I checked a dozen places before I even located where the shelves were labeled and I had to change lights to do it. It was a tiny brass plaque tacked to the side corner of the shelf. Why they thought that was a helpful place to put it was beyond me. Needless to day, it wasn’t anything close to 34-D and I resigned myself to an extensive search.

I had no idea how right I was. I’d never been an optimist but, things being what they were, I think I could be forgiven for assuming that 34-D would be preceded by 33-D and followed by 36-D, or at least 34-C and 34-E, but no, that would be too simple.

Instead, it was completely fucking random. Were these numbers an organization system or drawn from a fucking hat!? Instead of just heading in the right direction and checking every four or five shelves to make sure that I was still heading in the right direction I had to stop and check every single shelf, holding up my rushlight and standing on my toes to squint at the corroded brass plaque tacked onto a corner that, more often than not, was either partially or wholly obscured by the neighboring shelf.

Not to mention moving made me anxious. Logically I knew that it didn’t make a difference, that anyone who so much as peeked into this room would notice the light one way or the other, but it didn’t feel the same. Something deep within my goblin brain knew I was trying to be sneaky, and it was deeply mad that I wouldn’t just find a hole to hide in. No amount of logic was going to deal with that, leaving me to grit my teeth and try to ignore the itching at my back.

Three more rushlights burnt low before I found what I sought. I crushed them in my fist after blowing them out, then stowed the cold ashes in my pouches. If the human scribes found any evidence of my passage it wasn’t going to be for a lack of trying on my part.

The only sign of my success was a single battered plaque, scratched in numbering nearly buried beneath verdigris.

I had some difficulty believing I’d finally found it, but it only took one book to confirm my success.

Huber Umpfrah’s On the Proliferation of the Common Classes

A quick skim of the first pages was enough to send it back to the shelf. I didn’t need to understand the psychology of humans’ class choices, I needed the absolute basics.

Finding that took longer than I would have hoped, but about as much as I would have expected. I had to go through half the shelf before I found anything promising and few of the books bothered naming themselves on the spine, forcing me to spend precious seconds paging through them just to discover their uselessness.

Most of them seemed dedicated to the subject of attaining specific classes, something entirely irrelevant when I was still going off of inference and implication just to figure out what classes were. Classes and You: A Beginner’s Primer seemed like the place to start.

“What class dost thou desire?” proclaimed the first page atop an illuminated image. The illustration was split into quadrants with the same human face drawn across four radically different bodies. It didn’t take a genius to guess that each was a different class even without the elaborately calligraphied labels, a pretty little what-if depiction.

The left hand pair depicted a mundane future, the top a farmer and the bottom a smith, while the right hand side carried the more exciting futures. A stalwart warrior guarded the top right, shield and sword burnished to an impressive sheen. In fact, yup, that was literal metal embossed into the paper somehow. How did they do that? The amount of time it would take to hammer silver into paper thin sheets for the gluing… unless they ground the metal into a powder and mixed it into the ink?

Nono,I broke my eyes away from the image, I wasn’t here to take the scrivener class, I had real problems to solve.

That didn’t stop my eyes from lingering again on the bottom right image. The mage depicted within cast a bluer blue than I ever had seen from the crystal atop his gnarled staff. That hypnotic blue was deeper than the vastness of the sky and clearer than the crystal waters of a mountain spring and I couldn’t begin to imagine how human hands had bound it into the pages of a book.

I turned the page before it could captivate me further. Maybe it had been a trap, some bewitchment twixt the pages.

Chapter One: For What Purpose?

I started reading with a keen focus, but that didn’t last long. Between the antiquated dialect and the flowery language the deeper I got the faster I skimmed through it, picking up the important parts.

The long and short of it was that classes served to bolster the strength of your soul levels, something of clear and obvious use, to me most of all. Less clearly, they also served to aid in everything from skill acquisition to stat growth, but only within bounds vague beyond my understanding.

I flipped through the book faster and faster, seeking something that would bring it all together and make it make sense.

The book did not provide. Alas, skimming had proven its limits. I scowled and returned to the beginning, resolving to read it straight through if I had too, but my scowl only grew over the hours of scant and halting progress. My understanding of the human script was beginning to show its limits, in truth it had begun to show its limits on the first page and I was rapidly approaching its breaking point.

I let the book fall shut, a sigh escaping from my chest like a troll had stepped on it. My arm fell limply over my knees where they were jutting out from the gap between the shelves that I’d crammed the rest of myself into. What was I missing? Every time I thought the book was actually getting to the important shit it segued into more blabbering on the true nature of what it meant to be a warrior.

What use could such philosophizing possibly serve? I wasn’t interested in identifying the true bounds of my platonic ideal or whatever other horseshit this book was selling. I just wanted to gain a class!

My frown deepened and my brow furrowed as my brain went into overdrive trying to track the fleeting hint of a thought it had just had. Fuck! I shot upright, jerking myself out of my cubby and turning to snatch up another book at random from the class shelf. I ripped it open.

The Fascinating Social Dynamics of Class Allocation in the 4th Century East Fjords

What. I could scarcely find anything else earlier, but now that I actually wanted a class guide noooo, the world just can’t let Zhen catch a break. I rammed it back onto the shelf, then paused and took it out again, only putting it back when I was sure I had exactly the same spot I’d taken it from. No getting sloppy now.

I found my class guide on the next try, then laid it out on my knees alongside the Primer.

A few minutes of comparison proved my hunch. The guide lacked the antiquated language of the Primer, but fell into a shockingly similar form of overly poetic nonsense when it came time to deliver the goods. It couldn’t be a code to obscure the author’s secrets, this was a guide, you were supposed to learn from it. The bullshit was even mixed in among more practical advice, it had to serve some kind of purpose. I just couldn’t understand what that purpose was.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I paged through both books to hit the points where they were at their most similar. If I could tease out the nature of the overlap, I’d have my answer.

It was so basic I wanted to overlook it, and I did on my first few passes, but both texts couldn’t stop talking about attuning to some deeper concept or idea. The guide called it the ideal of the fisherman while the Primer used more general terms, but that was just a symptom of the Primer’s more general nature. And the fact that the class guide was a class guide for, well, fishermen.

Now that I was taking a closer look it bore more than a little resemblance to Stats and the exercise of will that it took to impose those Stats on the soul levels in the first place. The flowery bullshit wasn’t just comparing your levels to an ideal, it was using willpower and soul magic to impose that ideal, but not alone. Ancient and poetic language wasn’t easy for me to parse, but it seemed not alone was accurate in more than one way.

It wasn’t your will. Not alone.

If I was parsing these texts accurately, the reason that classes were more advanced than Stats, the reason that the book advised not even attempting a classing until fifth level or more was because it demanded power beyond your own will and soul, and that knowledge unlocked the true translation. With my new context I was able to go back and reexamine strange words to find alternative translations that told a far stranger tale than anything my first past had suggested.

These writings on attaining the strength of an ideal, garbing yourself in story as well as steel, this meant you had to reach out to a will other than your own. To suggest you could harness the common will of the world, bind yourself to their idea of what it meant to be a ‘rogue’ and in so doing hew closer to that idea yourself.

It was madness. The power of a man’s will was a very real thing, a tangible force that could command powers his physical body could never hope to touch, this was indisputable.

But that was when properly harnessed. Bound by discipline or arcane secrets it was only natural for reality to bend beneath the power of the mind. It was another entirely to suggest that the passive will of others could be exploited, that the mere fact of a conscious mind perceiving and interpreting the world would generate anything worth using.

Yet only my own poor language skills even allowed that much doubt. The book was clear. The beliefs of the human masses weighed upon the world, engraving certain archetypes and ideas into the “Cognitive Realm”. No, I didn’t know what that was, but I didn’t need to. Whatever it was it powered classes, as whatever magical energy it produced had the property of affecting other magical energies, either to blunt their strength or magnify their power.

Anything else about it was frustratingly difficult to define. “Tragically, the very property that makes the Cognitive Realm so potent renders true study of it impossible. As it is shaped by belief, whatever hypothesis you come in with you are bound to confirm. Do not listen to those mountebanks and flimflammers who proclaim to know what no man may know. Even its name is suspect, yet we must call it something. The energy derived from it shall be referred to in more general terms, as the author I consider the risk of weighing it down with unnecessary connotations to be unacceptable.”

It didn’t take a genius to notice the awesome power of such a force. Thankfully it was notoriously finicky to work with. While mana or soul energy only had a personality when structured into a spirit or soul, this mysterious force always seemed to have its own agenda deriving from the ever shifting effects of mortal thought upon the Realm itself. Exploiting it all was a miracle, and classes themselves seemed more analogous to a filter than anything else. The human conception of a fisherman allowed you to reach into the Cognitive Realm and you withdrew power via that connection, ensuring all that power would be thoroughly tainted by that idea.

This series of steps ensured that whatever intrinsic quirks that made it so temperamental were “on your side”. That phrase alone was enough to send a shiver down my spine. If I put something in my soul I didn’t want it to be “on your side”, I wanted it to be me. The next few paragraphs allayed my fears somewhat, speaking of the inviolability of the soul and how it was the only environment where you held such a fundamental advantage as to make this magic your own and incorporate its benefits as a fundamental part of yourself.

The implication that the first step was only there to soften it for further assimilation made me merely suspicious rather than horrified. Still, the implications frightened me. If there was no other path forwards, if I must take up a class, then how deep would the influence go?

What did it mean to bind yourself so closely to an archetype not solely defined by yourself? Even if your class restricted its influence that only shifted the threat from unknowable magical phenomenon to the idiotic imaginings of the lowest common denominator. I was a stubborn bastard and I knew it, but that didn’t mean I trusted myself to test my will against that of collective humanity itself.

I let the books close in my lap again, eyes rising to emptily gaze at the wall ahead. If that was the only path out, wouldn’t it be better to die?

The thought shook me. I was a rat at heart, I’d always known that. It was the first lesson my mother taught me, for I’d been born in the Year of the Rat, a relic of a culture from beyond the warrens. While the Hobs saw the rats as persistent pests and my fellow yearling gobbos saw them as extra calories for any fast or clever enough to catch them I’d learned a different lesson.

A humble stature and a flexible nature carried you far, for when the courageous lion starved without meat the rat feasted on anything it could fit in its mouth. When the noble elk faltered and drowned the rat found trees to climb and flotsam to cling to. The rat was admirable above others, for a forest could burn to its roots and when the smoke cleared the rats would crawl from beneath those roots, hale and hearty.

I think it was just her way of trying to keep my dumb ass alive, but I’d taken it to heart. All the years of my life I’d lived with that knowledge, the humble live, the proud fall. My self-preservation instincts ran deep and each time I saw those words proven yet again they ran a little deeper.

Only my mother had outweighed that instinct, first in protecting her, then in avenging her. Now I wasn’t so sure. For what purpose did I live if it wasn’t to be myself?

Yet if I was willing to die, what did myself even mean?

I shook my head and blocked my existential doubts off into the corner of my mind where I kept other unimportant things like my desire for real connection with other people or questioning whether it could really be called living if I had nothing to live for. Agonizing over whether choosing a class was tantamount to destruction of the self had no point until it was actually time to make that choice. As it was I had little practical knowledge on how to gain a class, let alone multiple.

That thought made me pause again. If multi-classing was truly possible then a class couldn’t truly dominate your mind or thoughts. There was clearly something that I wasn’t understanding here, either a class didn’t effect your mind or there was some manner of insulating yourself from it.

Only more research would tell. So much more research.

I set my books to the side and padded across the room, heading for the windows. A peek out their, substantially less locked, shutters revealed the faintest hint of the deep blue-black of the night sky fading at the very edge of the eastern horizon.

That was bullshit! What had it been, a few hours? I’d burned through another three rushlights reading, which added up to eight total. That made two hours at least, maybe as many as four considering how nice these were.

Damn, that did add up. I suppose I could strike time manipulation off the list of ways the universe was fucking me.

I hustled back to my corner to start cleaning shit up. True night was never as long as you wanted it to be. Between the late night revelers and the early bird bakers waking to get started on the day’s labors you had rats gnawing at it from either end.

I’d already had to push back my break-in to avoid one, and now I was having to book it early to avoid the other even with hours of good dark left.

Dammit, had the Primer been on the third level from the top or the bottom? I glanced at the window, was that light I saw creeping around the shutters’ edges? Surely not, surely it was simply a figment of a fearful imagination.

I still jammed the damn book wherever it would fit and turned for the door. I could feel the noose tightening with every inch the sun rose. I needed to get out while I still could.

I extinguished my light before I reached the door, relying on memory alone to carry me forward. The stairway was of no consequence, with one hand on the wall and counting each step I came out exactly where I came in.

That room was more inconvenient, with halting, stumbling steps slowing me as I strove to navigate blind. Of course, that was, in its own way, a good sign.

I counted along the rows of desks, turning off towards the same window I’d come in through. I walked my hands along the desks on either side to keep my pace as I neared the light.

The tight fitting of the joint couldn’t deny all light, leaving a hair thin crack of light floating in the air ahead. I stepped up the sill and paused. How to hide my presence?

I reached into a pouch, then another, and finally buried my arm well past the elbow in a third.

It was disorienting in a sense, feeling my arm sink into that little space far beyond what ought be possible. I didn’t even think I’d normally be able to extend my arm this far at this angle, it would embed it through my stomach. Still a little thing like a contemptuous disregard for reality’s basic laws wasn’t going to stop me from using something to my advantage, so I withdrew my prize.

Half a foot of rope followed my hand out of the pouch, more than enough. I pulled out another half a foot anyway. Measure twice, cut once. It was a good rule, whether your were cutting rope or people. The rope took a minute to cut, and even then only after I switched from the stabby dagger to a more slicy one. Say what you want about Garrett, and I did, but he had great taste in rope.

It took me another couple of minutes to unwind the strands the way I wanted, something not eased any by working by a crack of reflected starlight.

I unlatched the shutters and looped a strand of twine around each latch before stepping through and pulling them shut behind me. I pulled the looped twine around, dragged the swinging latches into their proper places. I twisted the twine into one line so I could hold it in one hand and turn around.

It was an awkward shuffle, but the tension on the line helped me kept both feet on the narrow line. I returned to the spiky, stabby dagger and squeezed it in to work the latches from one side to the other. A pain in the ass to be sure, but with the latches swung into position and slid sideways into their proper positions their was no way to tell anyone had ever been here.