Throne of Time - Chapter 78-2: The Sequences of the Library (Patreon)

At first it seemed to have no effect, but she persisted, and finally she saw the internal flames falter. The metallic limbs around the core were no longer glowing with heat, so Suria pressed inward, casting as much as she could, trying to lower the internal temperature even further.

Unfortunately, the golem was intelligent enough to understand the threat and it charged directly at her. Even though she had expected it, Suria was shocked by the speed at which it rushed toward her, all three bladed arms slashing. As she started to cast her mana shield, something hit her from the side and she tumbled across the room.

Suria struggled upright, just glad she had kept her grip on her runebook. Adwyrma had grabbed her from the side, and she'd probably been right to do so: the golem had smashed into the wall just behind where Suria had been standing. Now, as it turned back toward them, the flames were beginning to kindle to life again.

If she knew more about golems, Suria would have preferred a more targeted spell. The construct must have a power source, and with a look at its internals, she could figure out the exact source of the flames. But this was the knowledge and the tools she had... she realized that one thing she could deduce was that the flames started at the bottom of the sphere.

So the next time she cast, Suria targeted the bottom more specifically. The golem shuddered, but it wasn't about to stop, and it charged at her once again.

"It's your funeral," Adwyrma hissed as she leapt away.

A sane woman would likely have run with her, but Suria didn't have good mobility spells, so she faced down the golem and cast her temperature-lowering spell as hard as she could. The other loopers were bombarding it with ice spells again, managing to slow its charge, but it was still going to reach her.

One claw rose overhead, trailing ice... Suria desperately cast her mana shield with one hand while she kept casting with the other. Her shield barely survived the first cut from the blade, making her stagger a step back. One of the legs was rising, aiming to drive the heavy limb directly through...

Suria cast one last time and the flames finally guttered out.

Instead of kicking, the golem slowly tipped, then collapsed to the ground. The metallic crash echoed across the room, followed by silence, broken only by the gasps for breath from all the mages.

For a while Suria just stared at the metallic remains, watching in case the flames burst to life again. But the golem really did seem down, and when someone froze it in a block of ice, it didn't move again.

A few of the Akrashic loopers let out little cheers, and Herriot gave Suria a respectful salute, but there wasn't much celebration. Adwyrma muttered "This better have been worth it" and began binding her wound with metal, while some of the others looked back toward the previous door.

"They aren't coming through," Wynchard said, "but I heard them moving. We need to move on. Suria?"

So it was up to her to continue leading the way? Suria sighed and smoothed down her robes, mostly to help calm herself down. Using ice and temperature-lowering spells had just seemed logical in the moment, but now she felt like she had been insane to face down such a massive golem. She would have to hope that this really was the correct path... Suria headed forward and pushed open the doors.

The newest room appeared almost like a normal library except that the floor was covered in a thin layer of sand and there were tapestries on the walls that fluttered in a nonexistent breeze. At least there were plenty of bookshelves across the room and the walls were blessedly free of mirrors.

As she advanced inward cautiously, Suria made sure to orient herself in the Sequential Library overall, just in case they had to flee. They had gone one room west, then headed mostly north, with the occasional move northeast. Safety and the exit were south, but if she'd kept her orientation, that might lead them directly into the barriers to the main forbidden section, which could mean a dead end. Their options were to push east and circle around on the other side, which was a known danger, or head back west into the mirrored hallway.

When she reached the shelves, Suria began opening books in a nervous frenzy, hoping this hadn't all been for nothing. The first book appeared to be a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, which made her apprehensive, but then the second was a tome titled Advanced Primer on Time Magic. It seemed highly theoretical and didn't contain a single inscription, but at least that was in range of what she wanted.

Did she just start shoving books into her satchel? Suria realized that there was no way she could carry everything she found here, so she would need to be selective. So far there hadn't been any dangers in this room, but she was glad she had the others serving as guards.

"How many can we take?" Suria called to Wynchard. "As many as we can safely carry?"

"That'd be a mistake," he answered without taking his eyes off the door. "The more you try to take, the more the library pushes back. You need to be selective or we won't make it out. Everyone else... better take just one. This is even worse than last time."

Suria advanced into the shelves cautiously, trying to discern how they were organized. The Endelythans seemed to be recovering from the loss of their ally while the Akrashic faction stayed close to her, serving as welcome defenses. Since she was covered, Suria dedicated herself to investigating the texts.

After having no luck, suddenly she had an abundance of it: every single book on the next shelf was a practical text filled with inscriptions. But how was she supposed to choose among them? She could have spent a month just sitting here reading, but that clearly wasn't an option. If these were real books that the Sequential Library was pulling from the world, they would be just like any other collection of books: some poorly written, some misinformed, and only a few truly valuable to her.

Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any introductory books on time magic, which made sense since time magic was a forbidden art usually practiced by archmages. Just when Suria began to worry that she couldn't possibly choose, she spotted something familiar amid all the jargon and strange diagrams.

It was the exact inscription she had seen Professor Drazen use in combat.

Not quite believing that she had found something she needed, Suria looked over the pages, trying to find some flaw she'd missed. No, it was definitely exactly the same inscription, and even the overall glyph looked similar - this was the spell he had used to stop time. When she flipped through the rest of the book, Suria saw that it seemed to be practical instruction on time magic.

The title was The Immensity of Time, and though it didn't have a table of contents, based on her impression of the chapter headings Suria felt confident that it would work for her. This was practical instruction on time magic, which was exactly what she needed.

Should she just sit down and read now? Suria had a terrible vision of her collecting books, only to be stabbed to death by masked reflections of herself before she could read any of them. But getting this far had cost her a lot and just a little reading wasn't enough. No, she would bet on herself and try to take books out so she could read them properly.

So she placed Immensity of Time into her satchel and kept looking. None of the other books filled with inscriptions seemed as useful to her, and if time magic was like any other field, there would be a lot of overlap. Her next highest priority was a broader understanding of how time loops fundamentally worked, so she needed theory that was comprehensible to someone at her level of education.

"Come on," Herriot said nervously. "You got a book, let's get out of here."

"This room seems safe," Suria argued. "We can't stop now."

They followed her a little longer, staying around her as Suria tried to find the proper shelf. Suria briefly glanced at the room and wondered if the tapestries were blowing more rapidly now. That could be her imagination, but she saw that the sand on the floor was beginning to flow in one direction, which she was sure hadn't been happening at the beginning.

When she found a shelf dedicated to theory, Suria began searching anxiously, trying to use her full attention despite the growing threat. Some of these were definitely discussing the fundamentals of time magic, but the prose was so obscure she wasn't sure how to evaluate them. If she wasn't careful, she could end up leaving the library with books she couldn't possibly interpret in the remaining days.

She found a tome called Seizing the Cycle that seemed to have promising subject matter, but the text itself was near-impenetrable in places. Many of the surrounding books weren't much better, though, and she wasn't going to find a simple primer. Perhaps if she checked every single book on the shelf...

Something landed just beside her and Suria felt a sharp stinging pain. But before it could grow, Maut-mai's amulet around her neck burned with mana. Something near-invisible recoiled and Suria instinctively cast force spells at it until it flew away.

When she managed to stabilize herself, still dizzy from the sudden attack, Suria stared in horror.

Something that looked like a massive worm made of glass perched atop a nearby shelf. It had no face, and one end of the creature ended in some sort of glass proboscis. It lashed out, piercing through one of the Akrashic women, and as Suria watched the glass tube circled back, somehow merging back into the body of the worm.

Even though her combat instincts told her to act, a deeper instinct within Suria was frozen in horror. Blood flowed through the glass tube from the woman into the worm, and its hollow body began to fill. But worse than that, tiny particles from the worm flowed into the woman's body.