25 Loop 1, Part 5

The gold thread pulled me forward and I followed it. Because wandering the Lost Library without a direction was objectively worse than wandering with one. I mean, there’d be so many different decisions I’d have to make. Left tunnel or right tunnel or straight. It was like this over and over, fork after fork after fork. I could’ve been wandering for hours aimlessly.

That was why I was aimlessly following the gold thread. It was the perfectly rational option. That had nothing to do with the fact that I could feel my uncle’s heartbeat on the other end of it. That was what I had finally decided was the source of the pulsing.

The deeper corridors of the third floor had lost even the courtesy of pretending to be lit, so I had cast [Marble] and [Illuminate] sometime after I saw the last torch. Technically, I didn’t need light, because the gold thread still led me forward, but damn if I wasn’t used to seeing things. [Wideview] was practically useless now. But I kept it on. I held my glowing orb aloft in front of me.

The gold thread didn’t care about the Library. Or its walls. It cut through everything. The passage turned left, and the thread went straight. The ceiling dropped, and the thread ignored it.

After following the thread for a good twenty minutes, there was another change in the Library. How so much fit down here, I didn’t understand, except to say magic. The upper levels had at least pretended to be a functioning institution. There were books on shelves, in rows, with a filing system that almost made sense. But this deep, books were stacked into walls instead of shelves, and there were just so many. I didn’t even know the school had this many books, let alone that this many had ever been made.

My illuminated marble caught spines wedged sideways between stones like mortar. A book wasn’t mortar. And there was no way it was structurally sound. Somebody with more ambition than sense had disagreed, and here we were, decades or centuries later, walking through the consequences.

The tether pulsed, slow and shallow, as I continued to follow. I kept walking, faster than I usually walked, which was still not fast by any reasonable standard. But for me, it bordered on athletic. Because I was trapped down here, I might as well have tried to find my uncle.

The thread cut through the left wall at a downward angle, which meant Corwen was somewhere below me and farther in. Why it couldn’t have led me down at some other point, I didn’t know. But the deeper corridors branched and rebranched, and the tether ignored all of it.

I wasn’t thinking. That should have worried me. I was always thinking. Thinking was the only form of effort I respected, and I did it constantly. Sitting or standing or walking. Or when someone else was talking. But right now, my legs were moving and my brain was quiet, and I was just going to keep walking until one of those things changed.

The hallway I was on was longer than it should have been. I noticed because I’d been counting my steps, which I did when I was definitely not anxious and merely passing the time. At step forty-seven, I passed a shelf with a cracked blue vase on the third tier. At step eighty-three, I passed the same shelf with the same cracked blue vase on the same third tier.

Shit. I stopped. Looked behind me, and then ahead. Fucking portal. I wondered how long I’d been walking down it aimlessly.

“Very clever,” I said.

The Lost Library was supposed to be like this. Every text I’d ever skimmed on the subject agreed. “Lost” in the title didn’t just reference the fact that nobody knew where the room you needed was. It was called the Lost Library because you got fucking lost in it. The deeper you went, the more things shifted. Areas reconfigured around you. Maps started contradicting each other. I’d treated this information the way I treated most academic warnings: as somebody else’s problem. And now it was mine, which I probably deserved.

In the middle, between the two duplicate sections, was a left path and a right path. I turned down the left passage because the tether said to go that way, and I was out of better ideas. Six stone steps descended ahead of me, evenly spaced and looking perfectly normal. I took them two at a time. At the bottom, where a door or hallway or literally anything useful should have been, the sixth step ended in a flat wall of featureless stone. The gold tether pierced directly through the center. The staircase had obviously been built to go somewhere, and then someone or something had sealed it over before anyone used it.

I put my hand against the wall. It was cold and solid.

I climbed back up. The passage I’d come from had rearranged itself while my back was turned. The blue vase was gone, the shelves were different, and there were three corridors now. I picked the left one because the other two angled far away from where the tether was trying to take me. It lasted forty steps before it curved right, then right again, depositing me back at the top of the six stairs I had just climbed. The same damn wall waited at the bottom.

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“You’re hilarious,” I told the Library. It didn’t respond. The stone around me stayed the same. And the tether kept running through.

I tried the right corridor. This one went farther, maybe sixty steps, before the ceiling started dropping. As if someone had built this passage for people who got shorter the farther they walked. By step fifty, I was crouching. By step sixty, I was on my hands and knees, holding my glowing marble out in front of me like a lantern. And the passage was still narrowing. And then, of course, the ceiling finally met the floor in a dead end.

I backed out on my hands and knees, which was as dignified as it sounds, and returned to find the corridor arrangement had changed yet again. Two passages instead of three. And the staircase was gone.