It spoke? Not that he should really be surprised anymore since Nympha could talk too, but this bird barely had a corporeal form to it as though its body could pass through solids. As he suspected, the bird named, Pisces sank through the thin metal bars, and flew through the open door. Wispy white wings settled on top of the spire and as its neck shook, vapors like white smoke dusted off its body. Pisces crooned, “Wel’ come on over, I’ve had en’of hide an’ seek. We’ve got things to sort ot’ and books to peck.”

The bird’s head rotated far around its neck, very owl-like, and its eyes changed back into those crescent shapes as it laughed at them. “Hurry now.” Its beak pecked the rim of the spire. Tic-tic-tic.

Several thoughts ran through Lark’s head: one, Pisces seemed very casual in nature, but the strange, little bird had been watching them since they arrived like a predator, and two, why did Sphinx do another casual bomb drop? This Librarian guy stored both Sphinx and his spirit familiar inside of SIM for what could’ve been all of eternity if they weren’t awakened by him and the Trinity Watch—and if Pisces was the Librarian’s spirit familiar, what did that make Sphinx? Another familiar?

Sighing helplessly, Lark had no choice but to go ahead by himself as Nympha seemed to be staring daggers into Sphinx’s back. She kept her distance away from Pisces and watched over them from the tops of a nearby plant stalk. Lark couldn’t help, but feel that she looked cozy in her natural habitat.

“So, you’re the one who in’herited SIM and now the library. Your name, please?”

“You don’t know it?” Lark blurted.

Pisces sheepishly waved his wing over his snowball-sized body. “Un’like that unique crea’ture over there, I don’t say I boast appraisal powers.”

“Oh I see…” Before they could encroach the next subject, Pisces became overwhelming flustered. His eyes went big, and tips of his wings shook. “And-and while I do say, we were play’ing hide an’ seek, I-I was seeing if I could catch your name like the others, but they never said it,” he swung a wing over at Sphinx and the other at Nympha. “I did he’ar this fellow’s — Gushi. You said it. I heard it then.”

Lark didn’t find an opening to interrupt, so he let the strange snowball carry on with naming the mouse over yonder, Nympha, and the Librarian’s subject’s new name, Sphinx.

“What was Sphinx like before?”

“Same as he is now, I sup’pose, with a bit less pieces,” Pisces answered and strange chuckle with his lisp cackled in the quiet library. The two of them looked over to where Sphinx was, hunched over the same desk he cleaned prior.

“You said he had an appraisal ability, isn’t that SIM’s thing?”

“The Professor once said, ‘inspiration comes in many forms,’ the one you call Sphinx was merely a stim’ulus that one could paint over and SIM, the brainchild of master’s lifelong work, the final art piece.” He flapped open his wings, eagle-spread, proud of his grand proclamation.

When Lark smiled back at him like a parent to a child’s wild imagination, Pisces hopped around the rim and avoided eye contact. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

His wispy body dipped a tiny claw into the pool of water. “C-cold!” The layers of silver vapors splashed water against the floor before he completely dived in. Several concentric rings rippled out, then stilled. Pisces never surfaced.

Lark tipped over the rim, looking for a single trace of the strange bird, but the bottom of the water was spotless. To his right, Nympha didn’t say anything, and to his left, Sphinx was still preoccupied at the desk. So, he looked at the slime on his arm. “Gushi, you saw him jump in too, right?”

The slime’s antenna swung up and down to answer ‘yes.’ It landed down onto the rim, taking a closer look to prove its point. Their reflections painted over the water. Then Gushi drew his antenna into an arc as if fishing for the drowned bird.

A sheepish giggle treated their ears as a column of water spouted into the air. Gushi pulled back, flinging beads of water like a sprinkler before Lark scooped it up by its tiny appendages. The fearful slime snuggled into his chest and the two retreated a few feet away from the geyser.

As the rush of water abated, bubbling into what looked like sea foam, Pisces reappeared in a form of a floating fish. Then the spire shook again, widening the base and another platform raised from underwater, protruding four green columns capped by a dome-shaped slab. Flowing water cascaded out the sides until it stopped growing.

From a distance, it would appear that the spire transformed into a freestanding mountain with a mini temple at the top. Dashing, curving lines of gold overlaid the smooth green columns, etching waves, scales of fishes, constellations and harp strings. The vaulted structure housed Pisces, who swam within the perimeter of the four structures, tapping each one with a fin and at every passing stroke, they would ribbon out, showing their long, paper-thin textures. After a tap, another part of his body glowed into a golden orange, granting him a stronger shape and mass.

Thinking it was okay to proceed(now that everything stopped shaking), Lark carried Gushi on his shoulder as the two made way up a short staircase to the round platform under the conical building. He could catch a portion of the dome’s top, which halted a bit over his head. Next, he waved to Pisces, who was now at face level with them.

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Instead of the yellow, piercing eyes of a ghost, Pisces’ gaze mellowed out into roundish beads with the color of pond water. In place of the feathers were sunset-rich scales and his beak replaced by fish lips. A bubble flushed out of those puckered lips and it popped open in songs unfamiliar to them.

Lark closed his eyes, relaxing to the unusual sequence of sounds; it wasn’t exactly opera with stretched out trills but rather string-like as if someone were plucking their voices and then letting them vibrate with the crescendo of epic waves. Below the chorus was the melody of humming beach noise.

Nympha reappeared beside them. “Mer bubbles.”

While still wary, it seemed she couldn’t contain her curiosity. “It’s said that the Mer have the blood of ocean dragons and an Immortal. Their ichor, fluid said to be in the veins of the gods, allows them to breathe underwater.” Her eyes traced the golden lines covering the green. “All things pretty, however, tend to die quickly.”

A second bubble emerged and popped. “How was the present?”

“Very beautiful,” Lark answered to the fish, while Gushi mimicked the bubbles floating.

Pisces rounded out eyes fluttered into a satisfied smile as he dove deep back down into the pool, disappearing once more. One by one, the pillars fell in order into a small square and the dome came undone, crushing them down till the water could no longer be seen and the dome covered the spire.

“Whoa!” Lark reached out, shocked. “Hey, is he going to be okay?” he asked Nympha. Her earlier words had terrible timing, after all, they had just met and he was finally learning the purpose behind SIM. His familiar merely shrugged. She didn’t know how other spirit familiars were supposed to act. Though she added, “I heard the merfolks were sundered by discord, the purity of their bloodline diminishing with each generation. They were already a dying breed long before my time in Celestia. He must be a remnant of a generation, now long gone.”

Like an egg cracking on the edge of a frying pan, the dome suddenly split open, revealing a dark-colored pearl. It sat on a bed of seaweed, with a perfect, unblemished countenance. A deep-space kind of black, which gave off a polar opposite vibe from the void crystal despite their similarity in size and shape. If this were to be sold on Earth, Lark was sure its opulence would attract the greed of any collector.

“Truly this unique goddess is know’ledgable.” Nympha’s cheeks darkened. Pisces spooked them from behind in his non-corporal form. “This is my one and only keeper of my soul. As the goddess has spo’ken, my kind has been absent from the world for a while now. Our flesh separated, but our sou’ls intact due to the ichor. Many of us have hidden away in such fine gems, waiting until the right person comes alo’ng to reclaim us. For me, I cho’se the Professor.”

Lost in thought Pisces rattled on while resting on atop the pearl. “He co’llected my container at an ol’d witch’s stall—she sol’d me at a lower price seeing as my pearl did not work as intended. After that, I was left at his research table for many long nights. He didn’t keep me hidden away, and I sat in an open jewelry box. While he was out, I was free to roam the library. Reading was always a pleasure of mine, you see, but I can’t touch things with this ghostly form. However, he’d have these magnificently large books open to pages full of color and script and there was one book always turning the page.”

Pisces squinted beyond the purple line and soft, blue tears welled up in his eyes.

“A bond developed between us, I would like to be’lieve, but he was mostly a strange person talking to himself into the inky night. And he would often say to me, as the pearl, that I reminded him of the unknown. The Pro’fessor would go on and on about exploring truths and to understand those truths we must take the light into our hands. Vague, yes?”

To this Lark nodded and with encouraged bravado, Pisces rapped his wing against the pearl. “I thought to myself that night: Yes! He’s the one! To take the light, meant he would take it from others who’d dare hide it. He could reclaim my kinds’ truth, the truth that we were betrayed, outnumbered, and rallied to our deaths!”

Beside himself with grief, Pisces’ small body trembled. “What the goddess said was true, our communities were divided by not just coastal territories but pride. Oh, we were so foo’lish then to believe we were an almighty race that our powerful ancestry allowed us to be above others. So many of us then were tricked. Humans, Beastmen, the Vodanoi—ugh! Especially the Voidanoi! They banded together flushed us o’ut of our territories under the guise of trade, parties, treaties, any reason you could think of…and hunted us for our flesh and scales…our beautiful scales.” Pisces wept into his wing.

Flesh? Scales? Hearing all of the above made Lark’s stomach feel queasy. The first pang of guilt as a fellow human, and truly humans had a history of having no moral standards when it came to territories. The second pang of guilt, that he too, liked eating fish. Sky’s and Mishka’s favorite foods consisted of raw fish and rice. Thirdly, he almost forgot how these new worlds’ inhabitants tended to eat each other. Orcs, giant octopi, and now merpeople. His mouth souring, Lark dry heaved to the side.

“It was as if the Professor understood my plight, so I dared revealed myself to him in my bodiless form, whilst he was stargazing. And to my o’wn surprise, he was already aware of who I was. As a scholar, he knew of the tragic history of the Mer and proclaimed to me, he would his utmost best to right the wrongs and as a starting point he offered his reputation as the Librarian and presented the shrine of Koi.”

Koi? Like the Koi fish found in those Asian ponds? More confused than bemused, Lark looked around for Sphinx. Apparently, his guide hadn’t moved from the same spot, yet he intently listened from afar and winked at Lark.

Shuddering, Lark turned his head and continued to listen, while connecting that the collapsed green temple must’ve been the shrine of Koi.

“To o'thers he had a re’known title as the Librarian. He was a master scholar, a teacher, and to me he’ll always be the Professor because while he could teach many areas of worldly subjects, he humbly spo’ke that he was a learner, a student, and the greatest respect of all would be to be given the o’pportunity to learn from other experts.”

Doesn’t that mean, he wanted to take advantage of you, Pisces? Lark lifted a brow, quiet. The bird gave off a chuckle.

“Although his intentions to seek out the Mer wasn’t for the sole purpose of retribution but for his own enlightenment…” as Pisces explained, a map of the Celestial stars covered the windows, “…I still felt he was the right person for this lifelong quest of mine. In exchange for his promise to me, I gave him my gem of Mer.”

Nympha whispered under her breath, “The black pearl!”

Pisces flew to it and said, “Co’me here, inheritor. I will be doing your reading.”