Come Alone

Varin refolded the note and packed it away as rain pattered against the hood of his cloak. It wasn’t the request that bothered him. He considered it a very, very bad day if he had to work alongside anyone else. It was just about everything else about the job. He had to have the barkeep repeat himself when he asked where the letter had come from. Varin had taken jobs just about anywhere in the hold, but this would be the first time that he accepted work from his local library. He squinted his eyes as he looked up past the rain, taking in the sheer immenseness of the building. Large, ominous, and foreboding shapes jumped out at him. Gargoyles lined the edges, all seeming to stare down at him, waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce. If he wasn’t so good at what he did, he would’ve been having second thoughts.

He walked up the steps carefully, minding the small puddles of water that pooled on the marble, and came to a rest at the library’s grand entrance. Large wooden doors that sported the heads of griffins for door knockers. He almost thought to knock before remembering that it was a public library, and just let himself in. Inside, candles lined the walls. Some shorter than others. All of them had hills of wax pooling and drying beneath them in dishes. Since he had first stopped in the city of Duvell he hadn’t seen an inch of sunlight past the grey clouds. Even the massive windows that lined the walls didn’t seem to be much at providing natural lighting. Someone probably had to replace these regularly.

He walked through into the main hall, spying a desk up towards the center. Empty. Gazing around, he saw that it was split up into four levels, and each of them was filled to the brim with books. Bookcases fifteen feet in height were lined up in neat, arranged rows that seemed to go on forever. Varin shuddered. He couldn’t stand the things. Books, that is. Varin was much more liable to stick a knife through one, or use another for kindling, than to actually open one up and read the blasted things.

Peering over the edge of the entrance desk, he saw that there was no one hiding behind. He pulled the note out of his cloak again and read over it. Right date. Right time. He rang the bell that sat on the desk. After a couple minutes he rang it again. With half his chest resting on the desk, his head in his hands, he absentmindedly rang the bell a third time, his carelessness smashing the thing damn near flat. Good fuckin’ lord, he muttered to himself, sliding the broken bell into his cloak. He’d pick up another one at the general store in the morning. For now, maybe they wouldn’t even notice that it was missing.

He decided to go for a stroll through the archives. If the place was empty it would be locked up, which meant that someone was there. Or they just didn’t care all that much about security. Either way Varin wasn’t feeling too keen on leaving prematurely. This had been damn near the end of his second week in the city without any pay, and he was running up quite the tab at the local tavern.

The labyrinth of wood and books all seemed to close in on him. He felt suffocated underneath a sea of ink spattered pages, and there was nary a soul in sight. He sniffed at the air, looking for any traces of life in the library, but he couldn’t pick any specific ones out. Just about the entire place had this stench of lavender that clung to its every crevice, and to call it such hurt Varin. He rather liked lavender, and he thought it such a shame that someone thought it was fit to douse a library in and stuff his nose all up. 

After a while of exploring, he happened upon a single book that popped out to him, it was a rather large tome with the binding cover painted In a sickly gray amalgamation of waves and sea spray. The front of it showed a ship that had been ripped in twain. He felt himself drawn to the book because it was a rather large one compared to its companions. At least 20 inches in length, Varin knew that books of this size usually had to be so in order to fit the illustrations inside of them. It was the pictures that Varin really liked. Pen, pencil, colored, not-colored he loved them all, though woodcuts were his absolute favorite. He loved rubbing the rugged texture of them against the flats of his fingertips. On the rare occasion that Varin did read, it was usually a piece that easily enveloped all of the senses. He hated just looking at words on the page. Symbols that swam more often than not, and put his brain into the complex, tiresome exercise of painting a full picture in his head. He’d rather just let the world do what it was best at, and lay it out for him plainly. The last book he read was an anthology of field guides for navigating the wilderness to the west of the Alps. It was territory he knew well, and his ability to directly reference what he read with what he experienced made it all the easier to put pictures to nothing but words.

His hand reached out for the sailing book.

“Excuse me, unfortunately we will be closing quite shortly. If you’d like to pick that one up I can help you at the front desk, but afterwards you’ll have to be going.”

Varin turned to face the voice. It belonged to a woman. A beautiful woman at that. Her hair was raven black, wrapped up into a tight ponytail that cascaded down a bed of milk-bread skin; soft and white as snow. Her face was lightly peppered in freckles and her eyes were a piercing gray. 

Varin tucked the book into the crook of his elbow to free his hand and grabbed the slip of paper to present. She recognized it within a moment.

“Apologies, should’ve known from the boiled leather and dried blood…aroma.”

Varin sniffed himself, “Hey, I’ve been in town a while now. Pretty sure I’m good and bathed.”

She nodded with a smirk, and nodded her head in a ‘follow me’ motion, returning to the front desk. She dragged a cart alongside with her, and parked it right beside where the bell had been. She noticed its absence immediately. Damn.

With a puzzled look, she glanced towards Varin. “Please, deduct it from my pay. Sometimes I forget to be gentle.”

She noted it on a pad she kept by her ledger. “Understood. So, you’re Blooded then?”

Varin nodded, and immediately threw his attention somewhere else. A crack in the paint of the desk that came halfway up sufficed. He’d seen all manner of reactions to people hearing the term, but he’d yet to find one that he liked. That was accepting. 

“I’d appreciate if you continued showing restraint from this moment on. As you can see there’s a lot of sensitive material around. To lose any of it would be to lose my job.”

Varin nodded. She was nicer than most, “Understood.”

A moment of silence was shared between the two. So Varin continued, “So, what could a library need me for?”

“Right.” She grabbed a set of keys and walked towards the main doors as she spoke. “We’ve come to suspect that some manner of creature has found its way in, and it seems to want to stay.” The doors locked with a satisfying *clunk*. 

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“So? Call a rat-catcher.” Varin returned. Not that he wasn’t willing to help catch a rat. At this point, he’d smack flies dead off of patron’s plates if the barkeep would toss him a coin for it, but he needed more details.

“Tried one. Couldn’t catch so much as a whiff. Had some locals come through looking for anything that it could be, but they couldn’t pin it down either. Exterminator too. Nothing.”

Interesting. “So you think it may be ethereal?”

“That was the first thought. We’ve had a few regular visitors pass on in the last couple of years. To think they’d make the library their haunting grounds wouldn’t be much of a stretch. We had a priest scheduled to come by and purify the land. They’re still scheduled to come by actually. This Sornsday.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it handled then.”

Varin pushed her to go on, she seemed to have a penchant for dragging things out to make for a bigger surprise, but he kind of liked it. Gave things the slightest tang of excitement.

She sifted through some drawers on her side of the desk, and pulled out a vial containing a dark blue liquid.

“But the night before last I found this dripping from a bookshelf.” 

Varin shuddered. Spirits don’t leave residue. They can make their presence physically known, but only in the manner of pushing things around. Pulling curtains open, blowing a cold breeze through a room, that sort of thing. They weren’t able to leave actual remnants of their activities. Only one other thing could. 

“I see.”

“I hope so. I also hope that you recognize why I need this handled tonight.”

He did. Priests were more than happy to come by a domicile and use their own bodies as mediums to usher lingering spirits off into the Great Beyond. Varin knew some who seemed to get a real kick out of it, but if they discovered a damn Wraith on the premises there was only one solution that they bothered with. Scorched earth. Tear the place down, torch every square inch, and water board the ground with enough holy water to hallow a battlefield before the thing tears down the entire fucking city.

“Tonight is a no-go.”

The librarian’s brow furrowed, and she crossed her arms in a way that Varin couldn’t help but notice. He forced his attention to the bell.

“What do you mean, a no-go? Isn’t this your whole job?”

Varin tried to make it ring, and the sound it squeaked out made him wince. “It is, and I do it well. This kind of thing takes preparation. To expect me to come in here and whisk away a wraith like its dirty laundry is ludicrous.”

She snatched the bell and threw it in a drawer. “Anything later than tonight is an impossibility. I can pay for the inconvenience. How much?”

Varin threw up his hands in appeasement, “Ma’am. I wish it was just a matter of money. It’s very much not.”

Her hands slammed against the desk, palms flat across the wood, “What then? Skill, that it? I’ve read tales of Haggards purifying entire towns in the time I’m asking you to do this. Please, I thought it terrible enough to read that Haggards lose their souls when they’re Blooded. Sorry to hear it took your balls too.”

And with that, Varin turned to leave, his head booming. He had neither the patience nor the crayons to explain why everything about this was a plan a donkey wouldn’t come up with. His first step cracked the floor as he made his way to the door. He took extra care not to rip the handle off when he reached for it, lest he have to pay for that too. He pushed on the door to no avail. After the second shove he remembered the bitch had locked it, and, he, head hung in exasperation, turned back to face the librarian.

She was already behind him, her eyes toward the ground. Tear drops clopped the floor as she placed the key into the lock. She opened the door for him, stepping out into the rain. She cleared her throat, trying to free the pain from it. “I’m sorry. I just…these walls. These halls. They’ve been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. Don’t worry about the bell. Or the floor. Soon enough I don’t think I’ll have to either.”

Varin looked at her for a moment. Her tears lost themselves in the rain as she looked past him, back into the library. He hung his head and sighed. “Okay, okay. I can at least take a look at what we’re dealing with. But no promises.”

She looked up at him, stunned and at a loss for words. He stepped past her back into the library. As she began the first in what would’ve been an endless series of apologies, he cut her off, “What phenomena have you noticed, and are they in the morning. At night?”

He wanted to hide a chuckle as she visibly fought the urge to apologize and answered his questions. “Standard haunts. Straight out of the book. And I’ve seen them at all manner of times. But seriously, I—.” 

He waved a hand, “Please, a passion for your work, and honorable work at that, is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s to be respected. My balls, though hurt, will get over their thrashing in time.”

She giggled, and with that the tension left the room. Varin ran her through his usual questionings. Her answers were quick and concise. That, and her previous mention of standard hauntings hinted that she might know a bit more than he first suspected.

Unfortunately, her answers, though accurate, gave him little to work with. The best way to discover how best to retire a wraith was to learn its limitations. Where it operated. What it operated on, and when it did so. From what he had heard so far, this particular one seemed to have none. It did what it wanted, when it wanted. The only limitation that it seemed to have was that its actions were solely linked to the books on the shelves. 

Varin continued, and the interview went on a bit into the night. The air grew light, and more than a few laughs were shared between the two. It took them both a couple tries to remember why they were there to begin with, and got back to the task at hand, but Opal, the young woman’s name, was more than happy to dig through a drawer and crack open a bottle to help pass the time. “Even an ‘okay’ book can be made great with a glass of good scotch.”

Varin found that a lot of things could be made great with good scotch, but he kept things professional. By the end of his questions he was stumped. Nothing jumped out that signified any great dangers or stipulations to note, but this particular wraith wasn’t entirely textbook either.

Varin browsed through the aisles, looking for clues that might have been missed when he saw Opal thumbing the vial of blue liquid. Slapping himself on the forehead, he kindly asked her for it. Plasm wasn’t ever the go to when it came to developing a profile, but without any other real hints he realized he had been ignoring the only real lead he had.

He held it up to a candle along the wall. It was a deep maroon blue, with bright magenta specks visible once you held it up to the light. Unique, but nothing identifying. He popped the cork on the bottle and took a whiff. His eyes immediately shot open.

“What?” Opal asked him, worried.

“This isn’t a wraith.”

He barely had time to cover her body as a bookshelf flew towards them, skipping across the ground like a pebble across water, and what launched it fell into a bellowing roar.