Dean's eyes continued to inspect the sapient's skeletal form. Her hair...it's violet, and pleated almost like...he blinked. Feathers.

Dean dropped the sheet, watching as it floated lightly above the sapient's body before settling. He inhaled deeply, then turned away. Others in the vanguard inspected the tomb, expressions grave as they held out instruments and recorded their findings in their chip readers.

He elevated his voice, projecting outward while still retaining a calm, self-assured air. "We need to head out." Everyone looked up, facing in his direction. Dean suppressed the desire to flinch under their gazes. I'm the Knight, he reminded himself.

He swallowed, debating whether or not to say something before heading out.

He decided not to. They followed him outside, talking amongst themselves. Dean noted that, once they emerged outside, their quiet murmurings gave way to excited speculations. Even as they sped up to cross over the harsh terrain, their voices remained audible over the wind.

That's the loudest I've heard them, Dean observed. He squinted as the wind lashed his face, then looked up, realizing that the overcast clouds above had darkened. Roiling coils of charcoal gray loomed above, casting the ground beneath in near dark.

Dean narrowed his eyes. This is probably a bad sign...

As he sprinted around a house-sized boulder, he saw several flashes of light. He moved on reflex, dodging diagonally left. He whipped his head around, looking behind at the contingent following him toward the planet's exit gate. A quick sweep of his eyes revealed that none had been struck by lightning, though he noted that many in the group were frantically looking around.

"Let's try to hurry through the storm," Dean bellowed, picking up the pace. Fifteen seconds after he did so, lightning streaked across the black above, thunder resounding in his ears. He grumbled under his breath and looked down at his wrist, re-enabling the navigation overlay HUD he'd disabled once they entered the tomb. The chip reader projected a transparent map in the space in front of him, always in the upper left corner of his vision. It also displayed the distance between his location marker and the destination he'd entered in when planning the city-seed's eventual location.

Only another two hundred miles to go...

---

"But why?" Lisa groaned while clawing at her hair. She turned away from the pedestal and the five books that lay on the ground by the sigils.

"Stop glaring at the books," Fartuun murmured.

Lisa took a deep breath. "I'm just annoyed."

Fartuun snorted. "I can see that much. I--" she paused, then looked down at her hand. She shook her head after a moment. "Sorry."

Lisa nodded. "I can't believe how...much it is to get used to." Every so often, Fartuun would get lost in what she was doing, freezing up for a few seconds. Lisa still wasn't fully sure what the reason was, but she'd overheard Fartuun grumble "overload" at least a twenty times over the past hour. And that was still days later. She wondered idly how Fartuun had even done something as simple as walking in the twenty-four hours proceeding the implantation.

Fartuun waved a hand dismissively. "It's fine. Can you go back to the pedestal?"

Lisa assented by turning around and dipping her hands into the pedestal's control sphere. "Now what?"

"Uh..." Fartuun put a finger to her mouth. "Okay, open the door to the eleventh library," she instructed. "And retrieve the twenty-nine-hundredth book."

Lisa looked over her shoulder. "How am I supposed to know which one is the twenty-nine-hundredth?" she asked. It's not as though the books were marked with numbers. To her knowledge, the only metric by which to find the twenty-nine-hundredth book would be to identify the first book in the library and begin counting from there. Besides, Lisa thought, for all we know, we could've already shifted the books around in our attempts to figure the sigils out. The original twenty-nine-hundredth book might be in the completely wrong place.

"It should have the number on its spine," Fartuun observed.

Lisa narrowed her eyes. "You sure about that?"

Fartuun raised an eyebrow. "All the books I brought to you have numbers on their spines," she pointed out. "Including the one you and Bath found."

Wait..."Oh." She bit her lip. Can't believe I didn't notice that before. Then again, when Fartuun had come to her two hours ago with information on the sigils and four books in hand, Lisa had gone straight to reading the books' insides, not their covers.

"Okay, I'll direct Ainsley--AI Ninety-Seven--to grab it and bring it to us." She did so through the pedestal's service request menu, flicking her fingers through its golden projection. "Done. Anything else?"

Fartuun shook her head. "We can't change too much at once. Let's see what happens when we add that one book."

Lisa stepped back from the pedestal and rubbed her hands together. "Fine by me." She walked over to Fartuun's side. "You really don't know why these books are special?"

"No." The woman gave an annoyed groan. "I ran every kind of textual analysis I could on them," she explained. "But at the end of the day, they're just...books. Storybooks." Myths, legends, fables...

"Have you made any headway on deciphering the sigils themselves?" Lisa asked. Fartuun had started on that project half a day ago, claiming that she needed a good mystery to keep her overactive mind occupied.

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

"Nothing definitive, but enough that I was able to see the briefest hint of a pattern. After a bit of guessing, I found the first book, then the second..." Fartuun glanced up at Lisa. "It helps that you and the Dragon were lucky with that first book."

Lisa nodded. When Bath had originally fooled around with shifting around books and seeing how the sigils reacted, he'd unintentionally failed to put one of the books back in its original room. I still can't think of any explanation regarding how that happened, Lisa thought. He put back every single book aside from the one that mattered. The entire situation was fishy.

Ainsley had found it on the floor a few days ago, though had only delivered it after Bath left. When she'd asked him why it took so long, he'd only given the non-committal response, "I tried to find the library to which it belonged."

Wait...He tried to find the library to which the book belonged...why did he fail?

AI Ninety-Seven arrived just in time to answer her question.

"Ainsley!" she exclaimed, hailing the android down. The android's four eyes trained on her.

"You made a service request," the android stated crisply while inclining his head.

"Okay, this is a two-part request. First, we need you to get a book for us. It should be a book in library eleven with the number, 'two-nine-zero-zero' on its spine. Got it?"

"Yes, Church."

"Great. Now, the second part is a question. When you returned that book to me," Lisa began, pointing to the book in question where it lay on the floor, "you said that you tried to find the library where it originated to put it back. Right?"

"That is correct."

"So, why weren't you able to find its original place? It's right here, in the catalog." She put both hands back on the control pedestal and opened the catalog, searching for the book, The Nezera. The book popped up, the pedestal projecting a slowly-rotating three-dimensional depiction of it into the air.

"See? It belongs--" Lisa froze. The area that normally held a book's information-- its title, author, and location in the library--was partially missing. Specifically, both the author and location looked blurred, almost like the faces of people who had been blurred out in video footage.

"I was unable to find the location because it was missing," AI Ninety-Seven replied simply.

Lisa felt like an idiot. I didn't think to even check...She glanced over at Fartuun. "You didn't notice either, right?"

Fartuun rolled her eyes. "No. Well, it's clear we've missed the obvious."

"Right. Ainsley, is there any way for us to find all the books that are missing location metadata?" Lisa gave the android an expectant look.

AI Ninety-Seven crossed his arms. "No."

No...Lisa moaned internally. "Why?" she gritted.

"Some would come to this arc to destroy only certain books," AI Ninety-Seven replied. "All those books classified most at risk have been unlisted."

"So that's how it is," Fartuun tsked. "Then we'd better get back to work," she said, giving Lisa a knowing look.

Lisa put a hand on her hips. "Right. Okay, remember, bring the book to us as soon as you find it."

AI Ninety-Seven gave her a small, mechanical smile. "I'll be back with all due haste."

---

Eyrin continued to shudder and breathe rapidly, his entire body cold from the wet and wind. Clarissa seemed, ironically, much better off, her rugged constitution protecting her against the cold. Moreover, her lack of clothing meant that she wasn't a half-drowned dog once she returned to the surface.

It was times like these that made Eyrin curse propriety most. Wearing wet clothes in a frosty wind was impractical, and yet...even as Eyrin recognized his compulsion to remain clothed for what it was--a social behavior long-since planted into his psyche--he couldn't bring himself to disrobe.

It's not like I'm at risk of dying, he smiled. Though my body doesn't seem to know that. With each shudder, Eyrin felt a small surge of adrenaline course through his body. It made being so miserably uncomfortable almost worth it.

"We need to go to the city-seed," Clarissa growled, blinking her eye rapidly. "We need the healing pools."

Eyrin blinked once. Clarissa certainly did--she was missing the upper right corner of her face. Even though Eyrin had been able to reduce the damage, he noticed that healing Clarissa was much more difficult than healing himself or another verdora. As a result, while her pain was greatly reduced, she still needed immediate medical attention.

He'd already healed his own wounds, even though doing so had left him weak. Just the thought of them--and looking at Clarissa's mottled face--made him shudder.

In her pain, Clarissa flew on to the new city-seed's location at a breakneck pace. They arrived in just under an hour and a half to an open stretch of grassland.

"Don't tell me...we beat them to it!?"

Eyrin hobbled off of the devilbat's back and almost collapsed onto the ground. It had taken all his dwindling strength just to hold on to Clarissa's mane as she cut through the air.

"I think," he huffed, "I'm going to sleep."

And so he did.

His dreams transported him back to the submerged, eroded castle. He watched from afar as he and Clarissa swam downwards, watched as they began to look through rooms for signs of past life. A futile search, given how long ago the barely-recognizable--and yet impossibly tall--stone castle had sunk.

He felt a growing sense of dread as he watched himself accompany Clarissa down into even deeper depths. Eventually they stumbled upon what could only be a basement area, throwing open its entrance.

He tensed, tried to tell himself to leave, tried to tell Clarissa, all for naught: they opened the door.

The laugh that echoed out as they did so sounded louder and perhaps even more malevolent in the dream. It certainly seemed more pervasive, as though it echoed out for miles rather than a few feet ahead.

A garble of sound followed the laugh, sounding like a foreign language. Their translators did nothing to help, so Eyrin could only assume that the language was unrecognizable through the water's distortion. Or, perhaps the chip readers didn't recognize the language at all.

Then, a flurry of rainbow tentacles burst forth, each squirming uncontrollably while reaching out towards the exploratory duo. Eyrin looked on as he and Clarissa retreated backward up through the water.

The rainbow monster jetted after them, its thousand one-eyed many-toothed heads narrowing their eyes and gnashing their teeth. It failed to catch up to them as they reached the surface, but in a last effort, the fiend had used its many heads to spit a volley of acid.

How did it remain undiluted by the water? Eyrin wondered, shaking his head.

This time, the acid swallowed him whole, and he woke up.

Clarissa gave him a look. "Bad dreams?"

Eyrin stroked his veil. "Something to that effect."

He sighed. While the monster hadn't been rainbow--it had been black--and had only possessed three heads, it had still been terrifying. Why had it even been in that abandoned, sunken room anyway? Had it been locked down there? While he and Clarissa had effortlessly opened the door, it was entirely possible that it had been sealed tight before they used their enhanced strength to force it open.

"You think it lived down there?" Clarissa asked. She was currently resting her head on the ground, placing all pressure on her good side. Eyrin thought that the position looked particularly uncomfortable.

"Maybe," he replied. "Its draconian appearance certainly matched the castle's war-like structure."

"War-like?"

Eyrin blinked. "Did you see a single normal window anywhere?" he asked.

Clarissa frowned. "I wasn't exactly paying attention to the windows..."

"There were only slits," Eyrin explained. "The kind from which you send out punishment."

Clarissa narrowed her eyes. "Speaking from experience?"

Eyrin paused, then broke out into raucous laughter. "No," he said, catching his breath. "There's nothing like that on Illudis."

"Then..."

Eyrin smirked. "I learned about that from reading up on Earth."