The Mosel Library
Sam was riding her bike on the stretch of road between Applewood and Mosel. The sound of dirt crunching under tires was soothing, but she couldn’t help but continue thinking about Sol cutting away at branches to clear the path to the ritual clearing. It was the first time he would be alone in the woods since she found him, and although Sol hadn’t said it, she could feel the tension in his voice whenever he was surrounded by those trees. So, she focused on the rumbling underneath her and watched as tiny rocks were flung across the ground as her bike unearthed them with its rolling tires. Sol would be Okay.
Sam noticed a woman pulling a blue metal wagon behind her in the opposite direction that she was traveling in the direction of Applewood. The woman was looking at her with an intensity that Sam wasn’t expecting. Was Sam supposed to know this woman? She didn’t recognize her. Sam couldn’t help but stare back at her for a second before finally riding past her, feeling slightly uneasy as she continued. Sam would pass several more people travelling in the same direction, most of them pulling wagons with luggage or carrying backpacks. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were observing her every time she passed a group of them.
She was finally able to brush it off and continued down the road until she was greeted with the familiar red brick roads of Mosel.
Sam walked down the road, pushing her bike happily along the red brick road of the city street. She walked under the Don’t be Latte sign hanging above the doorway of her favorite coffee shop and a feeling of excitement rushed through her. Maybe she could stop by later if she managed to find something in her research. But she didn’t want to let herself get distracted before the work even began.
She continued past the perfect black Core building and then past the bookstore that was attempting to lure her in with the whispers of thousands of new and interesting stories to tell her. Unfortunately, those weren’t the books she was trying to find today.
She went another couple blocks before turning off at the main street, and the bustle of the city and its people slowly started to dwindle. She approached a large timber building that had a variety of specialty storefronts along its face. She approached what was probably the most unassuming window of the strip and looked inside. She could see old worn couches against the wall in a small room.
A small plaque was mounted on a heavy wooden door that read in small silver letting that was chipping away, Mosel Public Resource Center and Library. She approached the oversized door and paused to look at the familiar sight, letting the nostalgia wash over her and she looked at the worn dark stained wood. She had come here many times to study for projects, access financial assistance resources, and just to hang out and read. She opened the door, which greeted her with a loud moan of protest for having to hold itself up for so long and walked into a lobby.
It was a small room with a couple of couches where people waited for their appointments with the public resource officer, whose office could be seen down a hallway on the left. She didn’t pause and walked directly forward to a door with a sign over it that read simply: Library. She gripped the handle which was loose in its fitting in the same way it always had been and pushed the door inward.
The smell was delightful. Old, well taken of book left the air smelling positively enticing, promising enough information that no one human could possibly know all of it. Tall bookshelves were packed close together and reached up to as high as Sam could reach. There were only a few feet in between each shelf, filling every square foot of the relatively small room with dozens of rows of shelves.
On the right side of the room sat the librarian's desk, an old oak construction built to last the years. Behind the desk was a door that led to an office where the records were kept, and sitting on a chair next to it, now looking up at the sound of the entry door creaking open, was a woman with slight wrinkles coming from her eyes and mouth from years of smiling. Her hair was wispy brown hair with a plethora of grey streaks running through it. She wore a gentle smile.
“Well hello Sam!” she said in her familiar voice, which immediately brought a broad smile to Sam’s face. “It’s been so long, how have you been?
“Hi Bethany!” Sam said called out and approached the desk.
“How having you been fairing on your shoehorn assignment? It’s been so long since you’ve been in!” she said as she closed her book and got up to straighten her plain brown shawl which had bunched up under her blue jeans while she’d been sitting.
Sam smiled. Bethany told her this same line every time she came in, no matter how long or how short it had been ever since she started her shoehorn assignment after graduating. “It’s been mostly good, except… have you heard the update about Timothy?”
A small, worried wrinkle appeared between Bethany’s brows. “Yes, I did. That Mo came by yesterday to convince people to make their way back to shoehorn this season, and he explained the whole situation. With quite rude language if you ask me.” She raised her eyebrows in dramatic effect as if to highlight the abnormality of Mo’s ‘rude language’, despite the fact that throughout the time Sam had known her, this same ‘crude language’ often found its way slipping off of her own tongue.
Bethany had a way of always moving on from serious topics very quickly. She cared about other’s issues deeply, but she was just too hard to keep down, especially if there was nothing she could do to help. So, like she always did, she plowed her way forward to asking Sam about another subject. “He also mentioned a kid that you found in the woods. Wow, how did that come about? He didn’t have much to say about him except for that apparently you and him were close?” Her tone shifted up a few notes as she finished the sentence and she paused, eyes wide open, waiting for an answer.
Sam wondered skeptically about what fantasy she had built up in her own head about the type of relationship the two might have had. But Bethany was right about one thing. She and Sol were close. It felt strange to admit that she could be close to someone she’d only met a few days ago, but it was true. “Yeah, that’s Sol. He turned up in the woods a few days ago and couldn’t remember anything about his life at all… He still can’t, in fact.”
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They continued on, and Sam described some of the moments that were particularly interesting in the month or so that had passed since she was here last. She realized that she found herself almost exclusively describing the past few days, which had been very eventful, and how regular her life had become in Shoehorn before Sol appeared. Eventually Sam worked through everything that she would have considered particularly notable, and proceeded to describe all the things that she didn’t consider particularly notable, then paused, and decided it was probably best to get to the point of her visit.
“So anyways,” Sam paused, thinking back on the scene in the clearing that day and trying to recall everything precisely. “I’m looking for anything covering strange medical responses to rituals.” She described what she saw in Sol’s reaction to the dispersion ritual while Bethany jotted down some notes in chicken scratch writing that only she would be able to read.
“Alright then, I’ll see what I can scrounge up,” she said as she dotted a period on her last note after Sam finished her description. “I don’t recall reading anything like that eye business, but I also don’t delve too deep into the sciencey subjects,” she said, sounding slightly guilty. Sam knew that most of Bethany’s time was spent reading romance novels, but that Bethany was also being humble, she had quite a good understanding about a wide field of different subjects.
Bethany led Sam to a table where she could work before disappearing behind the shelves of books and after just a few moments, she returned with the first book and set it in front of Sam. She opened it up on the desk in front of her, along with a notebook from her bag that she would use to write down notes on anything that she found that was of interest. She began what would turn out to be a very long day of research.
Like the books that she had read through in her room at the inn, there wasn’t much to find in these pages. She read through the relevant sections of several reference books covering reagents and rituals, hoping that going back to previous versions may reveal information that perhaps hadn’t been revisited in a long time.
Book after book, hours passed, and Sam began getting a nagging sense that what she was looking for didn’t exist, and that she was searching in vain. But she remembered what a professor had told her in one of her classes. “These rituals have been around and have been studied for longer than our grandfather’s grandfathers. If you run into an issue, a mystery, it is nearly a certainty that someone before you has seen it, solved it, and documented it.” Sam believed this to be true, and it had never failed her throughout her studies and over the past few months of work. The dispersion ritual was one of the oldest rituals around, and even as she looked through reference books as old as 300 years old, the ritual remained mostly unchanged: core crystals, salt, and some common binding reagents.
~
Sam set her notes to the side, which remained mostly empty except for some possible leads that she had scribbled out in frustration when they failed to pan out. The scribbles stared back up at her, to torment her. She rubbed her temples and sat her head on her hands, letting the stress flow out of her.
“What do you know Sam? And what do you know you don’t know?”
Sam jumped slightly, surprised. She hadn’t noticed that apparently Bethany had come back with another book and was now watching her struggle to make progress. Sam sighed, and after a moment said, “I know the ritual I was performing. I know Sol’s symptoms…”
Bethany waited a moment, letting Sam collect her thoughts, before continuing, “And what’s the key? Which symptom do you think could reveal what happened?”
Without thinking, Sam replied, “The eyes, nothing I’ve read through is even a little bit similar. It’s so distinctive. Nothing has even come close to describing a glowing like I was out there. I feel crazy, all these patients, all these symptoms. But none of them match.”
“Maybe reframing would help. Right now, you’re thinking of Sol as a patient. No other patient you’ve found has had such a reaction. What if the problem is too abstracted? You said his eyes were glowing, right? Is there any material that can glow like that?
Sam took a few moments and tried to think of the problem like any other reagent combination. She thought back to her chemistry and physics classes and tried to think of basics that could be applied here.
“Resonance...” she thought out loud while grabbing her notebook to record her thoughts as she had them. “All crystals glow with a particular frequency when their energy is released. If a crystal of a compatible structure is exposed to the waves emitted from it, that crystal will also glow, resonating to the same frequency.” Sam thought of a similar application. “Like the locator we use, we can create a card that lets off a frequency in all directions, and the crystal in the tracker resonates when it aligns with the frequency and can indicate the direction.”
“So,” Bethany continued directing Sam’s thoughts, “let’s say we are seeing an example resonance here. What could resonate to generate that orange color?”
“Hmmm...” Sam’s brain fired up as it managed to make connections that had been obfuscated by her determinedness to find another patient with the same symptoms as Sol. “Well, the reaction uses core crystals as the driver, and as far as I know, the only thing that resonates with core crystals is... other core crystals. That’s why we can’t bring more than we plan to use to a ritual site, it's possible that the crystals could resonate and spontaneously react. Sam was bewildered as she realized the implications of what she was saying. “So, if what I saw yesterday was resonance, that means Sol somehow has core crystals gathered in his eyes, like microscopic particles gathered in his irises.
“I think you may have found your answer,” Bethany remarked as she took one of Sam’s hands and gave it a gentle squeeze. “So, Sol might have core crystals in him. Now you just need to figure out why, how they might have got in there, and if they are dangerous for him.”
“Hmpf. That’s a lot of things,” Sam said worriedly. “And if I am right, the implications are pretty nerve racking. Those crystals, even tiny ones, are so full of energy.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine Sam, especially with you looking out for him.”
“I hope so.” Sam felt her mind wandering in the direction of grim what-ifs and quickly realized she needed to continue to be productive to keep her mind at ease. “Well, I suppose I need to start with how,” Sam remarked. “Do you have any resources on industrial processing of core crystals? I’d think they would need to be a powder-fine dust to get integrated into someone's system like that.”
With that, Bethany disappeared to fetch some more books, and Sam dug into the next book, back on the grind.