9. Loop 0, Part 9

It was just past eight thirty when I walked in. The main reading room was mostly empty. The other students who had nowhere better to be on a Monday night were perusing shelves or busy studying. Blah. Libraries. A wretched hive of hard work and studying. But that wasn’t why I was here. No, I wasn’t wasting my time studying for a class. I was here to save lives through research. A much more noble pursuit.

I was heading for my usual nook in the east wing when Master Grimm materialized. I say “materialized” because the man didn’t so much walk as [Teleport]. A man after my own heart, really. One moment, he’d be shelving a book near the entrance. The next, he’d be at the front desk writing in a ledger. The next, he’d be adjusting a lamp two aisles over. He really made the most of a beautiful but expensive spell. It was like [Wideview] or [Subtitle] in that it lasted hours, but the upfront cost of 300 mana was more than I would’ve been willing to spend any time soon.

“Mr. Yarrow.” His voice was deep and grumbly and bored. He always seemed bored.

“Master Grimm. Researching tonight.”

“Yeah, that’s the plan. Like always.”

“East nook is available, as usual.”

He was already somewhere else by the time I opened my mouth to respond, reorganizing a display I hadn’t noticed. Someone had left books on the floor by the shelves. Then he was by the windows. Then behind his desk again. Every time I turned my head to track him, he was somewhere new, and I was getting a crick in my neck for the trouble. After the fourth time I physically turned to find him, my neck lodged a formal protest. This was unacceptable.

I cast [Wideview]. The 51 mana left a mark. I felt the drain like a long exhale, my pool dropping from about 160 to just under 110, but the relief was instant. My vision expanded into that familiar panoramic field, and suddenly I didn’t have to turn my head to track Grimm’s bizarre teleportation act. Much better.

I settled into my nook. It was a small alcove near the east wall, tucked between two shelves of pre-war and post-war magical theory. Forty years and a war divided the shelves. The newer texts had better spines, sure, but the ideas were worse, which was odd.

I would have thought forty years of scientific advancement would’ve made for better magical science, but well, fuck me I guess. I pulled my notes from the hidden crawl space under the nook and spread them across the reading desk.

My professors were always harping on about what I could accomplish if I actually set my mind to something. Well, if they knew what I was doing, maybe they’d stop saying that. I was working on a mana collapse prevention spell, the only piece of magic I’d ever cared enough to truly work on outside of class. The one I would never admit to anyone that I cared about. Imagine if Finn, or Therumia forbid, Sara found out about this. I shuddered.

My parents had burned through their mana channels in the Kratosian factory system. Everybody already knew that part. What nobody seemed to care about was making sure it couldn’t happen to anyone else.

The existing literature was thin. It didn’t happen often, but healers documented the symptoms, progression timelines, and case studies when they could. Scarring first, then fraying, then rupture. Always the same order. Always fatal. And the sum total of the magical community’s prevention strategy was: get stronger so it doesn’t matter. Level up your spells, expand your pool, and the problem solves itself.

Unless you were poor. Or Kratosian. Or working a factory line where the shifts didn’t stop because your channels were fraying.

Nobody was working on a cure. Nobody cared except me.

I was forty minutes into a particularly dense text on mana flow dynamics when I was struck from my reverie by a particularly noisy group of fourth-years. A whole pack of them settled into the nook adjacent to mine. Immediately, the library exploded with the approximate volume of a herd of Frollarts discovering a cheese wheel in the middle of the road. They slammed their books on tables. They pushed their chairs, scraping against stone. Someone laughed at something.

But among them was a friend of mine: Popo. Her real name was Polina Volkova, technically, but nobody called her that. One of the few fourth-year students I actually liked, she was a Manifestation student who had an enthusiasm for everything but didn’t bother me with it. Unlike most people, she kept that enthusiasm to herself. Finn could stand to learn some lessons from her.

She had a book clutched to her chest like it contained the secrets of the universe, and she was literally vibrating. I caught the title Into the Deep Wood off the cover before she cracked it open. I caught flashes of names—Marat, Valeria, and something about a witch. She was flipping pages much faster than she could have been reading them. It was like she was trying to find whatever passage she’d left off on.

She started narrating the book loudly to her friends, and there went the rest of whatever concentration I had. She stopped mid-sentence and squealed. Actually squealed, a sound that could have shattered a window at close range. I liked Popo, really. She was a very kind person who never bothered me unnecessarily. There was one time she found me asleep in the stacks, and believe it or not, she left me the fuck alone. It was the highest form of respect anybody had ever shown me, but right now she was screaming my ears off and I couldn’t focus.

“Popo,” I said.

She looked up from her book, eyes wide, as if she’d forgotten other people existed.

“Lazlo! I didn’t see you there! How long have you been…”

“Long enough.” I gestured at her book. “Is Marat going to keep making you do that?”

“Do what?”

“The squealing. The loud noises. The repeated interruptions of my work. The sound you just made caused three books on the shelf behind you to rearrange themselves in fear.”

She looked guilty for about half a second, but then looked at her book and then back at me.

“You don’t understand. This is, like, the best book ever. You have to read it,” she said.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“I believe you, but I still need to concentrate,” I said.

“I’ll be quieter, I promise,” she said, and she meant it, but we both knew it wouldn’t last long.

I gave it five minutes. Three bouts of squealing, two dramatic gasps, and one shout-whisper of “oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” later, I packed up my notes and went deeper into the stack.

The further you went from the lobby, the older the Archives got. The enchanted lighting shifted from warm and inviting to indifferent and dim. As if the spells maintaining the light had stopped around the same time the books on these shelves had stopped being read.

I found an alcove where pre-Vortex gave way to pre-Therumia volumes. It was crazy how big this library was, but when you realized it had been the national library of the entire country, well, it made sense. I spread my notes again and picked up where I’d left off. I was working on mana flow dynamics, the relationship between sustained mana output and the structural integrity of mana channels.