The sensation of dreaming was still somewhat foreign to Efrain. Part of him was fully integrated into the dream, believing whatever strange logic that was thrust upon him. The other part was an independent observer, watching as its counterpart was tugged about on the tides of absurdity. Most of it was inky and jumbled recollections of the past few days, monsters and pages scrawled with ink and sharp steel.
Then it very much wasn’t.
He was in a contorted, expanded reminiscence of the office in Karkos. Wood panelling stretching into misty heights, lined with the relatively unadorned bridges and walkways of the Kakros canals. Bookshelves upon bookshelves were laid into the walls of this now titanic space.
The first sensation that came to Efrain was the ache of vanish eyes at the sheer expanse of the library. Even the cathedrals and halls of Angorrah paled in comparison to the immensity of the endless bookshelves. The second sensation was marvelling at how he was aware of any of this at all.
Tentatively, he picked a book from one of the many shelves, its red cover bearing no inscription. As he opened the pages, they flickered and tessellated out, until his whole world was the text and paper. And slowly, words began to resolve into their real, physical components.
‘Water’ became a sparkling sea, ‘orange’ became a expanse of bloody sky, ‘friends’ stretched and warped into the shape of two men, sitting on the steps of a stone pyramid. The city around them was far smaller, without most of the wooden constructions and walkways that now dominated it. There was a clear line to the sea, and Efrain was sitting under the shade of a parasol, dressed in purple robes.
“Well, that about settles it,” said Nicolo, his dark beard just beginning to take on the fullness that would remain throughout his life.
“No it does not,” Armsted responded, “I’m already on the ropes with my family for how many women I allow you to visit here. I do not consent, I don’t even have the authority to consent to this.”
“Oh you’ll figure it out,” Nicolo said, shoving his friend, in a move that might’ve been dangerous for anyone less heavily built than Armsted, “everyone knows you’re the real heir anyways, not that pig that buries his heads between every set of thighs he comes across.”
“Rock, meet glass house,” said Armsted, shoving back.
“Oh please, I’ve reformed,” Nicolo said, pressing his hand to his chest, “I’ve seen the errors of my ways - there’s only one woman for me now.”
He turned around to look at Efrain under his parasol, his expression shining bright through the veil Efrain was wearing.
“Attest for me, friend,” he said, plantiff.
“Reformed?” Efrain mused, “Well, if you mean in the same sense as Angorrah - costing far too many innocent lives in the process, to dubious ends, then I’d be inclined to agree.”
Armsted laughed, and the two young men began to playfully wrestle in the roof top pool, surrounded by modified lunar lilies. He sighed and shut the book on the various sun dances he’d been reading, hoping that their splashing didn’t get too much water in the planters. The poor plants were so sensitive after all, too much water and they’d rot from the stem up.
“You know-” Efrain said, “some might say you-”
Bam. Like a book being shut hurriedly, Efrain was back in the impossibly huge library, the book closed in his hands. Efrain looked down at the cover, only to find that it was now gone, lost somewhere on the infinite shelves.
“What?” he said, “No, no, hold on, give it back.”
He tried to parse the various volumes, and couldn’t find a single one of the deep blood red that the volume had been. Still, there were plenty more, so he picked one at random. It was an older text, with yellowed pages, and worn leather coverings.
Once more the text on the page expanded and morphed into the real world.
He was in another office, larger than the one in Karkos, the wood panelling in this one darker, the bookshelves larger. Red curtains were drawn back from a whole wall of windows, overlooking a city of considerable size. Efrain recognized it from his earliest memories.
He was in Angorrah. But where? When? Just after he’d completed his transformation.
His question was answered and saw the dark coloured hands that rested on his massive, and cluttered desk. He wanted to reach up to his face, to feel if there was still meat on his cheeks, eyes still in their sockets. But alas, this was just a memory and he only could watch it play out before him.
There was note on his desk, stained with what looked like tears. Were they his? What was the note saying? He couldn’t quite notice, given that his gaze was locked on the city. The note remained stolidly at the edges of his vision, despite how he might will his eyes to move.
He came up towards the glass, laying a hand on it, feeling and marveling at the cold against his now living flesh.
There was a knock at the door, a student perhaps. Efrain wiped his eyes, and hastily composed himself for the visitor. Without so much as looking, he walked over to the desk and seized the note, crumpling it violently and thrusting it into a pocket.
“Yes, ahem, yes! Come in, please,” he said.
The door creaked open and in walked-
Bam. He was out, back in the library. The book was gone, lost once more on the shelves.
“No!” he cried, “That was- that was-”
“You don’t belong here,” came a voice.
He turned, finding a suspended platform, littered with desks, and what looked like an immense pile of written on pages. As he watched, it rose, swirling as one enormous mass. There was something familiar about it, just at the edges of his consciousness.
“I am familiar, because you have seen me before,” came the voice, “but you should not have come. This place is not for you.”
“The books in this place, are they all memories? Even the ones that happened before I-”
“Not memories. You’ve said - memories are knowledge. Knowledge can lie. They are truth. Not in the absolute, but the truth of what happened in time.”
“Well,” Efrain said, “I want to know more.”
“No,” said the crawling lines of text, constantly forming and reforming, “twice you have been pulled back from this place. First by the-”
The voice made a sequence of sounds that Efrain couldn’t parse. The whole scene seemed to shudder at what must have been language.
“She knocked you loose, hence you can float free. I doubt it was intended. Now I must deal with the consequences.”
“Here,” he said, “where is here? What are you?”
“No one,” said the thing standing tall as the space blurred and contorted around her, “My name is gone. By function, I remember when all forget. Here is here. My garden, my library, my vault. You have been brought here by mere chance, now GO.”
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With that final word, Efrain was sent careening forwards as the entire scene shifted sideways. Falling with the contents of the entire library, soon the pages became his entire vision.
Then he was back in the office of Karkos, the mentor craning over him, clearly concerned by his lack of movement.
“Master Efrain?” he said, holding a tray with a pot and cups, “I had fetched the tea like you asked, but you weren’t responding.
Efrain flexed his fingers, touching his mask, and found nothing but cold bone and stone, respectfully.
“Yes, well,” Efrain said, “I must’ve fallen asleep. Odd, I rarely need it. Oh, and you brought the tea, how thoughtful.”
“Yes. I have it on the recommendation of the professor you sat in on that the persimmon blend is particularly fragrant. ‘Warms the soul’ he said.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t bare a grudge,” Efrain said as the tray was set before him.
“If you were anyone else, he might’ve,” laughed the mentor, “but seeing a historical figure, one of the founders of the academy no less, come to refute his own work? It doesn’t get much better for a scholar of history.”
Efrain chuckled as the tea was poured, filling the room with a scent that indeed warmed the soul.
“To tell you the truth, I thought that I’d forgotten how to teach,” Efrain said, taking the cup and inhaling deeply, “I’ve spent so many years on my own, lost in my books in distant locales. I haven’t had true students in decades. Well, except…”
The mentor sat forward, clearly curious at what kind of person Efrain might’ve taken on as a student.
“I met a girl, young girl, in a mountain village,” he said, smoothing over the church, “well, quite a few things happened. It all got a bit messy - overlapping parties with overlapping interests, and all that. She ultimately fell under my wing. Curious girl. Actually, her mother was from the city.”
The man nodded vigorously, encouraging him to continue as he sipped from one of the cups.
“Now that I recall, her mother was…” Efrain snapped his fingers, “now what was her name? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll think of it later. In any case, she was bizarre. Has a magical affliction.”
“A magical affliction? Do you mean a curse?”
“Well, perhaps,” Efrain said, tapping his temple, “curses on objects are hard enough, especially if you want them to endure. Putting on living creatures is notoriously difficult. In fact, did you know there’s some old accounts of the sorcerers living on the steppes north of Angorrah. They came in conflict with the church, and they would send in goats to the city with bezoars loaded to the brim with magic. The poor animals would then explode.”
The scholar could not possibly be more interested than anything else. Efrain was unsure if this was merely perfected flattery, or genuine fascination on the man’s part. Either way, it elevated his opinion - if flattery, this level was an art in itself.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t do them a whole lot of good in the end,” Efrain sighed, staring out the windows, “none of those that resisted the Helgacite expansion did well. Angorrah was too well organised to leave stragglers.”
“Except the northern mountain kingdoms,” said the mentor.
“Well, that’s true,” conceded Efrain, “only because Angorrah had conquered half a dozen other countries by then and didn’t want to spread their forces further. The mountain men were shrewd - locking them into a contract like that.”
Efrain thought about the forested regions of Inalthia, where the borders of Angorrah ran up against its northern mountains. It’d been nothing when he’d passed through, almost three hundred years prior. He wondered if it had also expanded into sprawling townships, like Karkos had in his absence. Of course, they had the notable advantage of being basecamp for any and all mining operations in the region, and the reception point of the mountain men’s tithes to boot.
“But, back to the girl I spoke of. Odd creature. Bright. Part of a set, actually,” Efrain said, putting down the teacup.
“Oh?”
“Yes, of three. The other two are twins. Completely unrelated to her, from Erratz actually.”
“How curious!” said the mentor, nodding to indicate he knew the city.
“Yet all sharing the same affliction. They have these… scars. They wrap around their arms and hands. No pattern that I could see. And when they use magic, they glow from within.”
The mentor had put down his cup, and was leaning into Efrain now, hardly daring to breath.
“It’s fascinating, really,” Efrain said, “and they have these memories. Not their own. Supposedly they’re of the founding gods of the church.”
“Bizzare!” said the man.
“Oh yes, quite,” Efrain said, enjoying the exaggerated reactions of his converser, “and they have the most striking capacity for magic I’ve ever seen. They pick up things in a handful of tries that might take others hours to do. Not to mention just how deep their wells run.”
“And they all share this same trait?” said the man, fiddling with his spectacles.
“Oh yes,” Efrain said, “different children, obviously, with their own individual identities and personalities, but all with the same affliction. Fascinating isn’t it? So, through some twists and turns, one of the ultimately came to me for guidance. I should go check up on her, to see if she’s alright.”
“If you know which families they’re staying at, I could bring you to them,” said the mentor, “but you’ll be seeing them at the Festival tomorrow, or so it is said.”
“I see, well, there’s no rush, at least for now,” Efrain said, reclining in the chair.
“By the way, I can’t help but notice you’ve not sipped your tea. Is there something wrong? More honey?”
“Err…” Efrain said,thinking fast, “of course. Speaking of cursed items! This mask. Fused to my face. Quite unremovable, I think. Can’t eat or drink anything.”
“That’s horrible!” said the Mentor, standing up, “we must remove it at once! You’ll starve.”
“No, no, my good man, though I appreciate the thought,” Efrain said, “it’s been stuck to me for some time, you see. Quite useful in a way, it would seem it’s curse also spares the wielder from starvation and thirst, also sleep, for the most part.”
“Oh,” he said, “well how did you come by such a device?”
“It was a curiosity, one that I didn’t take care when handling,” Efrain said, wagging his finger, “a good lesson for you. Even the wisest can be unfathomably careless. I might miss the comforts of food and drink, but I’ve found other ways to amuse myself. My nose has gotten quite sharp. The professor was right, the blend warms the soul.”
That seemed to placate the mentor, who resumed sipping on his blend, though not without occasional guilty looks at Efrain’s full cup. Before they could resume the conversation, there was a knock at the door to the study.
“That’d be some of the students,” said the mentor, getting up to let them in, “they went to the library to get the texts you requested.”
Several young men and women filed in, arms filled with bound volumes, as well as brushes and inkpots. The mentor was quick to dismiss them as he began to reorganize the journals in order of instruction. Efrain was happy to sit and scent the tea as he did so.
“Well, there’s that,” the mentor said, slightly sweaty after moving so many volumes around, “Twelve in total, representing most of your attributed work. There are other books that reference yours. Oh dear, I’ll suppose those will have to be changed as well.”
“That’s was second editions are for,” Efrain said as he flicked open the cover of the first book, reading the brief foreword, “I assume you have a press in the city.”
“Several,” said the mentor, “we took the designs from Angorrah, and improved upon it. The artisans called it “woefully inefficient” when they first started building them. Also “tacky”.”
Efrain laughed as he finished the prelude, more self-aggrandizing nonsense from Nicolo, though not as audacious as some of the lies he’d put together in his youth. Seems like age had tempered that particular tendency.
“They would,” Efrain said, “I assume you just lease copies to them?”
“Oh yes. The previous mentor tried to sell the entire manuscripts to them!” he huffed, “selling off our academies heritage for profit, I say.”
“Can’t imagine too many were happy about that. I can see why you were selected as his successor.”
“You flatter me, master Efrain,” he said, bowing his head low with a smile of appreciation.
Within the first few pages, Efrain already knew exactly where the bulk of this book had come from. He also knew that it would have to be entirely rewritten for accuracy's sake. He’d already committed, however, there was no backing out of this one. To his surprise, however, the historical footnotes were both well sourced and actually quite informative.
Always more interested in history, Efrain thought, shaking his head and smiling in his mind.
“Well, is there anything else you’d like to discuss master?” he said, “or should I leave you to it?”
“I think we’re done for the time being, my friend,” Efrain said, gesturing to the piles of papers, “I have my work cut out for me, it would seem.”
“I can send up a senior student to serve as a scribe if you should wish,” he said, getting up and retrieving the tea set.
“Not as a scribe - I prefer to write my own notes,” Efrain said to a nod of appreciation, “but send one up all the same, so I can fetch more paper and ink should need demand. Preferably a quiet one if possible.”
“Absolutely,” said the mentor, “I can’t tell you how excited we all are to have you! And for you to grace us with your knowledge - ah, golden opportunities abound!”
“Yes, yes,” Efrain said, before snapping his fingers, “ah yes! I figured it out.”
“What would that be?”
“The name of the girl’s mother. My student from the northern village.”
“Ah, I see. What is it?”
“Assyeria, that’s what it was,” Efrain said, wondering how he would have forgotten something so simple.
The mentor, on the other hand, turned white then red, and had to scramble to catch the tray he dropped.