Ragave the Beast stalked the tunnels and corridors of the Library. His black bristles stood up on the back of his thick mane and his nose twitched and sniffed, searching for prey in the dark. He grunted with cold foul breath through thin white tusks and moved along, his great jagged claws clicking quietly on the ground.

There was no one there, not even Reese the pitiful imp. Most living things had long ago moved away from Ragave’s domain. He made it clear that he ruled these corridors of the Library and any other monsters or spells that wished to live there would have to go through him first. Many had tried but so far none had succeeded. For Ragave was ancient and powerful and though he looked like a terrifying monster he was not stupid. For he had been a human once, a long time ago.

He stalked through his halls. He passed the stained glass window that looked out onto the raging sea. He passed the corridor of mirrors, ignoring the terrifying reflection of himself that tried to eat him. He passed the Fountain of Amizan with its four faces crying into it. It had been growing colder in the room with the fountain and somehow... more silent. The fountain had never made noise but it seemed to make even less noise now. He sniffed it and grunted. The fountain had left him alone and it wasn’t edible so he would leave it alone. He stalked off, back to his own quarters.

He’d found the rooms of some noble family inexplicably down here among the dark corridors and twisted spells and claimed them for his own. He locked the door and carried the key with him around his neck, the only key. So he was astonished and angry to find the door unlocked and open, just slightly. Enough for an imp to sneak through.

He charged in and flung open the door, filled with rage at his privacy being invaded for sure enough there was Reese sitting on the dresser reading through his letters, and more importantly, her letters. Reese spun around and looked up at him with his twisted face.

“Beast!” he squeaked in terror. “I didn’t- I wouldn’t- I can’t read.”

Ragave did not believe him and lunged across the room, his huge jagged claws closing around the tiny imp. He had let Reese be the whole time he’d been down here as he felt sorry for him, their situations weren’t so different. But he wouldn’t be letting him be any longer. With a squeak from Reese Ragave tore the tiny imp in half. Spraying black blood across the dresser and the letters.

Horrified he tossed Reese’s body out the door and slammed it shut. He’d known the imp could squeeze into the keyhole and open it but he’d trusted him not to. He shouldn’t have trusted him.

Gingerly, with fingers far too cumbersome for such work he picked up the letters and sorted through them. There were the letters he’d written to her, his love, and the letters she’d written back to him. All that he had left of her. He’d been a prince once, before a witch had cursed him to turn into this monster, this thing. He’d fled then, before his wedding could begin, before she could see him like this. He’d come to the Library looking for a cure but they’d had nothing to offer him. Nothing but their own stares and hatred, so he’d fled again and claimed these lower floors for his own. Cultivating an image of the ferocious savage beast of the Library. A monster that was not to be trifled with. He couldn’t have Reese upsetting that image.

He sorted through the letters and read them as he did. Each one bringing up memories too painful to bear. The blood drops were small and the letters were all still legible but it still pained him to see those letters marred. He shouldn’t have killed Reese, he should have taken him outside and killed him there. Still, the thought of the imp’s disgusting hands touching these letters filled him with rage. He grunted in anger and had to resist the urge to break something, he had this room filled with all the fineries and wealth he had managed to find in the Library and it was his home, his reminder of what he truly was. He breathed slowly out and went to the window, looking out at the storm tossed sea.

He calmed himself slowly and then looked down at the letters. He had read those words hundreds of times, many hundreds of times. He reached the letter with the most droplets of blood, they were drying now, spreading out to stain the paper and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. This was one of his favourite letters, the letter wherein she’d described a flower field she’d found, writing at length about all the colours and sights and smells and how she’d lost herself among it. Tears came to his eyes as he realised just how marred it truly was, this letter would never be the same again, it would always be stained by Reese’s blood, by his anger.

He couldn’t finish reading it. He couldn’t bring himself to-

There was something there. Something at the bottom of the page that hadn’t been there before. It was her writing, it was her hand, writing out in front of him.

‘I miss you,’ it said.

He spun around, leapt to the dresser, shoved the letters into it and slammed it closed. He breathed slowly and deeply, panic rising up inside him. You could never trust anything in the Library. He’d learnt that within days of living down here. Everything was a spell or a trick or some magical device meant to drive you insane. Meant to kill you. And now, marred by imp’s blood even his letters weren’t safe. The thought filled him with rage.

He had always felt safe in his quarters, in his sanctum. No spells or monsters had ever come for him here. But now there was something, something corrupting the very things that meant the most to him. He shuddered and grunted furiously. Outside the storm raged and inside he slowly fought the panic within him. He went to bed, fearful of days to come.

The next day he stalked his corridors again, hunting, searching, desperate for something to take his mind off the letters. He found nothing. So his mind wandered back to them. Those letters and those new words scrawled on the bottom. What if it was true? What if she did miss him? No. He couldn’t think like that, that was just what the Library wanted him to think. But he thought it anyway. Maybe all the twisted magics and spells in the world and in the Library weren’t entirely nefarious. Maybe there was some spell that actually was trying to connect him and her again.

Could he afford to miss a chance like that? He thought about it. He thought about it for a long time.

That night he sat down at his dresser and dusted off the old quill and inkpot that had sat there from the day he arrived. Shuddering he drew out the bloodstained letters and placed the offending letter in front of him. Still it said all that it had originally said, about flowers and sunshine and the warm spring. But right at the bottom scrawled in the margin was ‘I miss you’. Ragave stared at that for a long time. Nothing else appeared so he wrote back underneath it.

It was hard with his huge jagged claws and the small space in the margin but he managed it.

‘Who are you?’ he wrote and then waited for a reply.

He didn’t wait long. ‘Why it’s me of course, silly, Emmantine,’ it wrote back, just the way she would have written. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

There was no space left on that letter so he got a fresh piece of paper and wrote beneath it, hoping that would work. ‘Of course I remember you. I have thought about you every day since I left. But how are you talking to me? How are you writing this?’

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He waited for seconds but it felt like hours, hoping she could still read what he wrote on this new piece of paper. She could.

‘That makes me so happy. I have thought about you so much as well. I thought after you left that I would never see you again. But there was a fountain, I found a fountain in the woods that you could wish in. I wished to see you and when I drank from it I could see you again. There is a fountain on your side too I see. If you drink from it you will be able to see me. Then-’

He slammed the letters back into the dresser and spun away from the desk toward the window, huge angry breaths heaving from his sides. The fountain, it was the fountain doing this to him! Of course it had to be something. A trap, a trick, to get him to drink from the fountain. But it had seemed so real, it had seemed just like her.

He curled up to sleep but he didn’t sleep that night.

But even monsters have to sleep eventually and eventually sleep, he did, and then dreams found him. The Fountain of Amizan did not yet have the power to alter dreams but it didn’t need to. Ragave dreamt of it anyway. In his dreams he was alone and trapped in the Library for the rest of his life, nothing and no one. Just one more monster to haunt these corridors with no purpose and no hope. What did it matter if it was all a trick of the Fountain, all a trick of the Library? What did he have to lose? How much more of this life, if it was a life, could he take?

It still took him a long time to make up his mind, to sort through his dreams and his feelings but eventually he took out the letter again and he read what it had written.

‘Then we can write and talk and be together just like we used to, even though we are far apart.’

She seemed so happy, writing so fast and with so much excitement. So eager to be with him again. He did so want to see her, to watch her playing in that flower field again. It had been so long and his body ached at the thought. He wrote his reply grimly and watched her’s come back, resigned.

‘I’ll do it,” he wrote.

‘Oh thank you my love!’ she replied. ‘I so want to be together again.’

He picked up the letter and an ornate cup he’d found in the rooms when he’d got here. Then he went to the fountain. It was so quiet, quieter than silence somehow, and cold, very cold. The fountain was black as it always was and when he looked into it there was only blackness. Above him the four faces hung from the ceiling, crying their black tears into the fountain.

This did not look like a fountain that granted wishes. This did not look like a fountain that would let him see his love again. But there was hope. A tiny spark of hope in the back of his heart. A spark that meant he had to try.

He looked at the letter again, tears rolling down his cheeks, and dipped the cup into the cold cold fountain. He drank from it and the spark went out.

In the silence the voice of the fountain roared in his head. A voice like a crashing waterfall that demanded to be obeyed. The fountain had used the magic of the Lexigrael to bring the Beast to it. Now it imparted him with the power of Mazzran the Worm. And it imparted him with its instructions.

“You will fetch for me the Stone that was stolen. The Stone of Falling Stars.” the voice roared and Ragave shuddered in awe of its power. He tried to resist of course, but against such a magic force there was no hope.

“What- why- what is the Stone of Falling Stars?”

“It is one of the most powerful magical artifacts to ever exist! It was held in this Library for centuries under the guardianship of the Chimaera Cabal. I corrupted them! I conquered them! I had almost reached the stone when it was stolen by Maegara the Thief! She took it far from the Library and hid it in a chest no living creature can reach. None, save for Mazzran the Worm.”

“Who-?”

“He died in my waters not two months ago and I have taken his great power to give to you. You will tunnel through the stone and earth of the Library and then to the Chest of Maegara where you will fetch the stone and bring it back to me!”

“I- I...”

“Beware though!” the fountain continued, Ragave’s voice barely legible now. “The stone is a weapon and it wishes to be used. It will do whatever it can to make you use it and as we have just learned you are very easy to manipulate.”

Ragave felt he should be angry at that, but he was too cowed, too afraid of that thundering voice, to care right now.

“But you must not use it!” the fountain continued. “For if you do I shall be furious and I shall have no choice but to seek out your little Emmantine with the forces I can bring to bear. She may not write to you but she still lives and I will put a stop to that should you fail! Bring me my stone, Beast! Now go! Go to the Fisher Plain and the Chest of Maegara. Go!” The fountain thundered and Ragave obeyed.

He sunk into the stone floor of the Library, feeling all of the stone and the corridors he knew so well from the other side. He could feel everything, see everything, sense everything. And he could sense how full of magic it was. He knew now that he had never truly conquered his part of the Library. He had only ruled the corporeal creatures, there were so many spells and curses overlapping and fighting around him that he was amazed he had survived at all. And in the middle of it was the fountain, the cold cold fountain, full of cold cold rage.

He swam away, sliding and twisting his way effortlessly through the stone. Sliding the way Mazzran the Worm did. He knew of Mazzran, the legendary guard the Archivists employed above. There were many stories about who he was, what he was. They said his power came from a demon, Qinar, the demon of stone. They said he’d made a deal with it after being trapped beneath a falling avalanche, he’d wished to be free and had wound up bound by the Archivists. Ragave believed it, he just wished he had a demon to grant his wish now. His wish for Emmantine to be safe. He didn’t care what consequences befell him as a result.

But there was no demon to hear his pleas, only the curses and spells of the Library and they cared little for such a corporeal creature. So he left the Library and entered the earth beyond it, tunnelling and swimming toward the wasteland that was the Fisher Plain. The voice was still there in his head, still like thunder but like distant thunder. He was leaving it behind. Soon it was nothing more than a vague feeling, guiding him on, pointing him in the right direction. He could ignore it now, he felt that at this distance the fountain could no longer force him to obey. But he obeyed anyway, he was too afraid not to.

Around him the ground began to change, his power, Mazzran’s power, didn’t work on living things, and so even in the barren lands around the Library he could only move slowly through the ground, full as it was, with worms and grubs and plants. But as he drew closer to the Fisher Plain there were less living things and he moved faster. Less worms and less grubs and only dead rotted plants. He began to fly.

Above him he felt a cave, a small cave, barely more than an overhang, and in it a chest. He rose up out of the dead ground and was stunned to see the broken wasteland around him. Everything was grey and destroyed, nothing but bones and bones and bones as far as he could see. Even the cave was a huge skull or some twisted cancerous growth of some great creature. He felt sick looking at it all so he looked down at the chest. It was open, Maegara clearly hadn’t bothered to close it. In it was a red gemstone, sitting on a black cushion. He picked it up and instantly it was in his head. He was sick of things getting in his head.

“The Beast of the Library eh?” the stone said. It’s voice was much nicer, much calmer than the roar of the fountain, but it was still insidious, and it was still in his head, so he loathed it.

“Why, you have a lot of anger lurking in you,” it continued. “No wonder she was afraid of you, no wonder she wanted you gone.”

“What?” he asked it, standing in shock. “No, she loved me.”

The stone laughed, and that was somehow much worse than all the rage of the fountain. “Oh you poor child. She loved you? How could she love you? You were just as much a monster then as you are now. Worse even. You were a prince that demanded her hand in marriage. What could she do but pretend to love you?”

“No! You’re lying! She-”

“So she went to the only person who could help her. The only person she knew who had any power over you. The witch, and sure enough the witch got rid of you right enough.”

“You don’t know that!” Ragave roared. The sickness he felt was getting worse, he felt like he was about to throw up, and once more tears were stinging his eyes. “She loved me! She-”

“What would you have done if she’d refused you like she wanted to? What did you to do that imp who slighted you? Really it’s all quite pathetic.”

“No! You liar!” Ragave threw the stone at the ground, heedless of the fountain’s warnings. It shattered into dust and its power released into the air. Ragave fell to his knees, sickness filling him, tears racking his body. He didn’t notice the sky turn red at first but he noticed the heat on his back so he turned around. Above him the sky was streaked with falling stars that all crashed into the Fisher Plain burying him and it in fire and ruin.

Many days later, when the fire had cleared the stone reformed in its little chest, ready to wreak more havoc upon the world.