"Who are you, Xera?"

The question hit me in the silence of the Athenaeum, prompted by Jenny's inner thoughts gone wild. She normally spoke far more often. I figured she must have grown frustrated at the silence.

I gave the easy answer. "I'm a Kindred." I knew her distaste for us. I didn't want to give her more purpose to hate me with my former position in the Royal Guard, nor risk telling her too much about Eskir. Though, what could the harm have been? Nobody had tried to kill us because his secret had been revealed.

Well, nobody had tried yet.

She rolled her eyes. "Thank you for reminding me. What are you doing in a place like this? Shouldn't you be following the Path of the Warrior?"

I did wonder about that. It's what we were supposed to follow.

"I can live with death," I said. "Not ascending. That's fine. As long as I leave the world a better place than I found it."

"That's refreshing," she said, sliding down a sandy slope that had accumulated on the steps. "I wonder if we can do that, if it's even possible."

"It's a shit world," I mused, "and humans are quite terrible." She shot me an annoyed look, and I quickly corrected myself: "All humans. Kindred too. Maybe especially Kindred."

We stepped across the threshold of a massive chamber. The water was held back far above our heads. An entire city block could have fit in here, with buildings towering higher than anything I had seen in Bell Haven.

"It's like the arena in Eaden Helm," I commented.

"It's disturbing. I feel exposed. Can we stick to the edges so we don't have to walk through that?" She pointed at the heart of the chamber, isolated and empty and suspended beneath the perpetual threat of the enchantments about to give way at any moment.

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"This Athenaeum place," said Jenny, "I mean, why?"

"It's complicated." How was I supposed to explain any of it?

Our steps took us the long way around the expanse, sticking to the edges where the walls opened up to smaller compartmentalised rooms filled not just with books and scrolls, but weapons, garments, charms, and oddities that were entirely unfamiliar. Jenny commented on them, noting peculiarities or admiring the contents of the rooms. At several points, she identified and explained objects that I had not seen before as trade goods, farming equipment, or components to machinery. How was she so knowledgeable, I wondered. Her eyes lingered often on some rooms, sometimes wistful and sometimes tense, where her entire body froze up and only the reflections of light from the water gave movement to her skin. The only connection of note in the rooms where she gave a notable reaction was in their presence of magic. Tools or otherwise, those rooms drew her eye more than others.

For me, it was the opposite. My eye was drawn to books, scanning titles with my Kindred eyesight when they faced the doorway, and when there were titles at all. My research in the Athenaeum had turned no good results, and this was a new section to me, something I had not seen before.

To my dismay, my search here revealed nothing. Most of the books were on aquatic life, which gave me new purpose to think that this was a section of the Athenaeum and not its whole, that we would come out of it and break back into the sections I was familiar with before getting lost.

When we reached the far edge of the chamber and the hall opened up again to passage beyond, that is when I finally saw it. Not a blue flickering, not the green lights that shone up from below and reflected off the water above to give us our ambient light, but the colour of unwashed stone bathed in dimness. The path ahead was darkened, but it was certainly stone, and therefore must have led back to the main area of the Athenaeum. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was not home, nor familiar, but I couldn't help to feel a sense of security in the Athenaeum, despite the red sun we had left behind. If the Deacon found its way in here, we would die just as easily below ground as we would above.

I resolved to steel myself for it, if and when the time should come. I'd go down fighting, and I would ensure to ask the thing why it would do so much just to destroy a man who could not speak. That was, at least, my best rationalisation for its coming. I was an ally to the Deacons through my position, and no protest, no matter how outrageous, would prompt a Deacon to annihilate a city.

His voice was the only explanation to the madness.