I had long observed my sister's odd actions but now I set out to take more radical steps in my study of her. The first step I had been considering for some time, yet always thought to be too improper. Like some lowborn criminal I would sneak into her room and rummage through her things to see what I might find. I wish to assert here that under no ordinary circumstance would I go through with such an act. It was only due to the truly alien behavior of my closest relative that I even conceived of the act. Whether you take my increasing obsessive curiosity as a sign of some malign paranoia or of the heightened caution of one increasingly aware I will leave to you. I only wish to assert I held no malice in my acts. I was worried – so very worried.
It would be in the early afternoon when my sister were off to school and most of the servants were having their own quiet lunch that I would breach my sister's privacy. With a lie I expressed that I had forgotten something of import for my daily classes and would take a later horse to get to my own lessons. The way was thus clear for my clandestine deed. My sister's room was covered in the warm light of summer, tidy and well-kept by our servants. I rummaged through her things trying to do so both quickly and without leaving a trace of my tampering. My cheeks burned with embarrassment and not a little guilt. It took a while, but hidden under her bed I found what I had been looking for. Her diary. In my hands I held a very mundane leather-bound journal with no obvious sign of its use save for its hiding location. Sitting down next to her window I started to skim through it only to be immediately confounded. A strange and alien language stared back at me. Even the alphabet was unfamiliar and incomprehensible. I could understand nothing. Grabbing my own notebook I transcribed some of the more commonly recurring characters, and then hurriedly kept flipping through the book. While my sister should be well on her way to the academy by now the servants might finish up their lunch at any moment, and I could not summon up the courage to take the book with me, should I be unable to return it. While those strange and esoteric characters were incomprehensible to me, there were a few things I could somewhat understand. Mathematical formulas in familiar notations, sketches that appeared to relate to strange scientific experiments, and various similar writings. I quickly scribbled down some more notes, trying to roughly match my sister's sketches and then left the room after carefully returning her journal to its original hiding spot.
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With the notes I took regarding my sister's notebook I set to once more filter through the vast array of medical history I had collected to find traces of similar cases to hers. With her increasing entrenchment in the upper political crust of our small kingdom I quickly moved from merely medical case history to the political history of our realm and of those realms on the surrounding continent and soon even to the farthest reaches of our world. Soon I thought to see a most disturbing pattern emerge from the most disparate of incidents. A most dreadful discovery beckoned. If it had not been for my earlier research it would have taken me much longer to draw the appropriate conclusions but now I near immediately found traces of what I was looking for. Hints of unknown languages were scattered all across our history and world, strange runic alphabets and odd pictographs with no known linguistic heritage oft believed to be the internal ciphers of shadowy cults or otherwise fictional languages constructed for the amusement of some talented but idle scholar. However I could find only a few examples of such script in the texts I studied with the scarce fragments impossible to match to those alien glyphs I had found in my sister's own handwriting. Any book claiming to contain a thorough discourse of such writing seemed to be a rarity with the subject as its own field far below even a niche interest of most scholars. In particular one such tome, the much maligned Iyakayan was claimed to contain otherworldly rituals and the maddening writings of a priest fallen to heresy and so had suffered censure, becoming a restricted text fit only for the most reputable of anthropologists as an object of study. But these dry and dusty tomes hinting at eerie cults lurking in the shadows and mad writings of an ancient past were not what would terrify me. Rather it was the collation of disparate knowledge from the great vista of the past and its comparison to the present times that would come to shake me to my soul. All the present conditions, the tensions at the border, the economic downturn, the hints at internal strife between the merchant class and nobility and the growing discontent of the lower classes told of a coming catastrophe. While this may seem like an obvious conclusion, it had taken me a great deal of study and internal reflection to piece it all together. I had been reading a dry article on a failed import of grains as a small break from more abstract linguistic studies when I realized it had likely not been an accident as described, but rather sabotage either from the neighboring country or from one of our own trade houses trying to weaken a competitor.
This small revelation in itself would tell me little but from it I could see all other recent incidents with new eyes. It was as if I no longer gazed at a long distant past, divorced and separated from present times but instead a clear and all encompassing plain that stretched out unhindered in all directions, a direct continuance of times I had tough we had all since long left behind us. A war was coming - a great and terrible conflict – I could not tell if it would start as an external invasion from our neighbor or if we would fall into a civil conflict but ultimately it would not matter. The conflict would quickly spread to neighboring countries and perhaps even farther beyond. A great and terrible conflagration set to sweep across the continent. And out of coincidence my sister had placed herself to have her fingertips on every piece that could hope to tilt the outcome whichever way. What absolute cunning, what impossible genius, what terrible foresight. Just as so many other strange eccentrics have done across the history of our world
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I needed to find that tome of dreadful knowledge hinted at by so many outcast scholars and fringe researchers – maligned, of ill repute, many even considered insane – and yet in the throes of my own obsession I found the perspectives they expressed in the few fragmented writings I had access to most understandable.
Needing someone to confide in and with our growing friendship and with the continued efforts my sister made in order to avoid her Miss Carmen seemed like the best – if only – choice I had. I did not tell her everything, not even most of what I had been doing. I simply spoke with her about my recent studies, and when I saw her genuine interest I mentioned several of the books I had been unable to find. It did not take her a moment to bring up the archives within the Royal Academy, mentioning the locked section with restricted texts. Both those tomes so old that careless handling might damage them and those whose contents were controversial enough the royal house saw fit to limit peoples access to them. The text I was searching for was likely to be in both those categories. So far had my obsession gone that I scarcely hesitated when receiving this information, and near immediately decided to obtain the tome one way or the other. While I initially considered simply requesting access to the book – citing my fine lineage and spotless academic record – I quickly discarded the idea. No matter what my scholarly accomplishments or noble blood I remained a first year student, and even if by some miracle I were to be granted access it would be in a most limited fashion, in brief periods and likely under supervision. No, I would have to commit theft. If discovered I would shame both myself, my family and my lineage. My arms trembled at the thought, yet in my heart I could find no doubt. It took me only a few days to both verify that the book truly was in the Academy's possession and to prepare for my crime.
While I worked, my sister kept to her daily routine, seemingly ignorant of the intense looks I’d give her whenever I thought she wasn’t aware of me. She remained a strange and unspoken mystery, down to the smallest bits of her movements. She had formed a pseudo-court of sorts around herself in the form of the student council with everyone of her more prestigious targets up to and including the crown prince a part of it. And while he was ostensibly the chairman there could be little doubt who among them was truly pulling the strings. I could only shudder at the thought and continue on the path I had committed myself to.
The archives may be under lock and key but the Academy held no real expectation that they would be robbed. As far as I could tell from my admittedly inexperienced perspective the security was light. Guards were posted mostly around the Academy perimeter with only a handful of patrols across the institution. The tome would be behind only two locks, the small iron gate separating the restricted section from the main library, and then the individual lock on the specific shelf containing the tome. For the first lock I simply waited for someone else to walk out of the restricted section – a not overly uncommon event – and as soon as their backs were turned walked past them before the iron-barred door could fully close. Inside the archives I located the specific shelf while avoiding the few other visitors. With my heart hammering in my chest I got past the second lock by inserting a small set of pliers I had brought with me and snapping the small metal latch that kept it secure. The sound felt deafening to me but no one came running. It was short work to stuff the book into my backpack, replace it with a similar tome I’d taken from the public parts of the library and then place the lock back into a seemingly untouched position. I then exited the restricted archives – the iron door could always be opened from the inside - and exited the library proper. I made sure to borrow a few books to stuff into my backpack to make it seem less conspicuous. Ultimately it was far easier than I would have thought, though at the time it was enormously anxiety inducing and scary. The theft would at some point be discovered, but it would likely take some time as that part of the restricted area saw little use. Whenever the lost tome was discovered they would have little ability to trace it back to me. That same evening – with an equal measure of shame and pride I cracked the book open. Written in an archaic form of our language, and with quite the dense and complicated content it took me many evenings of study to start deciphering it. It spoke of spaces beyond the boundaries of the mundane world, of strange people and strange languages. Of the Anglaise and Napaneise, of the Kiukakken and of the Aelch. Of concepts and theories I could barely fathom, until finally I had that most dreadful of revelations. An unutterable terror settled within my mind, and scarcely bothering to hide the tome I rushed out of my room.