enough to take more solid forms than the one Colin and Eola had fought. Those could survive the third floor’s predators, and occasionally become the predator themselves.

But the biggest danger of the third floor, according to Instructor Clearance, wasn’t the monsters at all. It was the Scholar’s Cult—a group of students and professors driven mad by the third floor’s maze and the floors beyond it. She didn’t say much more about them, except that they were to be avoided at all costs by parties of students venturing into the library’s third floor. “Better to fight a Dalyn and Davek than to trade words with the Scholar’s Cult,” she said with a shudder that creaked her bark skin.

Eola found her homework piling up on her desk as the midterm apprenticeship selections drew closer. Combat manuals, bestiaries, and guidebooks to different Mana flow techniques stacked up under her window. But every night, when she came home from classes, the test rune was there, teasing her with its secrets, only to pull them away just as she reached for them.

When she finally had her breakthrough, it came in the cafeteria.

Eola was halfway through a bowl of porridge, with dried apple chunks that smelled just about perfect, when someone sat down on the bench across from her. Orange bed head, no breakfast tray, and a sleepy-looking expression—this was someone struggling to even be awake right now.

“You’re a hard person to track down, Eola Lemiene. You and I don’t share a single class, and our free time’s almost exactly opposite.” The girl, whoever it was, yawned. When she kept talking, her voice sounded a little breathless. “Instructor Tarik said you’d be here, but I was starting to think he’d lied. I had to wake up an hour early and hope you’d actually eat breakfast this morning. You’ve cost me a lot of sleep over the last few weeks, you know that?”

Eola looked up, spoon halfway to her mouth. Porridge dripped into the bowl for a moment before she finished her motion and swallowed. “You’re the girl from the library.”

“Yep. Patrice Clerk.”

Eola looked up. The person was definitely the same girl. She looked almost as pale as she had when she was bleeding out on the library floor, and her orange hair was just as tangled and disheveled as it had been in the dungeon. Her ears were slightly pointed; Eola hadn’t noticed that the first time. Did she have some elven blood? Best not to ask.

“Hi,” Eola said. “Why were you looking for me?”

“Because I didn’t properly thank you for saving me,” Patrice said. “I wrote my father all about it, and he replied with something like ‘the Clerk family honor requires that you pay back your debts.’ Naturally, I ignored him for a couple of weeks, but it started gnawing on me. So, I started asking people who might know, and someone said you had some independent study first thing in the morning with Tarik. I thought that meant you ate breakfast before that, but—“

“I wasn’t here.” Eola nodded. “I’ve got a lot of studying to do. Otherwise, I’m not coming back next term. Meal time’s a good time to do that studying.”

“Understandable. I’m in the same situation,” Patrice said nonchalantly. “Less studying, though. What’s your bad subject?”

Eola hesitated, covering it with another spoonful of porridge. The bowl had been halfway full a minute ago, but now it was almost empty. How had that happened?

Patrice seemed like she might be trustworthy, and she did owe Eola for saving her life. It had cost her another trip to the library when she’d finished Evander’s Guide to Battle-Marks and Combat Tricks, by Tiphane, and that was valuable time she couldn’t get back. But in all her trips to Row Twenty-Three, Shelf Fourteen, and the surrounding shelves, she’d never so much as seen a monster there, much less something she couldn’t identify. She’d been on the lookout, too. Just because she knew that Atta hadn’t been a Srilla didn’t mean there wasn’t something like that on the second floor.

Patrice’s eyes watched her as she ate. There were bags under them, like the redhead wasn’t getting enough sleep. That, at least, tracked with her struggling academically. Eola sighed as her spoon clattered on the empty bowl. “Mana Studies, I guess? I’m not half bad at Magical Dueling and Introduction to Monsters, and I’d be pretty good at Ideograms if I hadn’t gotten an independent study instead.”

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“Oh,” Patrice said. She stared at the empty spot where her tray and bowl should have been, eyes defiant. “I’m bad at all of them. Probably the worst mage in the whole school.”

“Really?”

“Yep!”

“Ah,” Eola said. There wasn’t much else to say. She couldn’t get into more detail about why she didn’t think Patrice was actually the worst mage without revealing that she couldn’t cast a single piece of First Order magic the right way, and she didn’t trust Patrice anywhere near enough for that.

“You look as tired as I feel, Eola,” Patrice said suddenly. “What’s got you so beat?”

“That independent study. I’m supposed to be deciphering a rune, and it feels impossible. I’ve been working on it for months.”

“Months?” Patrice asked. Her eyebrow waggled. “Maybe I’m not the worst mage in the whole school.”

Eola sighed. Then she stood up and carried her tray to the return slot. Patrice followed her. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Here, I’m in Suite Seventeen. Come by this evening, and I’ll show it to you. Then you’ll get it,” Eola said. “I have to go help Instructor Tarik now.”

“Thanks. I’ll see you then,” Patrice said, and Eola nodded. Maybe this could be the start of a second friendship.

Eola regretted her decision almost as soon as she got to Instructor Tarik’s office.