“I think that Vanessa girl stares at you weirdly.”

“Does she? I’ve never noticed.”

“You haven’t?! She glares at you from the corner of her eye, and then every time you turn your head or snort, she looks away.”

“Oh, I see…I snort?”

“…yes? It’s a tad concerning. It’s as though your nose is blocked all the time.”

“Snorting or snoring?”

“Snorting. Being in the same class as you teaches everyone the difference.”

Iris took the harsh dose of reality with a bite of her sandwich: Evalyn’s favourite concoction when armed with a hodgepodge of past dinners, a loaf of bread, and an unfounded desire to spend less money at the school canteen.

Not that Iris was complaining; it was just that Elliot’s touch in the food faded after three days, and the roast had been in the fridge for four.

“Plenty of people stare at me,” Iris said. “What’s the difference with…uh….”

“Vanessa.”

“Vanessa, right.”

“There isn’t really a difference,” Crestana shrugged as she reclined in the windowsill’s triangle, one foot dangling out of Tyrren Court’s attic. “But she was one of the girls that loitered around my desk during lunch. You know, the clique-y type.”

“Hm…,” Iris pondered, pretending she knew what the word ‘clique’ meant as she spun a dusty globe. The small corner in Tyrren Court’s attic, sandwiched between two mediocre portraits draped in once-white cloth, had become their refuge—a small sanctuary they retreated to whenever they weren’t studying or sparring.

“I think,” Crestana said, her mechanical shutters closing over her mask’s eyeholes as a breeze found its way to them. “I think she’s jealous we always run off when the bell rings. Maybe she thinks you stole me from their group.”

Iris swallowed her last bite and immediately took another as she hopped onto an abandoned table that creaked for mercy. “I thought they didn’t care about you. That’s what you said.”

“There’s a difference between not caring about me and wanting me in their group for social status. Even if they're yet to realise, they don't want me, they want a Mallorine. For what reason they want that sullied name, I can't say.”

Iris nodded. Maybe a clique was like a political organisation, those she could understand, especially the ones with guns. Excala Academy taught them young. She scoffed.

“Sounds like I scored big then,” Iris said. “Friends in high places, that’s something Dad tells me to treasure.”

Crestana sighed, turning her body inwards to face her. “Your father is a very nice man, yet he says some very disingenuous things. I hope he didn’t marry your mother for status.”

“No,” Iris said, kicking dust, “he made a lot of enemies by doing that, at least I think.”

Crestana chuckled, but then it faded. She sighed again, pushing herself off the windowsill and towards Iris. She watched as Crestana passed through shadow, her bare arms and legs disappearing into the absences of light, melting much easier than before the incident.

Crestana could dip into shadows if she wanted to. So far, only part of her body at a time. The Aetherologist had pinned it on the Spirit of Spirits passing through her, reverting part of her body to a state even modern Beaks couldn’t replicate.

But her hair still wafted in the wind, and even now, there were scatterings of her clipped nails if Iris looked hard enough.

“I think I get it, Iris, why you don’t take people seriously. I mean, how can I? They’re bickering about who likes who and who said this about that while I…you know, I know how dire things can really get.”

Iris smiled faintly, bending her knees and sitting down on the table. She’d gotten used to skirts eventually, even though they never quite seemed to move how she wanted them to.

“Another thing my dad told me—”

“Again?”

“Promise!” Iris pleaded, clapping her hands together. “I promise this is important!”

Crestana crossed her arms, side-eyeing Iris out of an understandable fatigue for Elliot’s quotes, no matter how wise. “Fine,” she said, and Iris grinned, thankful she sat squarely in Crestana’s soft spot.

“Once, we were on one of those big seaplanes, flying from Excala to Fadaak.”

“Oh yes, I’ve been on one of those before.”

“Have you been to the ballroom?”

Crestana thought for a moment. “Yes, but I was very young. I don’t remember anything about it.”

“Well, being on that ballroom floor is like being one of your friends in class. All you really know is that there’s dancing and drinks and pretty people you can’t take your eyes off.”

“Certainly the third one,” Crestana said. “If I need to listen to another lovesick—”

“But those people don’t see the kitchen where the food and drink comes from, or the people in the ceiling controlling the lights, or…the people who fly the plane and run the engines keeping it going.”

Crestana walked over and sat beside Iris, her slender shoulders rubbing against Iris’s puffy, oversized bomber jacket.

“I guess not. You’re saying…your father is saying that we’re one of the people on the outside?”

Iris nodded. “We can see the world for what it is. We can see what happens behind the curtains…and what makes it almost fall apart, I guess.”

Crestana threw her head back, and the rest of her body followed the movement. “It feels a little exclusive.”

Iris sighed, wishing she could still feel the same.

She’d taken pride in it once, but soon realised why the majority didn’t live in the same realm as her.

It drove one crazy. It made one wish the world was different. It made one realise that there was nothing anyone could do to change it. She’d never experienced that ballroom floor; expulsion from it was permanent, irreversible.

The bell rang, barely reaching them through the attic window, riding the wind that often acted as their moral compass, egging them on to get to class.

They'd recently been arriving late, only realising the time once they looked at the dusty grandfather clock still miraculously in sync with the outside world.

“What do we have next?” Crestana muttered, unmoving.

“Physical education, I think. Why?”

Crestana hauled herself upright and slid off the table. “I feel like skipping,” she said, brushing dust from the seat of her skirt.

Iris raised an eyebrow, hearing something she thought she’d never hear from the unofficial class representative.

Crestana watched herself disappear as the tram passed under a building’s shadow.

Mutant. Ironically, she had never felt so mutated until her body started functioning like a Beak body was supposed to. She couldn’t control it; she’d found herself drowning in shadows on nights with no moon.

Crestana hadn’t slept with a night light in years. Back then it was to keep the monsters at bay, now it was her lighthouse to guide her back when she became one.

Monster. That wasn’t what the Aetherologist had told her. Iris’s one, different to the one that had called her defective. He was nicer, but Crestana could see him for what he was; a scientist, not a doctor, interested in her as a test subject rather than a person.

She looked out of the window and raised her palm to the air, watching the mid-afternoon sun pass through it. She could see the buildings and the pedestrians through it, the sky slowly turning purple against the silhouettes of burned electrical mills, barely standing upright.

Iris stirred, unconsciously protesting Crestana’s movements as she rested her head on Crestana’s shoulder. Crestana paused and relaxed, letting her hand fall into the shadow behind the seat in front, and reminding herself that it was still there.

Iris returned to an unabated slumber, letting the carriage rock her deeper into unconsciousness.

“You’re a handful, you know that?”

Handful. Crestana didn’t feel that way anymore. Her aunt cared for her, so did her aunt’s husband as far as he could manage. But too much worry in and of itself felt alien, like her aunt was overcompensating for what she lost from her parents.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

But at least she didn’t feel like a burden, a handful.

The tram slowed as bright traffic cones and yellow warnings signalled it to turn right for a detour. The tram followed, wheels clattering onto makeshift lines, and Crestana watched where the tumorous roots of an overgrown Spirit tree had burst through the concrete and turned the cobblestone road into rubble. Its branches had jutted into nearby buildings, piercing their faces and leaving them in ruin. The street was unsalvageable, its residents moved elsewhere.

And that was a small one; Crestana dreaded that particular corner in their route not because of the disaster in arm’s reach but because of the one beyond the immediate skyline.

The Spirit trees of the Royal Gardens had felt the brunt of the Spirit of Spirit’s influence, and had moulded together, each one’s growth spurring on the growth of several others. What was once the Royal Gardens was now a gargantuan tree that blotted out the sun from several districts, rising high above Excala’s already modest buildings. Its branches were becoming an ecosystem in itself, one the Council had concluded the city had to live with.

Some saw it as a new frontier of exploration right in their own suburb, Crestana saw it as a monument to her family’s sins for the entire city to see. The city had seen it, and some had decided to take up arms, sparking protests.

Crestana began to recognise the buildings in her periphery and tugged the small rope hanging above her seat. The motion travelled to the front of the tram, where a set of letters glowed reddish orange. ‘Stop’.

“Iris,” Crestana said, nudging Iris’s shoulder. “We’re there.”

Iris’s head barely rose from her shoulder, but she seemed to understand the assignment. There was hair in her mouth she didn’t seem to register, but Crestana wasn’t going to mother her enough to pull it from her face.

She tolerated her friend’s tardiness, it was nothing more than a quirk, and Iris had no need for Crestana to follow her up on it. She’d been showing off to the world just how little she cared for its standards long before Crestana had begun to care.

Crestana couldn’t say she wasn’t at least a little jealous. Perhaps skipping class was a little too much, even for Iris. Or, well, Iris’s mother.

They stepped off the tram and began to walk down the sleepy street, retracing the steps the tram had rolled past in the pre-rush hour silence. Iris lagged behind a few paces, but both knew where they were going.

A few repeats of heels clacking against pavement later, they came across the dilapidated building, not any less rotten than it had been since last time, and according to Iris’s mother, any less rotten than it had been twelve years ago.

“Do you suppose a passerby seeing two schoolgirls entering this place would call the police?”

“Cops?” Iris asked through a yawn. “It’s the East Excala Library, everyone knows what it is.”

“I certainly didn’t. I only ever went to the Academy’s or the Central library.”

“Then you were missing out, weren’t you?” Iris smiled, taking Crestana by the shoulders and pushing her forward. “Let’s go.”

They skipped up the steps and through the unlocked door, rust burning straight through the hinges. More light trickled in from the holes in the ceiling than the boarded-up windows. But unfazed, they continued walking along the moss-ridden, hollow floorboards until Crestana began to feel that familiar buzz.

It was a buzz that shot through her fingertips before mellowing across her body, a buzz that came with the changing floorboards and repolished glass. The taste of euphoria as nature’s skylights were boarded up with sturdy timber, and small flames in candles and lanterns took over. The little joy as the smell of damp wood morphed into the scent of fir and pine, and timeless furniture from couches to chandeliers appeared where her eyes weren’t looking.

A bottom floor, a grand fireplace, two spiralling staircases that led to an infinite forest of bookshelves.

And a mannequin travelling on a rail. Stuck on a singular spoke confined to a winding divot was a wooden torso, dressed in the appropriate garments, yet still faceless. It travelled down the staircase railings, then glided between the furniture towards them, the whir of its gears rousing nearby readers from their immersion, yet none seemed to bother complaining.

“Here it comes,” Iris muttered. “It’s brought something with it this time.”

A Spacehopper dragon; Excalan public services were almost never complete without one. From the Council Building to the driving test centre, being first class at morphing reality was a lucrative profession.

The Spacehopper hanging from the mannequin’s fingers was a brilliant gold, its snubbed nose dilating with each breath. It took Crestana an extra moment to remember Spirits didn’t breathe.

“Al,” Iris muttered. Just standing in the library itself tended to make one whisper. “Al. Hi. Customers.”

Al stirred in response to Iris’s last word, the entire library softly vibrating as they shook their head from left to right. The small, beady eyes blinked, and they finally registered their surroundings.

“You two again?” they said in such a thick, colloquial twang that Crestana never knew if she was meant to take them seriously. “What’s the time…hey! You two should still be at school! Not that I care, but a public servant has duties.”

“And friends don’t rat each other out?” Iris suggested. “Come on, please?”

Al’s face scrunched up for a moment before they gave in with a sigh. “Fine. As co-director and interior manager of the East Excala Library, I pardon your early leave from school.”

“If only the Academy recognised your word,” Crestana chuckled. “I’d be skipping class more often.”

Al pouted, their small brows crossing as they climbed the mannequin’s fingers. “Skipping sometimes is fine, Ms Mallorine, but don’t make a habit of it.”

Crestana nodded, thankful Al had the courtesy to whisper her family name.

“Go on,” Al encouraged. “We took another intake of homeless today, so I need to check if the pathfinding is affected at all. Ask it.”

Iris looked over at Crestana with eyes that seemed to ask for permission. Crestana agreed, acknowledging it was Iris’s turn at the research that day. They’d spent yesterday afternoon holed up in a nook, researching Beak anatomy and the Spirit of Spirits, or at least the mythology behind it. Today, the topics were….

“Karaxian mountains. Crystal city. Old Spirit Country. Spirit of Destruction.”

The last one was familiar, but the first three weren’t.

“A dream?” Crestana asked as the mannequin bowed and began to lead them into the bookcase labyrinth.

“Yep. Last night. I think….” Iris paused. “I don’t know for sure besides what I saw, but I saw the Spirit of Spirits.”

“Really?” Crestana said, jumping on the morsel of information as they hopped onto the first step, accidentally breaking the sacred atmosphere of silence. “What did you see?” she asked, this time whispering.

“I saw it over a big crystal city,” Iris said. “It looked like the one from the last door I opened, the crystals, that is. It was doing the same thing there as it had over Excala. Then…I killed it.”

“Were you lucid dreaming?”

“No. I watched myself kill it. This big dome of gas went up around the city protecting it,” Iris explained, waving her hands about as demonstration. “Then liquid trapped the Spirit of Spirits, right?”

Mouthed out sound effects for more dramatic effect.

“And then the liquid turned into gas, then the gas started glowing, then it turned into lightning.”

“Lightning?”

“I don’t know either, but that’s what happened.”

“I see…characteristically vague for your dreams.”

Iris grunted in reluctant agreement, but they wouldn’t visit the library every afternoon if her dreams were any clearer.

Crestana had watched Iris research every second day when it was her turn; the pain and disappointment whenever she put down another useless book.

They were both hurting as much as each other. Iris remembered nothing of her past life and wanted to recall it, Crestana remembered nothing of the faces she’d loathed, and she wanted to forget them all. All except one.

There was a photo of her mother in her wallet, the woman who had been strong enough to save her, but not enough to see it through—a present from her aunt for her thirteenth birthday.

Iris was turning thirteen soon. Crestana had come with the end of Winter, Iris when summer began to wane.

It was what Crestana and Iris’s parents liked to believe, but Iris was no longer so convinced of her own birthday, or rather was growing reluctant to acknowledge it as anything more than a number.

Crestana kept those worries to herself, unwilling to ruin any newfound hope Iris had woken up with for the day’s research. Four terms; the recommended number was six at a minimum. Al and their partner in crime—the revered Tony—predicted six or more terms would whittle down the bookshelves to one, any less, and they’d face an exponential increase with each missing term. Crestana’s draw never exceeded a single bookshelf worth of material, if reaching that at all.

Iris would pull several bookshelves at a time, or in the worst cases, nothing at all. That was what asking for the sole term ‘Spirit of Destruction’ had garnered them.

As they followed the mannequin’s lead, the bookshelves around them gently scraped along the floorboards, repositioning from one place to another and never travelling more than a few metres at a time, or at least that was what it looked like.

Crestana had never spotted the same bookshelf twice, losing them the moment they disappeared behind one another. Sometimes, there’d be glimpses of reading corners, Aetherology labs, tinkerer’s workshops, but never for more than a second.

Recently, those small havens of research had been outnumbered by camps. Individuals, families, sometimes even neighbours living with each other between bookshelves, populating the space with whatever they could salvage. The temporary residences in the Great Library were a far cry from the photographs she'd seen of war-torn countries. Considering Spirit trees were often planted in affluent areas, many were middle class, some even higher, waiting out their limbo while insurance claims were filed or a new residence was found elsewhere, permanent or temporary. Children sitting around gas burners waiting for their meal to cook, taken care of but clearly shaken.

“Ma’am,” Al called as they widened a gap between two shelves, revealing a small room bordered by books and partitioned further by cloth on metal stands. There stood a housewife and two children in a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in an ordinary Excalan apartment.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to cut the burner for a moment. The fumes are dangerous.”

The woman apologised, closing the book she was reading and following Al’s orders. The Interior Manager thanked her and closed the gap, restarting the mannequin’s journey.

Around a final corner, they found a space that didn’t run away—two armchairs, a bookshelf behind each, and a quaint lantern with a deep green lampshade.

“Two,” Crestana wondered aloud. “That’s not very many.”

“Well, very little appears when you want to know about old Spirit country,” Al explained, scratching himself. “It’s a vow of silence for the Spirits who still make the pilgrimage. If it’s broken, it becomes the moral obligation for all subservient Spirits to dispose of them and their writing.”

“That’s reassuring,” Iris mumbled as she walked forward, placing her bag at the feet of the left armchair. “How do we know anything, then?”

“Most of these books aren’t published. They were written in the library and have restricted access.”

Iris sat up from her chair as Crestana joined her. “Then why are we allowed to read them?”

“Because Her Majesty said so,” Al explained, the idea twisting Iris’s face as though she’d bitten down on something rotten.

“How come?” Iris asked. “I didn’t know she was so generous.”

“You’d be surprised,” Al chuckled. “I’m sure she’d tell you herself, but keeping any truth hidden from you would do no one any good, especially when the possibilities make many nervous.”

Iris sank back into her chair, an uncharacteristic scowl marring her face.

“She’s buying your trust,” Al reiterated. “That’s how she would say it.”

Iris clearly didn’t want it, the sincerity of her face making Crestana chuckle, but also making her concerned about where such vehement animosity had risen from. It was the Queen, after all. After several hundred years of relative prosperity, no one could think ill of the Queen.

“Well,” Al said as the mannequin turned around, its duty finished, “I have a meeting to attend with a Minister. Poor man wants to lease space in the Great Library as social housing.”

“That sounds awfully tough, sir,” Crestana replied, her shoulders sagging. “I hope people can be allowed to stay.”

“They’re more than welcome for free, but this is a library Ms Mallorine!” Al chimed, holding no contempt for the name it now rightfully deserved. “But who knows? A lot’s changing around here!”

The mannequin and its passenger disappeared into the forest again, and Crestana watched them go, unable to ignore the guilt that she knew no one wanted, let alone expected from her.

Changing, that was certainly one way to put it. She sank into her armchair, taking a deep breath as half her body dipped into shadow. Iris was already reading, quiet and in concentration.

Crestana could at least hope their new routine could last, even when the diligent research was no longer needed, when they could afford to waste time like everyone else their age, and at least pretend their heels were tapping the ballroom floor.