28 Loop 1, Part 8

“You know my uncle?” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

The voice paused, as if considering her words carefully. There was no telling what I was going to learn from her, and how much was going to be true.

“Yes,” she said. “To both.”

“Where is he?”

“Most likely below us. He descended to the fifth floor about eighteen hours ago. He went to the entrance of the dungeon, where he meditated before casting a full spell I didn’t recognize. He then meditated further before casting a second. And then his presence went still.”

Two spells, that was it? Well, whatever my uncle was doing down there, it wasn’t simple.

“Huh? His presence went still?” What did that mean? Eighteen hours ago had been during breakfast. Where was he now? Still in that dungeon? That didn’t make sense to me. Why didn’t he come out?

“His mana signature dropped to near nothing, and he has not moved since. I can feel his soul slowly dimming.”

Something cold settled in my chest that had nothing to do with mana.

I sat down at the edge of the desk. A small sconce lay unlit behind me. The wood was cold under my hands, and I stared at my uncle’s handwriting on the scattered papers. He had written them in a shorthand of his design, one I had never wanted to learn.

“How do you know all of this?” I asked her.

“Because I am the Library. Well, rather, its Keeper.” There wasn’t a hint of arrogance or emphasis in her voice. She was simply stating a fact.

“Keeper?” I prodded her to continue.

The book on the desk shivered. Its pages fanned open, riffling through themselves as if caught in a wind that didn’t exist. And then she said, “[Float].” I felt the mana leave her. A tiny, efficient expenditure, maybe 10 mana. My kind of spell. The book rose off the desk, drifted to the height of my shoulder, and hung there, spine vertical, pages half open as if it were enough. The Keeper was an enchanted book that could cast her own spells. I was going to have a lot of questions about this later.

“Every corridor, shifting passage, and dead end you walked through tonight was my doing. I was guiding you here.”

“Guiding,” I said. “Is that what you’re calling it? Because from my perspective, it felt a lot more like being funneled through a series of increasingly terrible options by someone who wanted me dead.”

“I didn’t want you dead.”

“Well, you certainly could have picked a shorter path.”

“The shorter paths were all occupied.” She could have been reading a train schedule. “The Frollarts have been agitated since the mana surge this morning. Every route I opened for you, I had to close behind you, and still, you were being swarmed. The alternative was letting them group up more, which would have ended this conversation before it started.”

I thought about the knuckles on stone. The shrieking. I thought about the multiple dead ends. The fact that I had been so close to my uncle, and yet prevented time and again. That had all been her.

“You can move the walls.”

“I can move almost everything within my domain. The architecture responds to me. But I cannot leave this room. Unfortunately, my soul is anchored to this book, and the book is anchored to this study. Beyond these walls, I am limited, despite my power.”

“And the Frollarts? If you have all this control, why didn’t you stop them?”

“I can’t directly influence them. Or any other monster in my domain, for that matter. Sure, I can redirect them, but I cannot control them entirely. They are a creation of the dungeon below me.”

The monsters weren’t hers. They belonged to something underneath her, which she couldn’t control. Which meant the thing I’d been running from all night was a symptom of a bigger problem. Fantastic.

There was that word again. Dungeon. The quest notification I’d dismissed on the stairs flashed through my memory. Something about the dungeon. I hadn’t bothered reading the full text. It sounded like a lot of work. It sounded like punishment.

“What dungeon?”

“This Library is built on top of one. The dungeon has a soul of its own—ancient, vast, and deeply unpleasant. It has been absorbing ambient mana from the surrounding environment for aeons, and uses it to generate creatures. These Frollarts are the lowest tier, and always manage to find a way up into my floors. The dungeon produces them as a defense response.”

“A defense response against what?”

“Us.”

The book drifted past me while she spoke, circling the room in a slow orbit. She paused at a shelf, hovered there as if reading her own neighbors, and then continued on.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Lovely. I was sitting in a building that was built on top of a dangerous dungeon, and it considered us enemies. This was going to require a lot of work, wasn’t it? This was the worst library I had ever been in, and I had once spent three hours in a Kratosian public reading room that didn’t even have fucking chairs.

“How old is it?” I asked. Sure, I was asking questions now, but as soon as this conversation ended, I was going back to sleep. As long as I could.

“Older than the Library. Older than the school.”

“The dungeon proper starts on Level 5,” the Keeper continued. “Everything above is the Library, and everything below is the dungeon. The Library was originally built to study and contain the dungeon.”

“And people just let a dungeon sit under a school?” I wasn’t that shocked, to be honest.

“The school came much later, and besides, not many people know about this dungeon at all. Decades upon decades upon decades of building, and… well, here we are.”

The book had stopped moving. She hung perfectly still near the far wall, pages closed, as if she had drawn herself up to her full height. It was an absurd sight to see.