Of the Master Wuhiao’s magnificent and multifarious travels, these things are known; of the sage’s distant voyages, these anecdotes were written. Master Wuhiao learned of nomads in the rocky wastes of Duai Doqing (Dridon) to the far west, and was told of their ancient forefathers who built obelisks to their trinity of gods. He learned of the females of Mi Rei (Myrenthos) to the northwest who commissioned the construction of a temple dedicated to the moon, and also the esoteric symbols discovered in an ancient cave that shaped their sacred rites. He learned of a library to the east of Yu that was built long before the Unification and the Populist Dynasty—yea, even before the clans of Yu were joined under one king! It was a library long since lost to history, one on an island far at sea, and it was devoured by insects and the passing of years.
-Records of Wuhiao, Foreword
Tsuriuche, Yu Mainland, Xheng Yu Xi
The sky was overcast when Cadas and Hiricho parted ways. There was no omen of rain, just a clean sheet of cloud cover the color of ash. Ever since he was a boy, Cadas liked to imagine on days like these that the sky was an endless abyss the color of the clouds, and that if he jumped too high, or if a bird flew too far from its perch, that anything could be sucked into the empty expanse of gray never to reach the ground again. He thought about this as Hiricho bid him a long farewell.
“Don’t lose this money, all right?” Hiricho said to him. He put the small bag of coins in Cadas’s hand, closing his fingers around the cinched neck. “You won’t be able to buy anything without it. No food. No clothes. No boats. You walk straight east—that’s where the sun rises every morning, opposite of the west where the sun goes down. It’s mostly grasslands and some small towns all the way to the eastern port city of Hyonjik. You keep to the road and the villages and you never wander off into the wilderness. Never. The nokudai will get you otherwise. Hyonjik is where you’re going, all right?” Cadas understood, but didn’t say anything. “Repeat it back to me.”
“All of it?”
“The name, Cadas! The name of the town!”
“Hyonjik.”
“You’ll find someone there with a boat and buy passage to the Moth-Eaten Library. Are you sure you still want to do this? It could be very dangerous. There’s no telling what you’ll find there... or along your journey. Are you sure this is the only way, Cadas?”
Cadas shrugged. “I think so. Do you know a better way?”
Hiricho chuckled. “Then I wish you the best. I’m here following my dream. I don’t see why you shouldn’t follow yours, too.”
“Goodbye,” Cadas said with his best polite bow. He took the satchel full of money and Hiricho’s written instructions and he went to go east, but he realized that the sun was nowhere to be found in the sky.
“Is that all you’re going to say?” Hiricho asked, furrowing his brow. “After all this?”
“No.” Cadas scanned the sky to no avail. “Which way is east?”
Hiricho shook his head. “That way. There’s a road on the outskirts of Tsuriuche. You’ll see the signs. Just head straight east that way. Good luck out there and keep your head down, friend.”
“All right.” Cadas nodded once, concentrating hard on just what to say at a moment like this. He turned to leave and, realizing the polite words to use, he turned back around. He looked Hiricho in the eye, even though it was difficult. “Thank you.” Hiricho smiled, and Cadas took that as a sign he’d said the right thing.
The morning air was cool and pleasant. The grass was dewy. Cadas kept his head down as best he could, but at times it hurt his neck and made it hard to see the path ahead. Eventually, he had to abandon this instruction altogether—he hoped it wasn’t integral to his journey. He couldn’t see why it would be, though. If anything, it was safer to walk with his head up like normal.
There were already ten or maybe twenty unfamiliar plants just past the outskirts of Tsuriuche that he would have loved to document in his new Compendium, but he needed to purchase writing materials first. Parchment. Ink. A well. Quills. Eventually, leather for binding his pages. Hiricho had reminded him many times that morning that everything he needed for his new book could be purchased in Hyonjik. Cadas tried to adhere to his instructions as strictly as feasible.
“When you reach a tunnel in the road carved into the trunk of a massive tree, you have almost reached Yokotaichi,” said Hiricho’s instructions. That landmark came around midday. The road there was tranquil and unpeopled, but the town that followed it was loud and busy for such a tiny place, and it made Cadas want to leave as soon as possible.
“Buy your rations here,” the instructions went on. “Food that will last. Cured meats. Hard cheese. Buy a mild aleskin and sip it for nourishment; when it’s empty, fill it with clear water like I showed you to do. Buy a tent and good walking boots. Assuming good weather the whole way, and a good pace, it will take you at least twenty days to reach the east coast.”
Twenty days. The road ahead was long, Cadas lamented, but he trusted that the destination would make every step worth his while.
***
After buying his essentials and leaving Yokotaichi, Cadas fell into a comfortable routine within a few days. He set up his tent, slept, woke up, ate some of his dried foods and drank some ale, and then he packed up and got back on the road. Having a routine was important to him. He’d left his last routines behind in Sang Lamdak, where his family must have been adjusting to life without him by now, and he would have this daily routine for another moon or so before making his journey across the sea.
What would his future routine entail? That was the one he wanted to maintain for the rest of his life. He would live and work every day in the Moth-Eaten Library, devouring endless books and studying all the varied insects that took up residence in the ruins. Best of all, it sounded like there would be no people there. He’d be all alone with his thoughts. He’d have nothing to do but the work that was important to him.
It was all he ever wanted.
Cadas made good time on his journey. According to his instructions, Hiricho predicted he wouldn’t reach Tangbaek until the sixth day, but he was already there by day four. “There is a butterfly garden there that you might find interesting,” Hiricho’s instructions advised. “The butterflies may not be there right now, though, since they’re seasonal.”
Tangbaek was a small village, nothing but a huddle of traditional Yu buildings, stone structures with simple timber columns and elegantly sloping clay tile roofs. Chimneys spat smoke from the burning hearths within. Cadas bypassed the village, detouring to the meadow with the wooden sign reading “Abode of the Graceful Butterfly” in Xhengyon.
There was only one butterfly in the whole garden.
It was a black butterfly with iridescent green markings on both its dark wings, ovular shapes that almost looked like hanging leaves. Cadas gasped when he saw it. The butterfly flitted from flower to flower, but there were only a few in the meadow, and they were sad and shriveled. “What kind are you?” Cadas asked. He didn’t enjoy talking to people, but insects were different—he loved talking to insects. They never shouted at him or made him feel small, since he was always so much larger than them.
The butterfly didn’t answer. Finding nothing to occupy its attention, the creature fluttered away, past the meadow and over the small village of Tangbaek and into the sky. Cadas lost sight of it past the canopy of trees flanking the road. He wanted to run after it and see where it was going.
You keep to the road and the villages and you never wander off into the wilderness, Hiricho had told him. Never. The nokudai will get you otherwise.
Cadas wasn’t sure if he believed in nokudai. Still, the butterfly was too far gone now for him to find it even if he did run off into the woods. He decided that the butterfly must have had a good reason to fly away the way it did. Maybe it was off on its own important journey. Or maybe it was near the end of its life cycle and about to die—he didn’t know this breed or anything about it.
“I wish you the best,” he said in Xhengyon. “I’m here following my dream. I don’t see why you shouldn’t follow yours, too. Good luck out there and keep your head down, friend.” He wished he had writing materials on his person to write down these words of Hiricho’s. This is what you say when bidding farewell to a friend, he thought. Remember these words.
But it occurred to him then that he didn’t have any friends anymore. He was all alone on the road. And although he made good time, there was far more road ahead of him than behind.
***
On the seventh day of his journey, the sickness came.
He was walking back one morning from filling his canteen in a brook when his breakfast came erupting out of his mouth. Caustic bile, chunks of half-digested cheese and meat splattering on the rocks. It wasn’t so much his body rejecting the meal as it was forcibly banishing it like his life depended on it. His belly squeezed so hard that all he could do was go along for the ride—he had to wait for the breaks between spasms to take another breath.
When the first bout passed, he staggered back to his tent, spilling some of the water from his aleskin on the way there. He collapsed inside with the flap door still open. Even though it was daylight, he was shivering cold.
What’s wrong with me? Cadas wondered. He hadn’t felt sick like this since he was very small. He got as comfortable as he could in his bedding and decided to go back to sleep—until he had the urge to vomit again. He barely got his head out of the tent before it happened this time.
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Cadas stayed there all day at that same campsite, sinking deeper into his fever, shaking, aching down to the bone. Food would not stay down, though his hunger waned to nothing as the day wore on. Water fared not much better. The more time passed, the worse he felt. Day turned into night, and even by the time the sun rose, he felt the same.
Eventually, he had nothing left in his stomach to throw up. He still had to crawl to the door of his tent and retch outside, but nothing came out except thick spittle, and then nothing but a pained groan. When he wasn’t tending to this stubborn impulse, he was lying in his tent. He drifted in and out of paper-thin sleep.
Cadas wondered if he was going to die. The process would have been intriguing if it weren’t so excruciating—if he was able to observe his body somehow after death, it would have been so fascinating to watch the decomposition from skin down to bone over many moons. But he realized that wasn’t feasible for practical reasons.
The third day of his illness, he found himself missing his family. His mother most of all. He yearned for her soothing touch and her soft voice, the kind she used after screaming at him for the whole day or hitting him especially hard, and no matter how he behaved when he fell ill, she always, always took special care of him. He called out for her in the night but she never came.
It was better this way. She would not understand where he was going or why he needed to run away from home. And if he died, he reasoned, perhaps she would have been angry with him. He didn’t want that. It was better that she did not know. It was better that he simply disappeared from his family’s lives and never came back.
On the fourth day since he fell ill, the aches softened for the first time. His fever broke into a thin sheen of sweat on his skin. He kept down small sips of water. That night, he drank the rest of the tepid water in his aleskin. Not long after that, he was able to urinate for the first time in a long while. His body was finally starting to return to normal.
The following day, he filled up his aleskin with more water from the brook and gnawed on some of his bland, dry rice biscuits. His strength eased back into his bones bite by bite. When it all stayed down, he took out his block of cheese to try eating it again, but he caught a whiff of its sweaty, footy odor and tossed it aside into the woods. More rice biscuits would do just fine.
The day after that, he felt well enough to resume his journey to the eastern coast of Yu. Cadas packed up his tent into the bag he carried on his shoulders. As he set out once more, he decided that the road itself was a destination of sorts. If he died before reaching the Moth-Eaten Library, he reasoned, at least he would die in transit to the one place in the world that would make him the happiest, in pursuit of the one thing in the world he loved the most.
At least it would have meaning. It was more than he could say for the life he left in Sang Lamdak.
***
“Signs will point your way to Hyonjik when you’re close enough,” Hiricho instructed him. “They will tell you the direction to the port city and the distance. When you see these signs, jump up into the air and clap your boots together! You are almost there!”
Cadas saw the first sign the evening of the twenty-sixth day since the start of his journey. He stopped there on the road, unslinging his pack and tent. He jumped once, hoping it was high enough according to the instructions, and then he sat on the road, removed his boots, and clapped them together once. He hoped he only needed to do it once.
Too excited to set up camp, he kept walking through the night and into the next morning, the sun rising directly before his eyes into a partially clouded sky, and then he finally arrived. It was his last stop before he reached his destination.
Cadas ran with renewed strength into the markets, past customers who dropped coins and pieces of multicolored paper and hurled unfamiliar Xhengyon words at him. Be bought a bowl of shrimp and noodles, remembering how he and Hiricho had eaten it when they’d first arrived on the Yu mainland. This bowl had none of the Myrenthian spice that Cadas remembered, and he set the unfinished portion neatly on the ground and kept walking.
Next, he purchased two hefty stacks of blank pages, two wells of ink, quills, charcoal, and a scroll of blank parchment just in case. He peered into the satchel and saw that there was not much money left in it. He didn’t care. The boat captain that brought him to the Moth-Eaten Library could have the rest if he wanted—he wouldn’t need it anymore.
“Can you take me to the Moth-Eaten Library, please?” he asked people on the docks. He expected one of them to be helpful as Hiricho was. None of them were, though.
Most furrowed their brows at him and said nothing. A few laughed for some reason. Some slapped his outstretched hand away and said, “Get out of here, spicer!” and “Go back home!” He started to get angry that none of them would listen.
“I need someone to take me to the Moth-Eaten Library, please,” he said again. “Please. Thank you!” There was a group of men wearing ridged armor over maroon clothing and silver-trimmed black boots. They marched up the wooden ramp into a large ship flying a flag with a Xhengyon character on it, the character for Yu itself. “Please take me to the Moth-Eaten Library, please. I have to get—!”
Thud. One of the men shoved him down onto the water-softened wooden dock. He glared down at him briefly, then returned to the procession of men ascending the ramp. A moment later, they were gone—the ramp retracted into the darkness of the ship and the door closed.
His eyes watered. He wasn’t sure why, but no one in Hyonjik seemed to want to help him. He dug out the wrinkled, crumpled instructions Hiricho had sent with him, scanning the final words on the page for any important steps he’d missed. Maybe there was something more he was supposed to do to secure passage across the sea. But there was nothing.
“I did everything right,” he whimpered in Myrenthian. Sometimes the old tongue came back when he was very sad, or scared, or angry. He cried for a moment on the dock and held back the bigger outburst that was welling up inside him. He couldn’t further jeopardize whatever chance he had left—not after he’d come so far.
He got back on his feet and tried a few more ships. These were not nearly as aggressive in denying his request, but they all denied it all the same. Eventually, he came to the end of the docks, and there was a small sailboat at the end. A large man with hairy arms and a hairy chest stood in front of it, shouting through his cupped hands. “Passage for a price! Anyone need to go south? Passage for a price...”
“Can you take me to the Moth-Eaten Library please?” Cadas asked him. “Please?” His stomach jumped when the man actually looked at him. But he just snorted at him and shoved him hard on the chest—this time, Cadas kept his balance.
“You like jokes, spicer?”
Cadas didn’t react. “I’m trying to get to the Moth-Eaten Library.”
“Passage for a price!” the man hollered again. “Salted fish going south to Xi. Anybody else need to go south?”
“The Moth-Eaten Library is east of here. I’ll pay you money if you take me.” He brandished his satchel. “I have twelve bai in here—you can have them all. My friend said it only takes four days to get there by ship.”
“Four days, eh?” The man snorted again and then spat on the dock. “Double it, and I’ll sail four days into the open ocean and back. Whatever you say.”
Cadas opened his satchel to confirm how much he had. “You can have all of these. There are twelve bai in here.”
“I heard you the first time, spicer!” the captain snarled at him. He slapped his hand away. “Not a chance.”
“But... But it’s all I have.” A silence elapsed. Cadas felt like he was about to cry again, but the man spoke up before he could.
“Throw in those fancy boots and I might consider it.” The Myrenthian boy removed his boots and handed them to the man, standing barefoot on the slimy, sea-salted dock. “And that tent you’ve got strapped to your back. Hand it over.” He obliged—the library would be his shelter anyway. “I’ve been in the market for a new cloak as well, come to think of it.” Cadas untied the collar and surrendered it, even though it made him feel powerful and important to wear it. “And what’s in that bag you’ve got there? Anything valuable?”
“You can’t have that,” Cadas said finally. “It has my only food. I don’t know where to find food at the Moth-Eaten Library.” In truth, it also contained his writing supplies, but he had forgotten about them in the moment. He was about to add that information when the man gave him a funny look and gathered up his other belongings in his hairy arms.
“Oh, fine then. This should be good enough. This fabled island where you’re going, you say it’s east?”
“Straight east,” Cadas replied. “That’s what my friend said. Aligned with the sun. He said it would take four days of travel by ship to get there.”
“I’ll sail east for four days. We make it, great. We don’t, you’re coming south with me to Xi and that’s the last of it, unless you can come up with another payment.”
“All right.” Cadas felt his heart racing. He jumped for joy on the dock, more of thrashing motions than anything. Excitement shook through his whole body against his will. “Let’s go. Let’s go!” He started walking up the plank ramp into the vessel when the man grabbed him by the wrist.
“Spastic little bastard, aren’t you? Take all this with you!” He handed him his own bartered belongings. “Throw these in the captain’s quarters. You can sleep in the cargo hold. Leaving at daybreak tomorrow.”
Cadas did as he was told, and for the first time since Myrenthos, he prayed to his native gods, all twenty-nine of them, that this time his obedience would be rewarded. “I did everything right,” he whispered, rocking in place. “I did everything right.”
***
The sea was smooth and favorable the first day. Even the wind seemed to cheer them forward, filling the sails and giving them a firm push toward the rising sun. Cadas ate cured pork and drank the rest of his canteen on their first night at sea.
The second day came and went. The man, whose name Cadas never learned—and he realized he had never told the man his name, either—preferred to be alone. It was just the same to Cadas, who preferred the same. They only crossed paths when Cadas went above deck for some fresh air and he happened to be above deck at the same time. There was a small crew of three individuals with them, but they never spoke, never even looked Cadas in the eye, and he was grateful for that.
Toward the end of the third day, the man was sitting in a chair cobbled together from driftwood, the kind of chair that seemed handmade rather than purchased from a skilled artisan. He lounged in the sun and ate from a parchment package of smoked fish.
“So, the Moth-Eaten Library,” he mumbled to Cadas through a mouthful of food. The man chuckled. “Ah, yes, that library. After that, we can sail to the Great Unknown. Meet the Faceless Ones. Maybe they’ll make you king!” He laughed and laughed and then choked on a fishbone, coughing it up and spitting it out at the Myrenthian’s feet. “Go get me my spirits from the cargo hold, spicer. Then leave me be.”
Cadas did as he was told. He went back to the cargo hold, fetched the flask for the man, and delivered it. By then, the sunset was in full effect, the peaceful sky was ablaze with the reddish hues of dusk, and Cadas was tired. He returned to the cargo hold to sleep.
His dreams that night were strange, interspersed with nightmares, and in it, somebody screamed and the sky opened and the gods scolded him like his mother used to do. He awoke in a cold sweat and a terrible fright. He knew right away that something was dreadfully wrong.
All of his belongings were piled up against the wall on the other side of the room. He felt himself slipping, sliding down the smooth floorboards to meet the cargo. The room was not level—it was tilted, and tilting more.
Cadas scrambled up to the deck. It was still night. He slipped on seawater pouring over the railing and hit his chin on the top step, biting down on his tongue. He cried the moment he tasted blood.
The waters were nothing like when Cadas went to sleep. Now the sky was full of storm clouds, rain falling in sheets and lightning flashing all around them. It reminded him of his dream.
The captain, still in his nightclothes, was pulling hard and fast on some rope near the sails. His crew worked with him to right the ship. The captain shouted something that Cadas could not hear over rumbling thunder and tall waves crashing against the boat, which listed this way and that in the chaos.
“Listen!” the captain screamed at him, and in the next instant, a white bolt of lightning cracked him like a godly whip. It splintered the mast, sending the captain tumbling like a sack of grain down the sloping deck and overboard into the sea. His crew members were nowhere to be found.
Cadas was alone.
“Help!” Cadas screamed into the angry storm, the churning ocean. “Someone help me! Mother!”
There was another violent crack and Cadas flinched, fearing more lightning, but the boat lurched in another direction. He cried and shrieked at the sight of the waves rising to meet him, surging to carry him far, far away.
The last thing he saw was the cold black water. No fish. No aquatic plants. No sand. Just water.
Then he saw nothing.