Throne of Time - Chapter 77: Library Run (Patreon)

The night of the library run, Suria had put significant effort into setting up an alarm glyph for herself: it used timing augments to set up a soft sound that only she would hear, which in theory would wake her up without distracting Maut-mai or anyone else.

It turned out to be irrelevant, because she couldn't sleep a wink. She tried to cast healing sleep on herself and her mind burned right through the spell.

After tossing and turning for a while, Suria forced herself to remain still and just lay there, trying to anticipate potential problems that they could encounter. She was severely limited by lack of information, since she couldn't ask Orinyan too much without coming across as suspicious, and the other loopers who had been in the deep archives said that it wasn't predictable. That didn't stop her from thinking about all the strange monsters that could potentially have found their way between the shelves.

The wait seemed to extend forever, but finally it was time. Suria slipped out of bed as quietly as possible and pulled on her old peasant's cloak, since it was durable and she could afford to lose it. She already had everything perfectly packed in her satchel, so there was nothing she needed to do except sneak out the door without waking her roommate.

"Suria." Maut-mai had been sleeping, or pretending to sleep, with her face to the wall. Now she turned, blinking slowly, and focused on her. "You're going to do something dangerous, aren't you?"

"I..." Suria's words dried up in her throat. She had prepared so many contingencies, but nothing for something as simple as this conversation.

"It's okay, Suria." Maut-mai sat up and rubbed her eyes. "I know that there's a part of your life you haven't shared. You've been so wonderful... I just don't want you to be hurt."

"I'm sorry, there's something I need to do."

"I wasn't trying to stop you." Maut-mai shifted to her table of jewelry and fumbled for a bit before she found what she wanted. "I made this for you. It's a general defensive amulet - the best I've learned how to make so far. Don't, umm, rely on it too heavily."

Suria didn't know what to say, but when the other woman moved closer, Suria lowered her head and let Maut-mai slip the necklace over her neck. It hung heavily, pulsing with mana in time with her heart. Despite the emotion of the moment, Suria made herself check over the glyphs on the amulet, just in case. She saw general defensive formations as well as specific augments that seemed tied to elemental spells, mental probes, even spiritual attacks.

It probably wouldn't save her from a soul killing spell, but it was the best defense she'd ever worn in any of the cycles. Suria slipped the amulet into her cloak as she tried to blink away tears. She would never have anticipated this as a consequence of the decisions she'd made this loop.

"Thank you," Suria finally managed. "I'll come back."

She headed out, wondering if it was selfish of her to say that. If Suria died in the Sequential Library, she wouldn't suffer the remaining days, while Maut-mai would be left wondering what happened to her. Or maybe that comfort was all she could offer... there was no more time for ethical considerations now that she was set on this path.

Their initial meet-up point was the Blue, which Suria could only trust had been scouted as clear - if nothing else, the other loopers seemed to have perfect knowledge of where gatherings were taking place. All of campus was rendered in darker colors at night, but when Suria stepped into the Blue, she was surprised by the depth of the shades around her, nearly black and yet undeniably still blue.

In those shadows, the loopers stuck out even more than normal. Everyone was present as they'd promised: Wynchard, Adwyrma, the Akrashic faction, and the Endelythans. Nine people to join her... except there was also a tenth.

Anything different from the plan made Suria nervous and she rushed forward, trying to get a clear look. When she finally did, she was surprised to see that it was Gerial Negnan.

"Gerial?" Suria blinked at him in surprise. "Are you joining us?"

"Absolutely not," he answered cheerfully. "Are you insane? Well, I suppose that it's obvious that you are, given what you're going to do, but I'm not that insane. However, I heard about your little suicide cult and I decided that the very least I could do was provide drinks."

He swept a hand to the side, but it didn't seem like he'd brought alcohol this time. Instead there was a case of glass bottles sitting on the ground, burning with a subtle mana.

"These are a little something I found in my cellar. It's said to have fortifying effects, mind and spirit. So if you run into anything too strange out there, hopefully you don't get even crazier." Gerial winked at Suria. "Just a little repayment."

"It's authentic." Adwyrma stood nearby with an open bottle gripped in her hand. "But we need to go over the plan, or this whole thing is off. First problem is going to be the outer door to the library."

"I can get us through that," Suria said, holding up the identification seal she'd received from Bumbledun.

"Really? How did you do that?"

"Doesn't matter." Suria shrugged it off like it was an irrelevant detail, but she was actually concerned about too much emphasis falling onto that detail. If Adwyrma knew that the xenarths had a seal like that, she might kill them in any future loop she wanted to get into the library.

"Fine, good to know you aren't dead weight." Adwyrma turned away from her and looked over the group. "Now, usually when the library is locked down like this, the Sequential Guard is completely gone. But there's a chance there will be a few, and in that case, we have to kill them."

"Won't that be noticed?" one of the Endelythans asked.

"It's regrettable," Wynchard said, "but there's no alternative. If they report us, we'll be targeted for the entire rest of the loop. If they disappear, it will be assumed they were lost in the library."

"What about the side doors?" Herriot asked. "You need some kind of security to move between rooms, right?"

"I have that part handled." Wynchard shook his head. "Most of that security was added by the university, anyway. Once you get deeper, the library protects itself and we can't plan for it. But we can cover the basics: we're going to be headed left and forward."

He opened up a sheet of paper that seemed to be a map of the Sequential Library, or rather a map of how its phases were connected. The front several phases - Suria couldn't help but think of them as rooms - were exactly the way Orinyan had described them to her, but this map went further. Past the seal-locked rooms, there was one labeled "Forbidden Section", but the library continued beyond that.

"Using 'left' and 'right' will get confusing," Wynchard said, "so it's best to maintain consistent directions. Forget that the library isn't actually aligned with the cardinal directions: from now on, the entrance is south and the opposite direction is north. So we start south and move northwest.

"This so-called forbidden section is a dead end," he continued. "They put a lot of power into sealing it off, making it look like that's the end of the library. But the shelves extend beyond that - we just have to go around their seal. The eastern path is missing a floor, so the western path is our best chance. But beyond a certain point, we don't know what we're going to find."

They had everything so well-prepared, Suria was beginning to feel like a passenger in her own mission. But she had gone to a lot of effort to bring this group together, and Maut-mai's amulet was hanging heavily around her neck, so she couldn't let it be in vain.

"Our goal is to find books about time magic," Suria said as loudly as she dared, drawing their attention back to her. "This is dangerous, but it's our only way to gain real knowledge about what's happening to us. It may take a while, but the Sequential Library should sort forbidden magic like that with the other forbidden knowledge, so we just need to make it to the right section."

"It works in theory," Adwyrma said with a grimace. "In practice, we'll see."

"Are we ready, then?" Suria asked, then realized she should have been more firm. "I think we are. Do anything you need to prepare and then let's go."

She said her farewells to Gerial, who wished them all luck and pressed a bottle into her hand. Suria reluctantly took a drink and was surprised when she felt the benevolent magic flowing through her. This wasn't merely enchanted wine; it was some sort of advanced alchemy. It didn't make her feel even slightly light-headed, either, so she drank the bottle and hoped the protection was enough.

Everyone else had prepared themselves, and as they walked across campus, Suria thought that they actually looked like a formidable group. Wynchard was wearing an enchanted breastplate, Adwyrma had her armor, and all the others were carrying runebooks. Suria didn't think she could have assembled a group much better than this.

After moving across campus carefully, the actual door was simple: Suria raised the seal and it opened silently. The interior was still lit by mana lanterns, but it was deathly quiet - not just like an empty building, like one that had never held a single human being.

Thankfully there were no Sequential Guards waiting with overzealous orders, so no one had to die. Wynchard led the way as they marched to the "western" door, and Suria was glad to let him take that position - she was confident, not suicidal.

"I'll direct us to the edges of what we know," Wynchard told her in a low voice, "but after that you'll have to check the books and guide us."

"Okay," Suria said. There was nothing else to really say at this point.

For the first time Suria passed through one of the doors of the Sequential Library, seeming to come out on the east side of a new cube. This one was very similar to the first except it didn't have a large open space in the center, just shelves scattered across three different levels with random openings and staircases in between them. The shelves around them were clearly labeled with subjects related to politics, philosophy, and nonfiction that didn't fall into the Naturalism department.

They pivoted north and, after going up and down a few stairs, discovered the doorway onward on the second floor. Again, they passed through and Suria didn't feel any magic - it was as if she'd simply walked through two rooms in a home, even though she knew she had left the physical library behind and was wandering into another realm.

The next chamber of the library was almost entirely dedicated to politics, with maps of the world on the walls, massive shelves labeled as copies of treaties, and thick legal tomes on all sides. After that was another political room, only slightly more chaotic. Again, everything seemed orderly and there was no sign of any real danger... and then they passed through the northern door and Suria saw a garden.

She blinked in surprise and scanned the entire room. It was still a cube, mostly filled with bookshelves, but there was a circular garden in front of her, neatly set off from the rest of the library by a low wooden fence. This section of the library had more open sections, so she could see gardens spread throughout the shelves. Most of the western wall was covered in moss and the door was covered in vines as if it had never been touched by human hands, even though that couldn't be possible.

"Can we get through the east?" one of the Endelythans asked.

"That'd be a mistake," Wynchard said tersely. "Even if we could, that just leads to the official forbidden section, which is still cataloged. The barrier isn't to keep us out - it's to keep anyone in the main library from coming here."

At first Suria hadn't really looked at the eastern wall, since it was more orderly, but as they walked she spotted the door amongst the shelves. It looked ordinary enough except for large metallic bars placed across it, each of them glowing with glyphs. Definitely not a barrier she wanted to try to break through.

When they passed through the northern door, Suria felt something shift; this was no longer a library with a wild garden intruding - they stepped into a wilderness with embedded shelves. There were so many trees she could only barely see the walls in most directions and the wooden floors were encroached upon by soil and moss.

As they walked toward the other side, they were attacked for the first time: a bird with razor talons burst from the nearby forest and swept toward them. Wynchard reacted instantly, burning it out of the air, but the entire group tensed.

On their way north, Suria forced herself to focus so it wouldn't be the others carrying her. When they were attacked by a larger flock, she cast force spells from her soul talisman, spearing some of the monstrous birds with force arrows. That wouldn't have been enough on their own, but when the flock got close, they were cut down by other spells.

"Now we have to make a choice," Wynchard said as they reached the northern wall. "Which way?"

Distracted by the threat of attack, Suria hadn't realized that there were more doors here: not just the usual four in the cardinal directions, but two different doors leading north. This was where navigation became more difficult and, in theory, they could begin searching for the books she wanted.

Both doors had bookshelves around them, so Suria walked closer and began to examine them. The northwestern shelves were built into the sides of trees and the titles suggesting Naturalism, whereas the northeastern shelves seemed to be focused on more arcane subjects. While Suria scanned them carefully a few more monstrous birds attacked, but they were easily taken out by the rest of the group.

"We take this one," Suria said at the northeastern door, more confidently than she felt.

"Then brace yourselves," Wynchard said. "It only gets less organized."

After the somewhat wild forest Suria had expected to be thrown into monster-infested wilderness, but to her surprise the next room was completely different. Instead of three stories of height, a garden spread out much further in all directions. All the grass was carefully trimmed, the flowers were arranged in neat rows, and - strangest of all - the bookshelves were guarded by statues.

All throughout the garden, bookshelves stood alone except for statues, which ranged from humanoid figures to gargoyles. None of them moved or carried any sense of magic, yet Suria kept feeling as though one of the statues was shifting in the corner of her vision. The group ventured inward, exploring one shelf after another, and she was certain they'd be attacked at any moment.

None of the shelves were labeled in the garden, but after Suria checked a few shelves she realized that they were still tightly organized. One entire section was clearly dedicated to Alchemy, for example, and another island of shelves had books cataloging magical beasts. She spent most of her time scanning a section with Evocation texts, hoping that she would find some about time magic, but she discovered nothing but more books about standard elemental spells.

Some of those could hypothetically be useful, and she saw someone from the Akrashic faction pocket one of the books. Suria didn't think any of these were worth all the risks, however, so she led them onward toward the northeast.

There were several doors clustered together, and this time the shelves around them weren't so distinct. After some discussion, they let Suria pick the one she felt best about. She glanced over her shoulder as they advanced, still surprised that not a single statue had attacked them.

The next room had none of the wild nature of the previous two: instead it was a cavernous dusty warehouse with shelves scattered randomly. Suria had started treating this place more like a library again and so she was taken off guard when an enormous beast twice her height dropped from above. It stalked on four limbs, each of which appeared to be a serpent, and had a human-like face surrounded by a great crimson mane.

Suria cast what she could, but there was no way she could have stopped something so large on her own. As the others united to battle it, Suria felt like she could do nothing but serve as support. Most of the group pelted it with spells while Wynchard met its charges, and eventually Adwyrma got on top of it and pushed her blade deep into its neck. Once the beast lay dead, the group took a break, catching their breath and searching for others.

"Stay alert," Wynchard said. "It might actually get difficult from here."