The Library of Memir
Amara gawked at the rather unimpressive exterior of the Library of Memir. After the archives they found in the world they can’t openly talk about, this place and even the library on Eryn looked like a broom closet stuffed with books. How had cultures survived on so little information retention? It was like they were intentionally trying to stymie their own forward progress.
“You look disappointed.” Yasiin said, noting her put off expression.
“A little. I feel like my quest for knowledge peeked in the Umbral plane and it’s all downhill from here.”
Yasiin allowed himself an amused chuck. Amara noted it was the first time she’d heard the dark-skinned sniper show a lot of emotion recently. She made a mental note to spend more time around him. This new side of Yasiin was nice.
“Let’s go see how badly we’re about to be disappointed.” Amara said reluctantly, and the two stepped inside.
Just beyond the double wide entrance lay an expanse of shelves that stretched as far as the eye could see. Above them, shelves floated in a uniform fashion that climbed upwards like the spires from outside. As she craned her neck to see, she swallowed hard, half impressed, half intimidated. Intermittent tables dotted the landscape between shelves. Mages flew back and forth, gathering items for research and taking a seat at bobbing tables and chairs.
“I retract my previous statement.” She turned to Yasiin, beaming with eagerness, “How are we even going to tackle this?”
Yasiin shrugged. Usually, the simplest solutions were the best answers. “Front to back, floor up. Asking around seems prudent too.”
“Right!” She grabbed his hand, practically dragging him out of his boots as she trotted off with a broad grin for the nearest rack of crystals, tomes and scales. Amara’s eyes glowed with the eagerness of a child on Gift Day in Hoshun Winters. She started in the farthest upper left corner of the nearest shelf facing them, plucking a massive dusty leather bound tomb off the shelf and frowned as her eyes scanned over the title.
“Ancient Draconic Ballads translated into Dwarven?”
Yasiin let a small chuckle slip, and she frowned at him.
“What?”
“Here are you are surrounded by all this vast wealth of knowledge and you’re dissapointed by the first thing you find.”
She sighed, blowing loose a large cloud of dust from the book. Placing the large book back on the shelf, she folded her arms and frowned. They were going to need a guide. The possibility of wasting their time just trying to find a general spot where they’d best apply their time was going to need someone with firsthand experience.
“Maybe we shouldn’t waste our time studying everything we see. There has to be some rhyme or reason to the arrangement here. Let’s see if we can find a better spot to start.”
The pair strode aisles of shelves. Occasionally inspecting titles and choose a direction to hustle down another five or ten more meters to pause and repeat the process. Amara mentally catalogued the changes at each, stopped and made quick judgements about which way to go and how far before checking again. Yasiin was content to ride silently to her madness and only offer input as requested. Technically, he outranked her, being a corporal to her private. But the study of history had been a pastime of love for her during her tenure in the temple and later in the weaver college.
Rounding the corner of an unoccupied section, Amara crashed into the back of a hatchling and fell down hard. She winced, but mostly felt humiliated at not paying attention. The hatchling, who was wearing white and blue robes, turned, a scaled eyebrow ridge lifted curiously. He kneeled down and extended a hand to Amara.
“Are you ok?”
“Besides a little bruised ego? Fine.”
In a swift jerk of his arm, Amara flew to her feet, going just vertical enough to make her stomach tumble. She whooped unconsciously before glancing at Yasiin sheepishly. The dragonborn hatchling bowed politely, wings drooping low and tail to the side in a show of respect and friendliness.
“My apologies. I often come here to be with my own thoughts. I should have taken my reading to a chair.”
“No! No, you’re fine. I was a little too motivated and didn’t see you there.”
“Not to mention a little too distracted.” Yasiin added unhelpfully.
The hatchling brightened a little at the prospect of perhaps finding a fellow scholar. Amara noted the change and felt slightly odd about the prospect of befriending a hatchling. Until this point, they’d been fighting dragons. Soul shackled dragons, but dragons all the same. It took effort to remind herself they were victims as much as everyone else in the sector.
“I’m junior archivist Kovek. Are you here in search of knowledge? Or riches?” The second half of his question was asked with an air of weariness.
“Knowledge mostly. We doubt we’d have any shot at any significant riches not already claimed by the elder wyrms here.” Yasiin said.
“Students of history. My brothers in books. So to speak.” Kovek said with an apologetic glance to Amara.
She beamed at him, shaking her head. “Not to worry. So, what we’re looking for is uh… old long-lost history. Stuff that may not be very well documented.” Amara said, with several glances at Yasiin for help. They were supposed to find the first spell ship without draconic scrutiny. But if one of their own knew what they were up to, it was possible they might be found out and stopped.
“What she means is we’re very interested in the history of spell ship production and we’d like to see if we can trace the practice back as far as possible.”
“Ah. I can see why such information might be worth pursuing for yourselves, being soldiers, of course. Let’s see.” Kovek said, idly tapping a clawed digit to his scaled chin thoughtfully.
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“The most obvious place to start would be the war records section. We’d be sure to find blueprints aren materials allocations used by artificers during the last Dragonsong war.”
“Brilliant. Lead on?” Amara said, gesturing to their new host.
“It might surprise you to know artificing’s many varied techniques were first developed here by the wyrm mothers of air and light.” Kovek started as he guided the trio through shelves and stacks of research materials. The deeper the group progressed, the thinner those browsing the shelves became until they were the only ones. They progressed up, ascending row upon row of dusty old shelves. They wound a slow, lazy path around drifting shelves, reaching a location that would have taken them far too long to find on their own.
“Ah, here we are.” Kovek said with a warm smile. He caressed a dusty old leather tome, wiping away decades of dust accumulation. “I haven’t cracked this book open in almost twenty years. I was a much younger dragon then.”
Amara and Yasiin exchanged a glance before drifting closer to inspect his chosen book. Amara settled in first, gently taking the aged leather-bound book from Kovek. Once Yasiin and Amara studied its contents, Kovek drifted off to fetch them a floating table and some chairs that bobbed gently in place. He positioned them nearby, so they’d be easy to reach but far enough away that others could navigate around them. Not that there was much traffic this high up.
“I never imagined I’d be studying a book who knows how old, while flying in a building that dimensionally breaks the laws of physics.” She said with an eager grin at Yasiin. Yasiin looked pleased, if moderately distant. His eyes always traveling off to study their surroundings like he was looking for something hidden. Eventually Amara paused, looking at him over the book.
“Yasiin?”
“Hmm?”
Yasiin finally turned, focusing on her again for the first time since Kovek had handed them the book.
“Are you ok? You keep staring off. If this is boring you, you can go?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. Just looking for enemies and spies.”
Amara thought about that level of vigilance for a moment. “oh. I see.”
Yasiin nodded, thankful she understood. “I didn’t like not being with you guys when things went to hell on Eryn. We did what we could, but it didn’t feel like enough. Now I want to make sure Sal and I pull our weight.”
“You know no one holds that against you or expects you to perform better like that was all your fault, right?”
Yasiin shrugged apathetically. “I know. Doesn’t change anything though. The captain trusted me to help you. I’m ok with books. But I’m better with my rifle. We each play to our strengths, right?”
Amara smiled. It was a very pragmatic approach to the situation. Yasiin wasn’t trying to force himself to be a scholar or archivist. He was just doing the best he could with what he had and applying that in a way that best fit the situation. “Right.” She said finally, with an enthusiastic nod. “So. Spot anything unusual?”
“Not at first.”
“You sound both disappointed and unsurprised.”
“You get used to that. The Sauridius aren’t known for being overt. Something most folks don’t know about them is they aren’t actually born the way we are. All those hatchlings and mages we kill? They’re really soul shackled. Bound hosts for souls that don’t belong in those bodies.”
“Like parasites?”
“More or less.”
“What happens to the host soul?”
“Depends on when they get their hooks on the body. If it’s at birth, the soul starves while the Sauridius soul flourishes. Like a muscle that atrophies.”
Amara’s stomach fell away from her body as her horror set in. She’d never considered that in all the time they’d been fighting. Even the Sauridius’s hosts were victims. “I can’t imagine what that’s like,” she said. Her voice, soft and distant.
“At first, some petitioned to find some kind of way to break the bindings collectively. Like a mass cleanse or something. But no one had the power to do that. With no other choice, we saw it as a mercy. Freeing the trapped soul of the prison of its body, stolen from it by another.”
Amara sighed, that really changed her perspective and explained a lot retrospectively. “Is that why many of them of are soul magic experts?”
“Unfortunately, yeah. All those necromancers we fought on Hidros? That was probably a big chunk of the goons that help build the Sauridius forces.”
“So…the more of them we kill, the slower they’ll be to respond?”
“In theory. But it only takes one to keep the fight going.” Yasiin said. A note of weariness in his voice.
“Exactly how long as the fight been going for?”
“Six decades or so.”
Amara blinked. She was impressed. She half expected him to say six months. “I would have expected much less than that.”
“It goes in waves. The initial responses were much more solid. Organized government responses. Massive military campaigns. But then complacency and apathy settled in. The public began to care less for a war that never came for them. Funding dried up. That only left the dried and used up war dogs who still knew the threat out was there. Lurking.”
“That explains why the Federation is less of a military and more of a gun club for nobles.”
“Exactly. Once official funding was cut, and funding came from the noble houses, the war changed. The Sauridius got a lot harder to get rid, but it got harder to face them because the people cared less and less about something they were convinced never would happen.”
“And then Ominek sacked Eryn’s capital.”
“Yeah. I don’t think it’ll be enough to change the situation for the better, though. Erlaut is a great Elder Mage, but… he’s unhinged. I can’t tell if it’s the weight of what he’s facing crushing him, or the realization that Eryn was only ignoring something it should have dealt with sooner. Either way, a reckoning is going to come soon. I just hope it’s not us that pays for everything.”
“All the more reason to find this spell ship and get it back to the Captain so we can win the war. Right?”
Yasiin nodded. Amara’s hope was infectious. Like a small spark in the void’s pitch. It shone bright enough to blind. As a Nomad, he could appreciate that light in her, as much as he could appreciate the void in Akamori. They would need both before this war ended.