In the years since Wuhiao’s passing, it is affirmed that the most ardent focus of his foreign studies concerned the ancient mysticisms of the Duai Doqing. In this land, the people pay homage to a trinity of deities they name the God of the Firmament (God of Heights/God Above), the God of the Realm (God of Earth/God Among), and the God of the Desolate Place (God of Hells/God Below.) The people attest that the formation of the world was shaped by these three deities, and it has been shaped thus continually since the Time Before Time. According to their sacred beliefs, the God of the Firmament is beneficent unto all men, while the God of the Desolate Place is the sower of discord and calamity. But the greatest among them is the God of the Realm, who oversees all things and is to judge the fate of the world. If the primary characteristic of the benevolent deity is benevolence, and the primary characteristic of the malevolent deity is malevolence, so the primary characteristic of the central deity is curiosity; when this god’s appetite for wisdom has been sated, so say the mystics of Duai Doqing, all things shall end.
-Records of Wuhiao, Foreword
Lymna, Myrenthos
It was the golden hour in Lymna. The setting sun painted the Myrenthian hills in hues of ochre and amber, seas of grain swaying in the breeze. The scents of ripe olives and jars of fermenting fish paste hung in the air. Fragrant spices from cooking hearths wafted over the land, and the tree crickets hissed their shrill, late-day song for all to hear.
Cadas walked the weathered path flanked by wildflowers in full bloom and soaked up the cool shade of the ampleum’s marble columns, the ancient ruin still half-intact. “Come along now, Cadas,” said his mother. “There’s supper to be made.”
“You said you would buy me another book,” he grumbled.
“Cadas, we’ve been over this.” Her tone was gentle and patient, just as she always was with Cadas, since he was still so small. “A coin is hard to come by. Calketra has taxed us to the bone to fund the legion’s defense of our land—and with those Qardish encroaching by the day, I’m sure it’s silver well spent.”
“But the last book I got, the title was a lie, and a merchant should really never sell a book with a lie for a title, because it’s not fair. It was called The Complete History of Myrenthian City-States and the Wars of Assimilation, but it didn’t say anything about Lymna. And—”
“Maybe that all happened before Lymna was established,” his mother cut him off. He was still small and full of questions, and she was always very patient with him, but she sometimes interrupted when he spoke at length. He didn’t mind; it seemed like a natural thing to do when someone wanted to say something. Young as he was, he still deferred to his mother’s wisdom as the final answer in most things.
But she was incorrect in this instance.
“Lymna was settled over a thousand years ago,” he corrected her. “It says so on the ampleum’s inscription. But the wars finished more recently, and the book was written only a hundred years ago. So why would the author lie in the title?”
His mother shrugged. “Well, perhaps the author left out the minor city-states. Lymna has always been a small village compared to bigger cities like Calketra or Ithodes.”
“That was my initial thought, too, but he also mentioned the tiny ancient city-state of Thebon, which has historically only had a population half as big as Lymna, and also Lymna is more historically significant because our—”
“Oh, you.” His mother threw back her head and laughed. “Listen to you! Your initial thought. Historically significant. Where did you learn all these grownup phrases?”
“Books,” Cadas replied matter-of-factly. “I was excited to read the last one, The Complete History of Myrenthian City-States and the Wars of Assimilation, but the book was incomplete. It left out more than one city-state, and it also left out a lot of details. It didn’t even talk about any of the plants and animals native to our region, like that other book you got me, On Nature and Its Forms, and if you think about it, all the plants and animals were here in Lymna before humans were, and they’ll probably be here if humans ever abandon Lymna and settle another city-state. That’s a thing people do sometimes, you know—that’s why there are ruins. Did you know that?”
His mother smiled and made a wide-eyed, awestruck impression that she sometimes made when he told her a new fact. “No, I never knew that, Cadas! Your books have made you wise beyond your years. Thank you for telling me that.” She held his hand as they climbed the rocks embedded in the hillside that served as a makeshift staircase leading up to their house. “You know, Cadas, you’re so wise that you should write your own book one day. You can put all the wisdom you’d like into it, so that whoever reads it—they’ll want for nothing more.”
“Really?”
She nodded fervently. “Yes, really. You could make a compendium of all the knowledge a person could ever want to know. The scholars and scribes in Calketra would love that, and they’d make copies and ship them to distant lands to be translated. Qarda. Dridon. Even Xheng Yu Xi. Wouldn’t that be something? A compendium of your very own?”
The idea thrilled Cadas. He imagined a book filled with all the important things a person ought to know, how tall and heavy a tome like that would be. But it would be worth it. “A compendium,” he echoed. Bigger words always felt more important, and he liked the way it felt important in his mouth when he said it. “Compendium...” Cadas got a little jolt of energy then, jumping in place and flailing his hands wildly. “Compendium!”
“All right, Cadas, that’s enough, now,” said his mother. Her voice was still level, but her smile faded. “I told you not to do that, remember? You’re getting too old to be silly like that anymore.”
Cadas used his free hand to grab the one that was flailing most, stilling the impulses in his nerves. His mother lost her patience with him when he got very excited about things. He tried his best not to be very excited about anything in her presence, as she was always nicest to him when his mood was flat. “Yes, mother.” He lingered at the top of the hill as she plodded along with her burlap bag of goods from the city market.
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“Cadas?” She turned around when she noticed his absence. “Come along, Cadas.”
“What if I went back to the book merchant and I could be excited there instead of causing you...” He fumbled for the word. “...instead of causing you distress?”
His mother scoffed. “No, Cadas. You belong at home with me and your siblings. We have supper to make.”
He picked up his pace to catch up with her, but his mind was abuzz with new questions now. “What does belong mean? I belong at home with you and my siblings?”
“Belong means you ought to be there more than anywhere else,” she explained, motherly patience in her voice again. “It means that even if you become a great scholar one day and study with the great philosophers in Calketra in the Temple of the Moon, you must come home when you’re finished. Because home is where you belong.”
“And what if I didn’t come home?”
She turned to look at him, furrowed her brow at that question. “Don’t say a thing like that, Cadas. You must always, always come home. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“If you left home and never came back, I’d be full of grief for the rest of my life. You understand that, don’t you? You’re my baby boy.”
He picked wildflowers as they walked, holding them up close to his eyes to study their colorful parts. “Even when I cause you distress?”
“Even when you cause me distress, Cadas,” she chuckled. “Even when I get very angry with you, like when I get very angry with Ikraos sometimes? It’s the same for all my children. I could never get so angry with you that you wouldn’t belong at home with me. And if you ever left, I’d count every day waiting for you to come back home. I hope you know that.”
When they reached the squat cube made of mudbrick and wood, the thatched roof gilded in the setting sunlight, Cadas said, “I would always come back.”
***
The Moth-Eaten Library
Cadas Lars awoke with a mouthful of sand.
The sun beat down on him. It was white-hot and blinded him at first, but his eyes adjusted. A crab scuttled by his head and pinched him on the ear, and then he knew to spit out the sand and swat the crab away, which kept on scuttling. Lukewarm water lapped at his legs, his feet half-buried in wet sand.
Cadas pushed himself up off the ground and took in his surroundings. He was on a seashore—one he didn’t recognize. This was not Sang Lamdak. Nor Gikuma. Nor even Hyonjik. There was no port, no docks, no people milling about, nor any anchored ships. A single plank of waterlogged wood washed up with the tide, bobbing back out a bit to sea and washing ashore again lazily.
The captain, he thought. Those men. What happened to them? Images of his perilous voyage resurfaced in his mind, bobbing to the surface like driftwood, only to recede with the tide of his forgetfulness. He felt the memory slipping away from him—taken from him, almost. What really happened to them? He remembered a violent storm... or had that only been a dream?
Whatever happened, he hoped they made it to their destination safely. He was just grateful to be alive.
Cadas leaped to his feet. He turned away from the sea toward the island where he’d come to rest. The sun was high in the sky over a spire at the top of a great hill. He could see it from here.
Cadas hiked and hiked against all terrain, against his own sandy thirst, against the bruises that decorated his body like cheaply bought Xhengyon tattoos. He scaled the face of a cliff with the assistance of a narrow path carved into the side of it, wide enough for him and him alone to walk. All of his supplies were lost to the ocean. All his writing materials, all of his food.
None of that mattered to him now. None of that could spoil his swelling joy.
The sun passed its zenith just as he reached the high point of the island. He could see ocean in all directions, and on the island below, wooded areas, fruit trees. He heard the calls of exotic birds. Something buzzed nearby that made him giddy to investigate. But first, he would have to pay a visit to the destination that had called out to him from across the sea.
The Moth-Eaten Library stood solemnly before him.
He grasped an old iron ring on the ancient door. He swung it three times against an unfamiliar material, very old wood or strangely pliable stone. Then he took a moment to wonder why he would knock if he was the only person on the island, reasoning that he’d just been conditioned for so long to do it as a facet of his manners, and then he tried to pull the door open, but it would not budge. He pushed and had no better luck. He brushed the stringy blond hair out of his face, still damp from sweat and the sea.
There came a voice.
“Cadas Lars,” it said quietly.
He whipped around. Hiricho had promised him that the island was uninhabited, part of the allure for Cadas, a place to be alone with books. But the voice he’d just heard sounded like it was very close. He searched and searched, behind him, back toward the path he’d climbed, in the bushes and behind nearby trees. The source eluded him.
“I am glad you are here,” the voice continued. It was speaking in Xhengyon. “You are indeed worthy to look upon the tomes in this place. I have watched you since you first picked up a quill in your native Myrenthos. You have a passion for information that most of your contemporaries could never hope to rival.”
“Who’s there?” Cadas asked in Xhengyon to match.
“This world is as a molting bug,” the voice said, now in Qardish. That analogy piqued his attention—still, Cadas could swear that somebody was right behind him, just over his shoulder, but when he looked, there was no one. “In its present shell, this world cannot hope to live. It is stuck. It has been stuck for so long. A new world must be born, bigger, better, stronger. This is impossible without some measures of pain and patience. You understand that, do you not?”
“Who are you?” Cadas replied in Qardsih.
“You have many questions, child, but you know nothing of My patience,” came the Myrenthian reply. “The time of the old world has passed away. The time of the new world is soon to come. Now the mother cries out in the agony of childbirth. Now the bug’s body fractures and is born anew.”
“What do you mean?” Cadas finally answered in Myrenthian. “What mother? What bug?”
“In good time, My child. Know this: you are welcome in this place. I watch at all times. I am always near.”
The doors of the Moth-Eaten Library swung slowly open of their own accord. It was just as Hiricho had said. Clouds of moths poured forth from the building’s interior, shading him as they fluttered out in dazzling spirals across the island baked in midday sun.
Cadas breathed deep the scent of ancient tomes, of knowledge waiting to be rediscovered. The doors groaned shut behind him, but he could still see by shafts of dusty golden sun cascading in through open windows and skylights. He could tell by looking that there were too many books to read in one lifetime. That wouldn’t stop him from trying.
“Finally,” he sighed, and he smiled.