40 Loop 1 Part 20

With her reveal about [Soul Tether], I opened my mouth to ask the obvious follow-up questions. How did she know? How does it work? Does it affect the object that’s bound? Does it affect the soul? But I didn’t get the chance.

The room shuddered like the whole library was a giant, and it shifted its weight from one foot to the other. Dust settled down on the organized floor.

“What was that?”

“The library,” she said. “Probably just settling. It happens every once in a while.”

“Libraries don’t settle. Not like that.”

“This library has, the entire time I’ve been here.”

She didn’t elaborate. It was clear she wasn’t going to. But I let it go.

I glanced up at the shelves anyway. Nothing had fallen. The books all sat exactly where they’d been a second ago, spines flush, corners square. It was like the room had decided to behave itself the moment I looked.

The Keeper hadn’t moved, either, her stone hands folded over the place in her chest where the book sat now. There was an odd ticking noise coming from it. If she’d felt the shudder the way I had, she gave no sign of it.

I had a dozen questions to ask and no time for any of them, so I turned back to the golems.

Something felt off. I needed to figure out what it was. Thankfully, since I had only missed a day and a half, I could probably figure out some story to tell Finn, say I’d fallen asleep in the woods or something, because people kept throwing magiballs at me. Didn’t have to be the most elaborate story. I’d figure something out.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It is shortly past seven in the morning, on Thursday.”

I stared at her.

“No, it’s Wednesday.”

“No. You are incorrect. It is Thursday.”

“I went down into your little nightmare basement Monday night at eleven. And then I built these golems after the tournament on Tuesday.”

“That is correct, that you did indeed go down to the murder basement, but you did not cast [Ambient Eye] on Tuesday. You cast it on Wednesday. I am pretty sure it is because you slept for almost twenty hours over the past two days.”

Even though I had quite literally just had an out-of-body experience, I had the feeling that I was going through one now. I felt like I’d lost a day, which I guess I had. I opened my mouth to keep arguing the point on principle, and then stopped myself.

I didn’t have time to meditate, despite my mana being low. I needed to figure out what was going on now. I turned to all four of my golems, who were standing patiently.

“Lift the chair. Two grab the front legs, the other two grab the back legs.”

Before I could do anything else, they hoisted me into the air

“Take me up as fast as you can, and don’t stop for anything that isn’t on fire.”

The Keeper didn’t try to talk me out of it, and I was off before she could do anything.

I imagined a mental route: out of the library, up the staircase, out the iron door, and then to the Archives. I’d meditate for as long as I could on the way up. Thirty minutes of meditation was thirty minutes of mana I didn’t have right now.

I was jostled out of my meditation as soon as they tried to lift the iron door open. The front golem dropped the leg and it clattered to the floor. I had to get down to open the door for them. After I scrambled back into the chair, and they hauled me onward.

The Archives’ main reading room should have had someone in it. Even at seven in the morning, there was always at least one person—either some unlucky soul who’d fallen asleep cramming for a test they’d forgotten about, or Grimm himself doing his rounds. But it was empty.

It didn’t take me long to understand why it was empty. There was a gouge in the front entrance, like something had wiped away the doors or taken a bite out of them. Air drafted into the space. And then I noticed the front desk sat ten feet from where it should have been. Obviously thrown there with enough force to split the heavy oak top clean through. Books were scattered around on the floor, some with spines up, others with pages fanned open, or ripped at odd angles.

Grimm’s lamp sat upright on what was left of the front desk, still lit. There was a little orb of captured flame burning steady. It had survived like nothing at all had happened to the room around it. Everything else had been thrown, scattered, or split clean through, and his lamp sat there perfectly balanced, flame untouched.

He never left that lamp. Not for meals or the bathroom. Not in two years of haunting this place. A lamp without its owner felt worse, somehow, than an empty room.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I sat in my chair in the doorway, the golems holding me up, and tried not to think about how ridiculous it must have looked.

“Grimm?”

But nobody answered me. The gaping, ragged mouth open to the morning air swallowed the sound, and no echo came back.

I picked my way through the wreckage, toward where the windows used to be, glass crunching under my golems’ stone feet. Cold air hit me before I reached the gap, and a smell assaulted my nostrils. There was an odd char in the air, something sharper than a normal fire.

Outside, the Green was wrong. The Therumian oaks were mostly standing, but their canopies were all gone. Whole entire sections had been stripped or scorched by something, and simply weren’t there anymore. Some had been picked up, roots and all, and thrown across where Malus had played Magiball on Monday.

A single shoe sat upright in the grass near where the benches used to be, laces still tied, like someone had stepped clean out of it and kept running. I stared at it longer than I wanted to, my brain refusing, politely, to follow the thought any further than the shoe.

Somewhere past it, a magiball lay half-buried in upturned dirt, magic still spinning around its orb. I made my golems carry me past before I could find whatever else was lying out there waiting to be noticed.

And then we cleared the hill, and the sight that waited made me vomit off the side of the chair. There were bodies. Oh, God, the bodies. Hundreds of fallen corpses were just strewn about, haphazardly and randomly, as if people had tried and failed to flee.