10 Loop 0, Part 10

Footsteps, coming from the direction of the faculty stairwell. Who would be entering from there at one in the morning?

[Wideview] gave me the picture. A single figure crossing the main reading room, moving with the kind of purpose that didn’t belong to a late-night stroll. Tall, straight-backed, familiar. My uncle.

He was alone, which was odd. There was no reason I could think of for the Headmaster of MIRKS to be in the Archives at one in the morning by himself. Surely he had better things to attend to. He crossed through the room without slowing, past my alcove, heading toward the back of the stacks. There, a heavy iron door marked the boundary between Level 1 and the restricted floors below. Corwen produced a key, an actual physical key, the old and heavy kind that predated enchantment locks.

He walked out of range within seconds. [Wideview] couldn’t see through floors of solid stone, and he was already below me, moving deeper.

I yawned. My uncle. What the fuck was he doing here at this hour? This was so not my problem. Whatever Corwen was doing in the restricted levels alone in the middle of the night… Well, that was squarely the kind of thing that didn’t concern me. Most definitely, it would only cause a headache if I cared. No, it was time I went to bed. I needed to leave, mind my own business, and catch up on the sleep that I Finn wasn’t going to let me have tomorrow.

I had 107 mana. Following my uncle into restricted levels I wasn’t supposed to access. In the middle of the night. While burning through the last of my reserves. This was objectively a terrible idea.

I cast [Subtitle]. 47 mana gone. The spell settled into the edges of my vision, ready to translate whatever I heard into words I could read. I pointed my wand at my shoes.

“[Silence].”

I pushed extra mana into it, extending the duration to thirty minutes. 28 mana left. I was now personally demonstrating the exact problem I’d been trying to solve all night. The irony was not lost on me.

I left my notes on the desk, crossed the darkened reading room, and walked through the iron door.

I was technically not allowed past this point. Students needed faculty authorization to access the restricted levels, and I was fairly certain “my uncle left the door open” didn’t count as a formal approval process. But rules, like locks, were only meaningful if someone was around to enforce them, and Grimm had already gone home.

———

The restricted levels were nothing like the Archives above. Where Level 1 was all rustic charm, dim lighting, and leather comfort, everything below was raw, ancient stone. The stairwell was carved directly into rock, a tight spiral of steps worn smooth by decades, maybe centuries, of feet. The only light came from pale blue crystals embedded in the walls at seemingly random intervals, casting just enough glow to keep you from falling, but nowhere near enough to read by.

I descended carefully, my silenced shoes making no sound on the stone. I was grateful for [Wideview] letting me see the stairwell ahead and behind me, but the passage was narrow and the crystals dim. I could hear my uncle’s footsteps below me, steady and unhurried, easy to keep pace with.

Level 2 was vastly different from Level 1. Through the open door, I got a glimpse of heavy wooden shelves packed with texts that looked far older than anything upstairs. Level 1 had texts that were thirty or forty years old at most. These looked ancient.

Some of the texts had preservation enchantments so old they’d developed a visible shimmer, the kind of sustained magic that predated modern technique. Whatever was on those shelves, people had wanted it kept intact badly enough to enchant it twice.

But Corwen didn’t stop, so I had no time to gander.

The air changed past Level 2. Cooler and drier, as if the humidity couldn’t reach this far down. The crystals grew sparser. By the time I reached Level 3, the gaps between them were long enough that I passed through stretches of near-total darkness.

The door to Level 3 had been left open, same as Level 2. The shelves beyond it were iron instead of wood, and some of the volumes were chained to the frames.

One shelf held a single book under a glass case that pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat. I didn’t look at it long. Some things had a way of telling you not to touch them, and I had always been an excellent listener when the thing doing the talking could probably kill me. I was lazy, not incompetent.

Between Levels 3 and 4, things got strange. The stairwell widened from a tight spiral into a grand staircase that felt like it belonged to a different building entirely. The carved steps gave way to the finest wood I had ever seen, magically preserved in pristine condition. The walls turned elegant, polished, as if fit for a palace instead of a library beneath a school.

A notification pulsed at the edge of my vision. I blinked at it.

What?

[Quest Alert! Dungeon nearby! Step One: Locate The Lost Library]

Quest alert? A dungeon here? Beneath the school?

I stopped on the stairs. In my two years with access to the system, ever since my mana channels unlocked at seventeen, I had never seen a quest. Never heard of anyone getting one. Quests weren’t a thing. Right? Nobody knew where the system came from, just that it tracked spells, your mana, and your levels. It wasn’t something that gave us errands or to-do lists, or told us how to find dungeons.

But there it was, blinking at me like it expected me to care or something.

Not only did I not have time to care, I didn’t want to. What did I need a quest for? Somewhere below me, Corwen’s footsteps were getting fainter, and if I lost him in whatever hell the lower levels were, I didn’t think I’d find him again. I dismissed the notification and kept moving.

Everyone said the Lost Library had never been found. Most people assumed she had built her archives on top of it to hide the real entrance. But down here, where the architecture stopped pretending to be a library and started looking like a palace, the line between the Archives and whatever lay beneath them felt very thin. This wasn’t the Lost Library, but whoever had built these levels had wanted it to be.

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The staircase leveled out into a grand hall with four corridors stretching ahead farther than I could see. I could just barely make out my uncle’s footfalls down the corridor straight ahead. I followed. Doors lined both sides, some open, some closed. Several had dust caked across their surfaces in little dunes and ridges, clinging to the wood at angles that shouldn’t have been possible. Dust doesn’t pile sideways. It doesn’t form dunes on vertical surfaces unless something down here had decided gravity was more of a suggestion than a rule. I filed that under “not my problem” and kept walking. Others were spotless, the dust on the stone around them worn away by recent traffic. Someone had been using these rooms. Regularly.

The corridor branched left, and I could hear my uncle’s footsteps taking it. I followed quickly, afraid I would lose him. Then right. Then left. Two more rights. Then down a short flight of steps into a passage where the ceiling dropped low. I had to duck. As suddenly as it had begun, the polished wood gave way to stone and moss and a strange green-blue glow that made everything look like I was underwater.

The passage opened into a smaller chamber, intimate, more study than library. Shelves lined the walls floor to ceiling, but these weren’t the towering stacks of the levels above. This was a private collection, carefully arranged, the kind of room where someone came to work, not browse.

Then, [Subtitle] activated. But it wasn’t my uncle who was speaking.

“You’re late.” The voice was flat and precise, without any hint of accent. Not my uncle’s. [Subtitle] rendered the words in sharp, clean text at the edge of my vision. Someone had been waiting down here for him.

“I’m the Headmaster of this school, Vex. I arrive when I choose to.” Corwen’s voice was controlled. Professional. “Say what you came to say.”

“Very well. This is not a request, Corwen. Minister Creed is not a patient man, and his already thin patience has run out.”

“His patience?” My uncle laughed. “Fallon Creed hasn’t set foot in this school in fifteen years. He sends his grandson to posture and now you, his errand boy, to threaten. He wouldn’t know patience, Vex, if it slapped him upside the head.”

Vex. So the grey man had a name.

“Color it what you like. The result is the same.” He paused, wrestling a paper from the bag at his side. “The Tuffet boy summoned shadow constructs in the commons. Four of them. Students were injured. Some could have been killed. Property was destroyed, property that has been here since before Therumia. Your response was to enter him in a tournament.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Vex was incredulous.

“My response was proportional to the provocation,” Corwen said, “which you witnessed firsthand, given that you’ve been lurking on my campus all day.”

“The provocation is irrelevant, Corwen. The response is what matters, and that response has been found lacking. Minister Creed sees a headmaster who allows foreign students to cast combat magic with no consequences.”