~Chapter Twelve: Feral Books~

The library’s second floor was monster-free for quite a few shelves, with the exception of corpses the dungeon hadn’t yet disposed of. There were plenty of those, of course. The third-years had been brutally efficient.

Colin and Eola weren’t alone, though.

They didn’t even bother with double-checking the first dozen rows, or with leapfrogging until they were almost twenty in; every row had at least one student in it, and Bright Balls threw light into even the darkest corners. Most of the others she saw were on the noncombat tracks, and this was a golden opportunity for them to get study materials without much risk. Eola didn’t feel threatened by anything, and she wasn’t as on guard as usual. Neither was Colin. Instead, they talked.

“What do you think I’m missing, anyway?” Eola asked.

Colin glanced over his shoulder. “Well, you said you checked the battle magic marks, so it’s not that. I’m more interested in runic array construction, which is why we’re heading for the magical theory section. All you’re doing is what battle mages do, really. They’re just doing it on a small scale, with the same marks on the same spells in the same places. They don’t actually need to study theory, because this is how Ordered Magic works.”

“And you know that, why, exactly?”

“It’s just how Ordered Magic works,” Colin repeated, grinning sheepishly. “My attunement shows the order of things—especially magic. I’ve been able to see where things don’t work for a…since I was a kid. It’s like an angry red sound in my mind when something’s wrong, and there’s no color for Ordered Magic or what battle mages do. Your mess of an array, though? Crimson. Bright, loud crimson. Oh, while we’re here, I need to visit Row Seventy, Shelf Thirteen. Esoteric Rituals.”

“On the way back?” Eola’s smallsword hung loosely in her hand, and as they passed Row Nineteen, she brought it into First Guard. “Time to leapfrog. Why Esoterics?”

“Because Instructor Clearance agrees that rituals are the way to go for me. I’m pretty hopeless with a sword, but she sees potential for me to follow her path.” Colin pulled his own sword out and readied it. “That’d be nice. Healing rituals are better than siege magic, but still useful with a caravan. I can get to know more people with them, too. Move.”

Sticking to the main path, the two made good time. Colin talked softly about ritual magic—Eola still didn’t get the point of it, but if it worked for him, great. She didn’t say much herself, though. There were monsters somewhere on the second floor, and she wanted to be ready for them. But no. There was nothing. With every leapfrog, she got more and more certain that the third-years had cleared the whole passage.

But as Eola passed Row Eighty-Seven, she held up a hand. “Stop.”

“What?”

“Our row’s unweeded. Look at the glow.”

Pale blue light poured out of Row Eighty-Nine and into the center corridor. It was faint, but this deep into the second floor, there weren’t many Bright Balls to wash it out. “Tagg said…” Colin murmured.

Eola’s fingers tightened around her sword grip. “Tagg said they hadn’t weeded it since last term. Shelf Twenty-Four’s pretty deep, but if the light’s making it this far…”

“It’s pretty bad, huh?”

“Yep. Definitely books that need weeding, but probably feral books, too, like he said. What rituals do you know right now?”

Eola hadn’t encountered a feral book—or as Instructor Clearance called them, feral tomes—before. But they’d been the subject of one of the hamadryad’s weeklong series of lectures on second-floor library dangers. Books in abandoned, disused sections of the library started growing out and taking on monster-like characteristics. The library’s staff and users were supposed to weed them when they found them, but no one did. It was too much work, and only the most common areas stayed clean.

Feral books were what happened when a tome went unweeded and unused for too long. It gained Mana, an attunement, and even sentience. Feral books didn’t resemble their original forms, and unlike a book that hadn’t been weeded, there wasn’t a good fix outside of taking it apart and re-binding it.

That usually didn’t happen. If a book went feral, it was because it wasn’t used, so there was no point in repairing it just for the same thing to happen a year or five down the line.

Colin cleared his throat. “I’ve got a couple that might help here. I need to see it before I know, though.”

“Okay. The plan is as follows. I’ll disrupt and defend for you. You figure out which ritual you want to cast and make that happen.”

“You’re sure?’ Colin asked. “You’ll be alright up there?”

“Absolutely. Your armor’s not as good as mine, and you’re hopeless with your sword and battle magic. Focus on what you do well, and I’ll do what I can to let you do it.” Eola slipped her wand into her free hand and leapfrogged up into Row Eighty-Eight. “Move.”

Row Eighty-Nine was dark. Not pitch black, but grey-blue, with an almost foggy feeling to it. The unweeded books threw light into the fog, but even that only resulted in a soft, uniform glow.

Eola drew a Bright Ball and left it hanging behind them, off to one side and at the top of the shelf. It threw their shadows down into the blue-ish mist, but she didn’t want to risk alerting the feral book before she had to. Colin had sheathed his sword. One hand rested on her armor, right between her shoulder blades, and his eyes were mostly closed as he murmured words to himself. She almost felt his touch through the steel. Almost.

Rituals were strange—even if it was still Ordered Magic and the mnemonics weren’t strictly necessary, almost every ritual used them. He might already be casting, or he might just be working through the spells he had.

Eola didn’t know, and she didn’t care. As long as he was ready to do his part, that’d be enough. Ideally, he’d be focusing on his spell, hence the physical contact. She was his eyes and ears right now.

As they moved down the row, the number of vines grew. They hung from book to book like strands of garland at a Y’aer’s Day festival, their faint blue illuminating the shelves just enough to make another Bright Ball unnecessary. She sketched the spell anyway, leaving it hanging mid-air behind them. “Don’t touch those,” she muttered.

Then, as they reached Row Nineteen, something moved in the mist.

“Casting,” Eola muttered. She drew up the Hasty and Delayed modifying marks, then added Personal and Echoing. As she added the Safe Shield symbol and slashed them together, her soul drained, and the runes filled. The soul exercises helped, though; when she’d finished, she had enough Mana to cast another cantrip, or to fight.

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Nothing happened. The thing in the mist was moving, and as it got closer, Eola breathed a sigh of relief. She’d had a choice between an offensive spell and the only First Order-equivalent barrier in her toolkit, and she’d picked right.

The feral book had noticed her.

It was fast—a whirlwind of pages ripped from the cover of a brown, leather-bound tome, linked to the shelves around it by strands of magic that traveled across the book’s pages like walking lightning. Eola couldn’t tell where one page ended and another began, or where the ink linking them together made words and where it was nothing but gibberish. The cover sat somewhere in the middle, in the calm between hundreds of swirling pages.

She dropped into a lunge. Her smallsword shot out, slicing into the papers and parting a few pages, but even as she drove the point toward the feral book’s core, the sword’s blade bent awkwardly and rebounded as pages stacked on top of each other in a shield of layered fiber. The blade bounced off, and Eola spun.

She’d gouged it. But she hadn’t hurt the feral book at all. Colin was right on her back, too.

“Back up,” she ordered. “I need space.”

“Sure. I’m casting my ritual.” His hand left her shoulders, and she stepped back into the empty space between them.