Albert stepped forward and bowed his head slightly to the Archivist.
“Ms. Wozniak, a pleasure as always,” he said, adopting a tone Aaron suspected he thought was charming but only managed to come across as sleazy.
I can see why he’s got a little crush going for this archivist lady, though, Aaron thought.
The Archivist smiled back at Albert. “I’ve told you, Mr. Lang, you don’t have to be so formal. You can call me Katrina or Kat, whichever you prefer. That goes for you, too, Mr. Abrams, and I must say I was excited to hear you needed the archives so soon after joining us.”
The Archivist, Katrina Wozniak, was a bit under five and a half feet tall, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a warm olive complexion. While she was a pretty woman with an ageless quality to her features, it was her sense of style that truly made her stand out.
Back in California, Aaron had known quite a few people who adopted ‘50s fashion and aesthetics, but he associated the Rockabilly and Pin-Up types with a more working class, greaser kind of style. Katrina’s style was both more formal and homier.
She looks like a guest star on I Love Lucy, he thought.
Wearing a canary yellow shirtwaist dress patterned with bright little birds, a deep blue cropped cardigan, and winged glasses that matched her sweater, Katrina looked more like a sultry housewife than Rosie the Riveter or a woman draped across the hood of a Ford Thunderbird.
“Come in, come in,” she beckoned, stepping back from the doorway. She had a kind of smoky rasp to her voice that was similar to Kiara’s, though a good deal softer. “Let’s start with a quick tour!”
Aaron’s first impression was that the archive was more like a library than a storage facility. His next impression was that it was fancy as hell.
A wooden balustrade, reaching nearly chest height, sectioned off the area around the door into a comfortable lounge, filled with leather couches and armchairs. Counters abutted the balustrade on the sides, but the end opened into a central hall fifty or so feet wide and perhaps twice as long.
The floor was handsome parquet tiling and the ceiling was composed of domed sections, each ten to fifteen feet across. Small chandeliers hung in each of the domes, casting a warm light down into the hall and illuminating the designs etched into the curves of the roof panels.
A carpeted lane ran down the middle of the hall, flanked on either side by sturdy tables with low-backed chairs. Islands of Carrel desks with low partitions and their own table lamps separated the space between the larger tables and the outer walls. Those walls were made up of bookshelves, with framed glass covers protecting smaller sections.
There were breaks between the bookshelves at regular intervals, where large slant-topped bureau desks were set against the walls between them. Every bit of furniture in the archive was sturdy wood construction, ornately carved and gleaming in the soft overhead lights.
“Wow,” Aaron said.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Katrina said. “Please follow me.”
Katrina crossed the lounge, passing through a cunningly concealed swinging gate in the wood balustrade wall into the central hall.
“This is the main chamber of the archive,” she explained. “Normally, there would be a few archivists and around a dozen of our regulars doing their own research. We don’t usually open the doors until ten, so you’re beating the rush.”
As Katrina walked them around the main chamber, she showed them how it was organized. Primarily housing reference materials — such as surveys, treatises, and meta-analyses — it was the starting point for many drakus conducting studies on a variety of topics. Those topics were varied, but the bulk of the material in the archive covered different styles of magic, history (both hidden and mundane), and unusual phenomena of the world, like bestiaries and almanacs on magical flora.
Aaron was delighted to be shown that the bureau desks standing against the walls between shelving units weren’t just useful for quickly looking something up in a book without needing to take it back to a table or desk; they also hid doors to other small wings of the archive containing materials with a more specific, detailed focus. In total, there were four additional wings that branched out of the main chamber — two on each side — and each of those contained their own collections as well as small rooms for research or meetings.
“And, of course, we have more exclusive materials, as well,” Katrina said when they reached the bookshelves that covered the entire rear wall.
The Archivist stopped in front of one of the broad bookshelves. She produced three smooth round rocks from somewhere in her dress. They were somewhat similar to the one Aaron had for his apartment building, only hers were made of rarer stones than his simple granite key, each polished to a lustrous shine. One was a rich, honey-like yellow, another dark green, and the last a black so clear Aaron was pretty sure it was obsidian.
She held the stones in one hand and performed a sharp, complicated series of gestures with the other. When she finished, a section of the bookshelf in front of her slid backwards into the wall, then swung open away from them, revealing another chamber beyond the first.
Just as wide but not nearly as deep, the tables within were smaller and round and there were no rows of cubicle desks along the sides. The shelves along the walls were broken only once, in the middle, rather than twice, and the door in each was obvious instead of concealed and blocked by a bureau desk. The books on the shelves were also more diverse in size than the main chamber and many looked a great deal older.
Aaron’s eyes drifted around the library. It was a gorgeous room, but it wasn’t particularly different from the larger chamber behind them. The contents of the books probably played a big role in why this section was more exclusive, as Katrina had put it, but it still seemed relatively mundane.
“I’ll be honest: this is a really cool little library, but I was sorta expecting it to be a bit more… more… if that makes sense,” Aaron observed.
“Oh it is,” Katrina replied with a gummy smile. “Take a moment to really experience the room itself, not just what your eyes are telling you.”
Aaron’s eyes swept the room again and he tried to focus on what his other senses were supposed to be telling him.
Is it supposed to be a sixth sense kind of thing?, he wondered. Or maybe there’s a feeling or a smell? It all looks and feels the same to me.
Except there was something else, something harder to notice and even more difficult to define. The room had a quality — an impermanence or flexibility, maybe — that made it almost uncomfortable to be in, as if it were somehow not quite real.
That… is that magic I’m feeling? Aaron wondered, looking around the room slowly and trying to keep himself open to the sensation.
Katrina’s smile widened and she nodded encouragingly. “I think you’re getting some idea of just how remarkable our little archive here is, especially when you consider its relative youth compared to some of the others the Drakon have back in the Old World.”
“So what’s through the doors?” he asked.
“Those are the Society archives,” Katrina answered, then pointed to each in turn from left to right. “Tome, Scale, and Spear, respectively. Only members of the appropriate Society — and those they grant access — may utilize the materials within.”
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“Why separate them like that?”
“Membership in a Society isn’t just a matter of skill or preference, it requires a degree of dedication to the Drakon and our fellow drakus,” Katrina said. “If we didn’t keep a tight rein over some of these materials, drakus with little to no interest in the well-being of the community would take advantage to develop their own power and the rest of us be damned.”
“I’m guessing you mean that in a literal sense,” Aaron said. “Not just self-improvement or study.”
“The Emergence helps us awaken our potential, letting us influence aether even if we weren’t magically-inclined before it. It grants us the benefits of strength and endurance beyond what humans are capable of, but it’s not equally effective for all drakus.”
Katrina retrieved a book from a shelf near the entrance and set it on a table. Aaron looked and saw that the title, written in gleaming golden letters, was Essentia Draconum: the First Hoard.
“This book contains a… well, I won’t say decent, but a foundational study of the topic. In summary: each drakus contains the essence of a dragon, either inherited from a previous drakus or newly-forged in their own being. In general, the greater the legacy of a drakus’s essence, the greater the benefits they’ll see when they complete the Emergence. More often than not, they will also have an easier time growing in power, at least at the early stages.”
“So that book is like a guide on how to power up your dragon-ness? Then why isn’t it in one of the more restricted sections?”
Katrina laughed quietly. “This book? No, it’s more like a primer on the ideas about our power. To be honest, as useful as some of the ideas in it are for codifying things, it’s mostly a book filled with something akin to scientific racism. The main thrust of their research was to find evidence that drakus from western and northern Europe tended to have a stronger legacy than their contemporaries.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Aaron exploded. “We don’t just have fantasy racism like ‘all goblins are mindlessly evil,’ but boring old normal racism, too?”
There was some laughter at that, which was not a response Aaron had been expecting. He felt himself getting a little warm under the collar and cold along the spine, a sure sign that he was annoyed. Not angry, though, of course; just annoyed.
Griffin clapped a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “You have to remember that drakus are human before they awaken to their dragon-ness, as you put it, and all the bullshit and baggage doesn’t disappear just because an individual suddenly finds themselves wielding tremendous personal power.”
“This particular research is especially stupid because it ignores certain very pertinent facts,” Katrina added. “While it is well-documented that the essentia draconum tends to gravitate towards individuals who come from powerful or wealthy cultures, it’s also very clear that those cultures can and do change and that this clustering effect is rarely limited to a single geographic region. No, what this book did, in its desperation to manufacture quantitative proof for the prejudice of its authors, was to devise useful metrics to classify the power of the individual.”
“Oh!” Albert exclaimed. “Is that where the lizard wizard wyvern thing came from?”
“Holy crap,” Kiara said, smacking Albert’s arm. “Don’t stay stupid shit in front of the Archivist, Albert. It goes serpent, salamander, zmei, wyvern, dragon.”
“That’s close, Miss Lavigné, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that,” Katrina said, excitement in her voice and a nerdy gleam in her eyes. “When Ralstead and his collaborators were writing Essentia Draconum in the 18th century, they delved fairly deeply into extremely esoteric materials and it led them to, I would argue, their most compelling contribution to our body of lore.”
Katrina carefully opened the old book and gently turned its pages until she found what she was looking for — an intricate graphic with so many tiny branches it could have been a map of a river’s tributaries, the roots of a tree, or even a human lung. Each branch was marked with a small annotation, at least, and many had longer comments scrawled beside them in a cramped but delicate script.
“Now, this was before the term ‘Emergence’ became the norm, so you can see the old form at the top there,” Katrina said, pointing to the broad ‘trunk’ of the chart. “He labeled it the ‘crucible,’ but noted other commonly-used terms found in older records, like chrysalis and so on. Now, if you follow the root downward, you see that serpent and salamander are the next in this scale, but what do you notice after those?”
Aaron examined the diagram and noted that pretty much every label on the map itself was written in what looked like Greek, so he could only assume that the entry for salamander was the one Katrina’s finger was hovering over. After that entry the chart began to spread, splitting into three different paths.
“That’s where it branches out,” he said.
“Precisely!” Katrina said, bouncing in place once and swinging her arms in a tight motion across her body. “You see, for all their insipid prejudice, they had discovered what they thought was an explanation for, as Ralstead put it, ‘the inherent grandeur and superiority of the Anglo-Saxon drakus.’ Their research showed that drakus had a long history of gauging each other’s personal power and there were several different classifications that came up time and again. Although the book acknowledges there could be as few as two and as many as five, Ralstead settled on three separate categorizations.”
She pointed to three large branches splitting off. “The zmei, the wyrm, and the drake. Although there was a good deal of overlap and the records lacked the kind of unity of language or thought necessary to be confident, Ralstead surmised that they were separate outcomes of the Emergence that were roughly correlated with an individual’s power.”
“How does that explain or prove their racism?”
“Poorly, only they were too blind to see it,” Katrina answered, delighted. “In the decades after Ralstead’s death in 1709, the Drakon reclaimed a number of texts and artifacts from temples that had been abandoned for centuries. Although many of them were damaged and didn’t yield much, it did clarify what Ralstead had stumbled on — that drakus don’t all develop in the same way or at the same rate.”
She trailed her finger over the various branches. “The zmei weren’t ‘Slavs, Bulgars, and Huns, innately diminished in both mind and vigour’ — again, quoting the long-dead bigots — it was, instead, a common classification from one region of the world for an early stage of development, just like wyrm and drake were. We don’t know for sure how the zmei classification develops beyond that stage, but the current research suggests it was a separate path of development and not a third common stage before branching. Now, are you ready for the exciting part?”
Aaron wasn’t sure if that was a rhetorical question or not, but he nodded anyways, just in case. The Archivist was on an enthusiastic roll and he didn’t want to interrupt her.
“With the greater insight we’ve gained from more recent discoveries, we are fairly confident that these paths are relatively static. That is to say, a drakus at the ‘wyrm’ stage of development will grow into a wyvern and one at the ‘drake’ stage into a dragon. What’s really cool, though, is that these categories aren’t about where a person was born, who their parents are, or even where their talents and interests lie; it’s about how they use those talents and, most importantly, how they grow stronger.”
“That is cool,” Aaron said, glancing at his three protectors to see if they were equally confused.
From the looks on their faces, they were trying to keep up with the Archivist and managing about as well as he was. Katrina was enthusiastic and engaging, but she also moved through the material at speed.
“So really, the scale is more like serpent, salamander, zmei track, wyrm track, and drake track, with wyrm and drake leading to wyvern and dragon and zmei to something unknown,” Katrina said, putting her hands on her hips proudly. “One of the big projects right now is trying to figure out more details about how all that works because, well, having a better classification system doesn’t really help without the context or practicum attached to it.”
Katrina took a deep breath and blew it out through puffed cheeks. “Anyways, you came to the archive looking for something specific and I’ve led us off on a bit of a tangent. Can you tell me more about what you’re looking for?”
“I’m afraid that’ll have to wait a few minutes, Kat,” Barrett said, stepping through the door from the main chamber with Alice in tow. “I need to speak with Aaron and his security detail.”
“Of course, Cordus Freeman,” Katrina said amiably, picking up Essentia Draconum from the table. “The other archivists should be arriving shortly, I’ll make sure everything’s in order for the morning so I can help Mr. Abrams with whatever research he might need when your meeting is finished.”
“Thank you, Kat,” Barrett said, then turned to Aaron. “Let’s go talk in my study.”