Quinn was unable to get a restful night's sleep. She got up much earlier than usual, had a nice hot shower, pulled on her comfy clothes, and headed down to grab a cup of something very similar to coffee. She nodded at Cook, beckoned to Aradie, who alighted very easily on her shoulder and headed downstairs to speak to the Library.

The core room of the Library, where Quinn originally landed when she was pulled here from her university, was usually breathtaking, especially now they had power to spare. The glimmering lights lit up overhead like leaves and raindrops on a tree.

She walked from the stairs onto the soft ground, looking up, and realized that the gentle winking lights were not all lit up as beautifully as she initially expected. There were gaps in them, and some of them flickered into red and orange, a few of them yellow. Quinn had no idea what that meant, except perhaps that it had to do with the Library's memory.

She'd wondered if there'd be obvious signs, but this was a lot more than she'd assumed.

Before, when there wasn't enough power to turn on everything, those little discrepancies had been difficult to notice. Frankly, the Library hadn't had access to everything. But now, they stood out, and it only made Quinn more concerned, as the patches were fairly obvious. She walked toward the core, however, and that glistened with luminescence in front of her. The ground shifted, and from behind, or perhaps within the trunk of the tree, as it were, a shadowy figure stepped.

"You're taking on corporeal form?" Quinn asked, a smile in her voice.

The Library shook its head. "Not necessarily. Sometimes I feel maybe it's easier to speak to a visage than to the trunk of a tree."

Quinn let herself laugh, and Aradie cooed softly. "Well, I'd ask you what brings you here, but I would say that that's painfully obvious. So, Quinn, ask me your questions, and I will do my very best to answer them."

Quinn observed the Library for several seconds, because she wasn't exactly sure how to phrase all of the questions in her head. But she guessed she may as well start at the beginning. "So, how are you a Library, if you're really a dragon?"

The Library smiled, but it wasn't something Quinn could see. It was just a sensation that she felt from all around her. "I see you jumped straight into it. You would be mostly correct."

"Mostly correct?" Quinn asked, quite curious.

"Well, mostly correct, because yes... I am a type of dragon, one of the first creations in the universe, along with four of my brethren, and we are what is known as a cosmicisodracus. We have differing ability strengths, magic, and affinity inclinations, technically, but we also have all of them. Our strengths are very different, and frankly, we are all personally different."

"There are five of you? Have I met any of the others?" Quinn's interest suddenly piqued.

"Not to my knowledge," the Library paused, and Quinn could feel the grin emanating from it. "and not yet."

"Oh." Quinn couldn't help but be oddly disappointed that they hadn't been hiding somewhere close by.

"I do believe...' The Library paused for a few seconds. "Yes, I do believe that two of them are actually hibernating right now," another pause... "Wow, they've been hibernating for a very long time.'"

"So dragons hibernate?" Quinn blurted out her obvious question.

"We can. We don't have to, but we've been alive for a very long time, and sometimes we get a little bored." The Library said in a gentle tone.

The nerdy part of Quinn's brain that had made it relatively easy to accept the magical Library when she first got there was in overdrive. She had to stop herself from going down a tangent that she didn't need to right now. "Okay, wait, so what are you?"

"I am a Lunar cosmicisodracus, which basically means I am a primordial lunar dragon."

"Moon-based?"

"Mm-hmm. There's moon-based tides, waters, that's me. That's why the filtration system works for me. It's part of why I became the Library." The Library answered and immediately instigated a thousand new questions.

"Okay, so we've established that you're a dragon, which means I'm part, or mostly, dragon, but we'll get to that, and I can be completely and utterly overwhelmed by that in a bit." Quinn pushed the curiosity down for now, keeping it for later. "Why are you a Library? Why aren't you a dragon flying around the universe?"

The Library, actually, chuckled. "Well, you see, I am a little bit obsessed with knowledge. I always have been. I wanted to know everything and how it worked, and why magic did A, B, and C, and how I could therefore make magic do D, E, and F. I wanted to know where everything came from, where everything was going, where there were potential hiccups along the way. Absolutely everything appealed to me. And I have to admit, I was the youngest out of all of us. Maybe that boosted my curiosity, trying to keep up with everyone else. But when the universe began, and we sprung into being the equivalent of a split second later, we were a family who sought out the meaning of the universe. And we followed as everything was created. We fell in love with some of the species and their development."

For a moment, stars passed through the Shadow in front of Quinn, like the rush of a universe passing them by. "Oh, Quinn, you don't even understand."

And suddenly, it was like a movie playing into Quinn's mind. She could see it, one of the most beautiful sunrises she'd ever seen, from a mountainous region, with purples and blues and yellows just stretching across the horizon as two suns rose one after the other. There was water and waves and mountains. And down below in the valley of the vision were, well, people. Not humanoid. They looked very similar to centaurs, except they had six legs. And then the vision was gone.

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But the sense of majesty and wonder and the beauty of creation, that lingered in Quinn's mind. It blew her away. She wanted to see more.

"No, I'm not here," the Library said. "'To give you a visual tour of the entire universe. You have doors you can open to reach those places. You know that, right?'

"Yeah," Quinn said, the wonder still lingering so close to her skin she got goosebumps. "'So tell me, how did you become the Library?"

There were several seconds of silence, and then the Library sighed. "Yep, that's a good question. So let me start..."

"At the very beginning?" Quinn asked.

"Eh, give or take several thousand millennia." The Library laughed softly before continuing. "Well, you see, it took a long time for us to realize that the chaotic elements of creation magic were actually more dangerous than they were helpful. That they needed more power, and that with every creation, the spark of chaos began to burn out. Naturally, at the start, there was so much power, so much magic, that we didn't notice."

"Didn't notice what?" Quinn asked.

"We didn't notice that slowly the spark was starting to regurgitate, I guess, or starting to draw power back into itself because of how much it was outputting. It didn't regenerate fast enough naturally. Not at the rate it was expending energy to create worlds and solar systems and the rest. We were all too giddy being mostly new in life and figuring out all of our own idiosyncrasies and the other species that existed, how we could build things and aid things and have fun. To notice that the spark was starting to, well, devour anything in its path that could help give it extra power so that it could create bigger and better things. But in order to do so..." The Library paused.

"You mean it kind of like ate planets in its way, stuff like that?" Quinn asked, wondering just how that was possible.

"Exactly like that. And in doing so, it devoured everything on those planets, all life, including any species it had created. Now it wasn't doing this every five seconds or anything and it took us maybe a millennia to notice and by then we'd lost maybe a dozen civilizations completely. So we had to convene an emergency council."

"Is that kind of like the beginnings of the council that Milaro’s on?" Quinn butted in.

"Precisely," the Library said, smiling into Quinn's senses again. "Yes, almost exactly. And we convened and we decided that in order to temper the magic that was loose in the universe, we needed to remove the dangerous element from it because it devoured everything, Quinn, everything in its wake. It didn't care, it didn't discriminate, it didn't pick a special being or a special species. If we'd have gotten in the way, we'd have been dead too. In fact, it got several of our cousins, much younger, much more reckless and it just gobbled them up and all their power, lending more to its own gathering momentum. We had to do something and this is what we decided on." The Library gestured to itself and all around them. "I volunteered because water is my main element, it's what I'm best at, and the magic, while not water, mana is very, very similar. It's liquid, and its viscosity is something I innately understand. So, I set up myself as a filtration depot, so to speak. I mean, you've seen the size of it. I can expand it anytime I want. As long as I have power incoming."

"And that was just the start." Quinn asked, "What about the Library? You're just telling me how you became a filtration station."

"Just let me get there. It's taken millennia for this to happen," the Library sounded ever so slightly impatient. “I can’t quite convey the scope in five minutes.”

Aradie cooed. And even though Quinn couldn't see facial features, she was pretty sure the Library just squinted at Aradie.

"You know, your owl can sometimes be very intrusive," the Library said.

Quinn laughed. "You don't say. She's always in my head."

Aradie hunched her shoulders up and looked away from Quinn. "Now there's no need to be offended. I just want to know what the Library is about to tell me."

"So, the filtration system was in place. It helped immediately. At least it did when we could take on the chaotic elements that were causing the power to feed on itself, and manage to calm down the initial spark. The universe was pretty much complete by then. I mean, this is eons before Earth and many other planets were created. But we did it. It stopped seeking out the excess energy and allowed the filtered energy to be gathered in one spot and to go out and lay lines and lay pools from there to the entire universe. Thus the spark could create without feeding off the negative until eventually it just became the magic within the universe, as long as the chaotic element was tempered by the filtration." The Library paused thoughtfully before continuing. "Then we realized people needed ways to harness all of the different affinities there were. Back then there were only several hundred. Maybe, I think we started with 812."

"812? That still sounds like a lot," Quinn said.

"Well, I mean, it is, but not compared to 1722."

Quinn laughed. "You make a very valid point.

"In order to help people harness magic, we needed to create magical tomes - a way for them to access information and knowledge safely because we couldn't afford having people lose control and cause chaotic elements to devour them. In order to create magical tomes, we needed to set up a system that wouldn't allow for everybody to simply access it all the time and create as many magical tomes as they wanted. Because that, that was going to be food for disaster and over expenditure again. We couldn't afford to have it unregulated at all. But we could make it so that everybody had access to that knowledge. So that's what I did. I volunteered to shift into a magical Library. And I did. And now I am a massive Library. And voila."

Quinn narrowed her eyes. "Yeah, but that's not everything. You don't just Library and voila. You would have needed different powers to help, right? Because you don't have spatial manipulation yourself, or you didn't back then right?"

"Well, every dragon has at least a bit of spatial manipulation. We can shift our corporeal forms around quite a lot. But yes, you're correct. My siblings assisted me and poured copious amounts of energy into me in order to create the Library, to make it into what we needed. We started with like 50 tomes. And it just grew. We had several people help us along the way. And it just continued to expand. Then we divided the sections into new branches. We arranged new deadlines, new facilities. And my very, very own pocket dimension. It was the only way we could make the Library accessible to everyone from everywhere. When they so desired. We weren't trying to gatekeep the magic. We were just trying to make sure that the chaotic elements didn't get out and start devouring anything and everything in the universe." The Library paused and sounded a little melancholy when it continued. "We'd already lost so much to chaotic magic running rampant."

"Well, I mean, sounds really noble and all," Quinn said. "But obviously, not everybody agreed."

The Library sighed. "You're correct. One of my brethren, my siblings. He didn't. He wasn't overly fond of the concept. Even if he helped, it was begrudgingly. He believed that those who were strong enough would come out the other side unscathed. Even though, to that time, not even one planet survived the reappropriation of power. Not even one individual."

Quinn waited a few seconds before trying to approach the question delicately. "Do you think he could have anything to do with..."

"To do with..." The shoulders on the Library's shadow slumped and they shrugged. "I'm really not sure. Or at least, I don't want to believe it. I've tried to convince myself that that's not the case. But something is lurking behind this whole conspiracy, Quinn. And even I have to admit, my brother is probably the prime suspect."