“Welcome, class,” professor Alydia said. “Everyone, please come forward, so I can mark you, and then we will begin.”

“Mark us?” Yushin asked skeptically.

“It’s a simple fifth circle contingency mark,” Wesley scoffed. “Obviously.”

“Partially correct. As Wesley pointed out, it is a contingency spell, set to teleport you out if you become severely wounded,” professor Alydia said. “But I teach three of these classes, each one with roughly ten students. Putting that many marks would deplete even my ether pool.”

She produced a paintbrush from nowhere, and funneled ether into it. The tip began to glow.

“This paintbrush was made by an artificer out of the wood of a moonsoaked rowan, and further imbued with the assistance of spatial, containment, and rune affinities. I can paint the marks on you at a much reduced cost, but they’ll fade after four hours and thirty-seven minutes. Come on, we haven’t got all day.”

One of the second year students approached, and one by one, we shuffled up to have a strange, box-swirl glyph painted on the back of our hand. That made the second symbol painted on me today, though the first had been done in my own blood on my stomach.

Once we finished, professor Alydia clapped.

“You’re free to go. You have until the end of the period to retrieve at least one complete set of arcane armor, missile, and shield. For perfect marks, all of you should have one.”

“Right, so, remember the plan,” Jackson said. “Yushin and Salem will scan the shelves. Emrys and I will play defense against any beings that show up.”

Yushin and Salem both withdrew leather gardening gloves, which should hopefully stop any toxins that we found so close to the entryway of the library, and Yushin muttered a spell under her breath for poison detection. At least, that’s what she claimed – I suspected that she was just using it as cover for her bloodline.

All of us withdrew straps of leather and pressed them to our chests as we muttered the incantation, made the right gestures, and shaped the ether from our pool. The moment we finished, barely-visible arcane armor appeared around me in a faint blue, a hint of green around Salem, a purple shimmer around Yushin, and bright red armor around Jackson.

I stepped through the door to the library – or, rather, the doorframe – first, followed by Salem, then Yushin and Jackson.

“Grab the ones from the table, fast,” I told our last two in a hurried whisper. Jackson launched himself forwards and snatched them up, then we retreated to the reading room to flip through the pages. Other groups were starting to move in as well, and the table was filling with random books between every blink. I turned back to the group.

“What did we get?”

“The Clever Investor’s Guide to the Shield Spell, a Spell Guide for Clever Investors, by the Clever Investor, Elias Cleatus,” Jackson read aloud, then made a face. “If this weren’t a useful book, I’d burn it.”

I glared at him for even suggesting the idea. Yushin, on the other hand, unrolled a scroll in Hua-Long and shook her head.

“No luck. It is a spell for discerning familial relations.”

I raised an eyebrow, and she quickly shook her head, asking me not to press it. I didn’t, so she tucked both the spell guides away in her ring and we moved out to guard the shelves. I took point, watching the shadows with my well beyond human senses, while Jackson watched our flank.

We took several long steps into the shelves, with my hair standing on end as I could feel eyes on me, more eyes than any one creature should possess. There were more eyes in this library than there were in the entire rest of the Citadel of Ether put together, and every single one of those eyes was on me. I couldn’t see them, but I–

I shuddered and shoved the effect out of my mind as we slowly shuffled deeper into the shelves. It was very slow going, since the shelves were about six feet high, and even a few steps held hundreds of books. Most of the books spines were utter gibberish, but we still needed to check every one of them, which meant after five minutes, we’d only really cleared a single shelf.

Just as I was starting to relax, at least as much as I could in the library, a shadow twitched beneath my feet. I stumbled, as it rose up from behind me, and heard Jackson starting to speak, but ignored it.

Icy cold hands pressed to my skin, slipping through my arcane armor as if it wasn’t even there. As they began to sink into my flesh, I felt a bloodline reach out for my strength, trying to drain me dry to enhance its own power.

I ran my fire through the embers to enhance my strength, then punched out at its shadowy body. It was left entirely unharmed, and I grimaced. I released my bloodline to conserve its limited power, and disjointed it, slowing the draining of the strange shadow creature.

I began chanting, but Jackson’s voice rose as he completed his incantation. He raised his hand, and an orb of light the size of my head appeared, like a weirlight, but somehow both brighter and calmer, more intense and more natural. When its light fell upon the shadow-things, they shot backward, moving like a liquid across the floor.

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I conjured a few weirlights and flicked them out at the shadows, sending them scurrying, and Jackson gave a goofy grin.

“Lesser sunlight. Pretty useful spell,” he said in a slightly-too-loud whisper.

We started moving again, and Salem clicked his tongue.

“Gotcha,” he said, pulling a thick book from the shelf. It was in Hydref, which I didn't speak much of, but I was able to make out the word for force.

“What is it?” I asked in hushed tones.

“Sokolov’s Comprehensive Guide ta Firs’ Circle Force Combat Spells,” he said, flipping it open to scan the table of contents. “S’ got all three we need, an’ a couple a’ others, like force hand.”

He said three like tree, and I felt myself grin, then turned my attention back to the library again.

We started moving again, with shadows occasionally dancing at the edge of Jackson’s lesser sunlight spell. Yushin held up a hand for us to pause, though, and we came to a stop. She crept forward, then ran a gloved finger through a fine layer of dust on the ground. It was slightly thicker than the dust that covered the rest of the library, but not enough that I’d taken note of it.

“Contact poison,” she said. “Fairly weak, but if we’d kicked it up while we walked, we would be covered in rashes.”

She used her gloves to slowly and carefully push it to one side and the other, forming a clear walkway for us to file through. We did, and continued slowly deeper.

Salem’s eyes went wide after we’d made it a little bit further, and picked up one more spell guide.

“Brain-rats’re watchin’ us, an’ already trynna’ worm into my brain,” he said. “Someone drive ‘em off, I’ll amplify the fear tah get through their mental shieldin’.”

I raised my hand and began casting the spook animals spell, while Salem muttered his own spell. After a few moments, there was a scampering sound as rats fled from us, and we pressed on.

I was the first to hear the buzzing of the next attack, and I began flicking my hands and chanting a spell, reaching into my pocket and removing a handful of sand.

The shelves began to crawl with scarabs and centipedes, earwigs and worms, horseflies and roaches, and more besides, and I cast the spell, flinging the sand out into the air. It started to multiply and transform, filling the space with glimmering silver-rainbow light and particulates.

The glimmersand spell, against a human opponent, was more of a distraction than a proper attack. The rapidly shifting lights, the grit in their eyes, and abrasive sting on their skin making it hellishly difficult to concentrate on casting a spell or fine manipulation of power.

Against a bunch of bugs?

The bright lights and scouring sands sent them scurrying back into the shelves, and when the spell ended a few seconds later, they were nowhere to be found.

We continued our slow, trudging advancement, working through the shelves one by one. Though the books didn’t come frequently, they did slowly continue to show up, often in Ceyish, but sometimes in other languages. We even grabbed a book that was in a tongue that Salem recognized as the intrinsic language spoken by beings on one of the planes of plants, though he couldn’t read it. Maybe we could trade it?

The attacks kept up as well, as did the traps. Yushin pulled a thin spell guide off the shelf, only to reveal a glowing rune beneath it, which released a tendril of electricity at her. I knocked her out of the way and let it run through my body, burning through a bit of my bloodline to enforce my body against the external power.

It was strange: the library itself seemed to be responding to what we were looking for. Stranger still, we most often encountered it after running into a trap. I was really beginning to wonder if the library itself might be intelligent, and perhaps less malicious than it felt. This felt more like a test, or the trials that I knew some of Shen-Long’s sects made their participants undergo, than it did something trying to kill us full stop.

By the time that one and a half hours had passed, we’d collected four copies of the shield spell, two copies of arcane missile, the one copy of arcane armor from the compendium, plus whatever the unknown book was. A copy of the flamethrower spell had also fallen on top of Jackson’s head once, dislodging a bunch of itching powder, but doing no actual harm.

“Do we turn around?” I asked. “This class is three hours, and we should make it back. We’ve definitely passed, if nothing else.”

“Push on,” Yushin said, shaking her head. “We need to ensure that we get more copies. Simply passing is not satisfactory.”

“A’ get where’re comin’ from,” Salem said. “But nah. We can go back slow-like, just like gettin’ here, an’ pick up some more on the way.”

“I don’t care,” Jackson said with a shrug. “Even without using fire, most of what’s shown up so far hasn’t been too dangerous.”

“Turn back,” I said. “Taking a lightning bolt to the face burnt a lot of what I have left of my bloodline, I’m down to about a third. If I have to do something like that again from pressing forward, I’m not sure I can act as guard on our way back.”

Yushin’s jaw worked for a second, then she nodded, and we turned around. I was able to relax a little bit, with Jackson now effectively working as the front guard, but I still wasn’t able to entirely relax.

The traps were less on our way back, but the books we ran into were slower to show up as well. Most of them weren’t any major problems, but one gave us a lot of trouble.

“Stop,” I hissed, and our group came to a stop. I pointed to the ceiling, where I could faintly see and smell magical runes lining it. They formed a neat, orderly line, completely covering the narrow hall.

“Ah,” Jackson said. “What do we do?”

I scrabbled in my pockets until I found a smooth river stone, then cast the levitation cantrip on it and sent it floating over the line of wards.

When nothing happened, I floated it back and pulled out one of the dried berries I used for the lifeberries spell. I began swirling ether around them, and after a short wait, it turned to the glowing green lifeberry.

I flicked it over, hoping the runes were tuned for life, and sure enough, magic discharged down on it, a rain of four arcane missiles that tore the berry apart.

The runes winked out, and we kept pressing forwards.

By the time we got back to the central wooden table, we’d managed to pick up two more copies of arcane armor and one more arcane missile, and stopped in the reading room. I paused when I recognized someone.

“Anna of Endless Fields!” I said, waving her over. The second year looked up and walked over.

I held up the copy of the book.

“Don’t suppose you’re good with planar languages?” I asked.

“Oh, a bit. This is… that’s… Movement about eight legged builders? Oh! Spider climb. That’s a good one, you can probably trade it for something.”

We glanced at one another.

“We do need another copy of both arcane armor and missile,” I said, “but if any of you really want it, then I won’t stop you.”

We glanced at one another for a moment, then moved to the board and started writing the entry for trade.

“And that’s time,” professor Alydia said, appearing from seemingly nowhere. “Finish writing, then we’ll head out for our debrief.”