LSRO: Interlude - Second Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Okay so... you know the story so the cliffhanger this ends on should be okay. Frankly... on going through this maybe I should have kept more elements of just this chapter lol

ANYHU!

Thursday should see us loading into book 4!

Enjoy this last Interlude

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Chapter 2

Of Broken Doors

Quinn blinked once, registering the origin of the voice definitively, and fell back against the door. The thud jolted the handle free so that it opened behind her, depositing her ceremoniously on her butt just over the threshold.

"You spoke." She stated, her voice flat, her eyes still focused on that bright blue glow.

"Excellent." The, what she realized now was a very, oddly coQuinnd lynx said as it picked its way up to sit at her side. "You can identify the bleeding obvious."

At first the words confused her, but then she scrambled up, brushing her already grimy jeans down and glared at the creature. She rubbed her head, trying, again, to see if she'd bumped it when she fell into the wood outside of this city. Maybe she had a concussion. For all she knew she could be experiencing some sort of cognitive dissonance. That was a thing, right? She shook her head, focusing. "Yes, because a talking lynx is extremely obvious and if you..."

But that's where her voice trailed away as she turned enough while snapping her reply to withhold what she'd stumbled into. The building made no sense at all. What appeared before her eyes just couldn't be.

Glancing behind her, she stepped over the threshold and poked her head back out into the alleyway. Nope. Right there where it should be in all it's dark and creepy glory. Then she looked back through the door, and her breath caught in her throat. It was magnificent.

"Stop gawking around. Come on in. Meet your new home." The lynx took several steps inside, and glanced back at her over its shoulder. "And close the door behind you. I don't have the energy to spare to house more than one of you right now."

Almost as if automatically, Quinn stepped through and let the door close. "One of us?" She murmured, not quite understanding what the cat, no, what the lynx, meant. But even that realization wasn't enough to draw her full attention, because the room had her full attention.

The sheer magnitude of the interior of the building she'd stepped into wasn't registering properly. Not in a town this size, not in a place this dank.

Dim lighting overhead offered a modicum of brightness, allowing her to take in most of the massive room. But the sides ran deep and she couldn't see past a feet into the shadows. 

There was none of that sense of danger in here, not those underlying whiffs she'd gotten as she worked her way through the small town. Which was just as well.

Right in front of her stood a massive wooden desk. It had to be five feet tall because she could look over it but it pretty much came up to her nose. At one stage the monstrosity had been beautiful. The carvings were of trees blossoming into books, with words strung across like leaves blowing in the wind. It gave her the sense of motion, and just a smidgen of safety.

It smelled like the blues of freedom on the surface of a lake, with the reeds blowing in the wind.

Beyond it there was nothing but gloom she could see right then, but that didn't matter right then.

She moved slowly around the desk, finding a couple of steps that led up into it, she stepped tentatively inside, unsure of what it was that made her do so. But once there, it was like a sigh of coming home. Even though dust tickled her nose, there was no scent of decay. 

That in itself was surprising. Decay was a smell she'd lived with her entire life. From wood and food, to the sickly bodies of the dying.

This place felt... right.

She turned toward the back of the desk and gasped. The gloom had receded. 

Before her stretched a long path edged by massive wooden columns stretched out before her. Furniture was scattered into the shadows at the side, but she could imagine, just for a moment, when it had been pristine. 

There were carvings on the pillars that reached into a ceiling too high for her to see in the dim light, and on each side of her, about twenty feet up was a walk way connected to those columns. Perhaps it was an upper mezzanine level, but it was too encompassing to tell.

The light just didn't reach that far.

She had to ignore the itch in her feet to climb up there any way she could and expQuinn.

It was like a veritable treasure trove of...

Well like, dilapidated furniture and what appeared to be books or something scattered everywhere. Which sounded less grand than the initial impression had intimated, but it really stuck in her mind.

It did, however, appear to be hers to expQuinn, for now.

"Are you done gaping? We don't have all day." The lynx sat next to her, on the surface of the massive desk, decidedly larger than she'd originally thought he was.

His fur was so dark it was almost black, especially in this light, but as she looked closer she realized his stripes were stripes. Instead, they were constantly moving... letters? Like runes twisting and writhing across his fur in an endless incantation.

Was she having a fever dream? She'd heard people talking about those... Just what did they entail anyway?

Suddenly a cold nose nudged her cheek and she scrambled back, only to realize the lynx had stood up and pushed its face into hers.

"Ah. A reaction. That's good. I thought it broke you." It sat down, tail swishing to come to rest around its feet. "Frankly, I don't have the energy to find another of you. Are you about done? We don't have much time left."

"Time? Done? What are you talking about?" Quinn was suddenly feeling overwhelmed. This stupid feline... cat! had tricked her into this strange abandoned warehouse on what appeared to be another continent at best, likely other world at worst, and now it was speaking in cryptic about not having time and asking her if she'd processed everything.

It seemed the feline was about to answer her question when Quinn held up her hand.

No. She'd done all this. She'd dealt with people who thought she wasn't worth their attention, or that she wouldn't understand what it was she was being told. Perhaps not while her parents were alive, but sure as heck after they died.

She took a deep breath. "I do not know where I am. All I know is I'm not where I was five hours ago. That alleyway should not be able to house a warehouse this large. And cats or... you're a lynx, well you're not suposed to talk. Not to mention that you haven't even given me your name. So take five seconds to give me some answers before you just usher me off to wherever it is."

There, she thought she'd done a mighty fine job of expressing herself clearly. Define your needs and stick to them. Wasn't that what one of her career classes had been teaching her?

The creature blinked at her, and slowly nodded. "I apologize. Humans are not my forte. I've been too busy looking after the library alone for the last four hundred years. My name is Lynx." And Lynx bowed low over his forepaws.

"Oh." Quinn squinted at the strange cat. "I'm Quinn."

"I know."

Okay, Lynx obviously had problems with just how to converse with a human. Quinn refused to dwell on the fact that he'd mentioned humans like there were more species out there. That was something she'd deal with later.

Just as she was about to speak, something in the corner of her vision moved. Nothing that cast a shadow, but something that crept through the dust on the floor. Unconsciously, she moved closer to the lynx. Lynx appeared to have fairly formiddable claws.

"Well. Then why are you hurrying me up? Just what am I doing here and where do we have to go that you're in such a rush?" Maybe those last two were the same question, but her mind had been running in loops about why she was where she was. Then, as an afterthoughts she added. "Also, where can I get food before I collapse from hunger."

"You're nowhere near collapsing from hunger yet." Lynx said, somehow raising one of his very lynx eyebrows. "But I do believe we do have some organic sustenance that's survived over time. I'll see to it that you're fed as soon as we get to our destination."

This time she planted her feet and crossed her arms, thankful, not for the first time that her combat boots were solid. "I'm not going until..."

"Yes, yes, until I tell you why you're here." Lynx waved a paw as if he was trying to figure out just what to tell her. There was a furrow to his kitty brows and frankly it made him look more comical than serious.

So, Quinn waited with about as much impatience as she usually exibited, only she hid it better by picking at the sleeves of her jacket.

"Look. I could have left you to deal with Miald yourself, but I helped you get free. It's too long to explain, but I think you should be able to trust that I'm not here to hurt you."

Quinn quinted at the lynx. "Perhaps, but you did take me from my home..."

"You were about to sleep in a park, if I'm correct. Was it for a challenge? A dare I believe that's what you call it?"

Taken aback, Quinn stumbled a little over the next words. "No, I just... look. You took me from my home."

"And I'll gladly apologize later if you'll let me. But humor me for now because if we don't go and get this done straight away, then there's not going to be any time left for me, or for here, and you'll be stuck right here, without anyone to guide you." His words were stern and he stood up, jumpin lightly off the edge of the desk away from the door they'd entered through.

Quinn realized if she didn't want to be left in the almost dark, she was going to have to follow the glowing cat lest she risk the chance of only having the pale gloom to navigate by. She hurried down the stairs and followed the feline.

Luckily, he didn't take her toward where she'd seen the movement previously. While the dust and the scattered furniture didn't strike fear in her, there were undertones in here that smelled wrong. There was no other explanation for it.

Just that the dust over the ground in here smelled like it was misplaced, and the color wasn't discernable. Something she'd never encountered before. Everything had a color and a smell. That's how things worked.

Hurrying to keep up and not get left behind to the mercy of whatever it was she was feeling, Quinn followed Lynx all the way through, down a winding staircase to the side of the desk a ways. 

"You could be leading me anywhere." She mumbled under her breath, still not sure in her trust of the creature.

"Well I am definitley leading you somewhere." There was no wry amusement in his voice, just a certain level of fatigue. Even just in these last few minutes he seemed mroe drained.

Come to think of it. Even his form was flickering ever so slightly. While the bands of runes or words, she'd have to take a closer look later, were solid, the rest of him came and went, not quite corporeal after all.

"Are you..." But she didn't get further as they finally hit the bottom step from the spiral staircase.

She gasped involuntarily.

There, before them, stretched out in a space that seemed just shy of infinite was a massive netrowk of faintly glowing runes. Some of them sputtered, others were missing their light completely and they all stemmed from the most magnificent centerpiece imaginable.

She'd seen the figures for the world tree before, but never like this. 

Because this was not, in fact, a tree. This was something she couldn't comprehend because she simply didn't know what she was seeing.

But one thing Quinn knew was that this was a hub. It's where strength came from, and right now, it was where an underlying fear lay. Something about the center trunk of this source of life and warmth was ill.

It was flagging, failing, and it was, to a certain extent as much as it could be, scared.

"What..." She reached out to touch it, suddenly realizing she'd been carefully walking toward the actual trunk of it ever since they set that last step down.

"Go ahead." Lynx said, his eyes reflected this eagerness, but there didn't seem to be anything malicious behind it.

"What will it do?" Quinn asked, her voice soft.

A sigh escaped Lynx. "If you touch it, you'll link to the Library."

She perked up at that. "To a Library."

He shook his head. "No. To the Library, and it's more than you ever thought a Library could be."

"But it has books, right?" She asked, still slightly hesitant.

"And so much more."

Quinn took a deep breath, sensing the way the trunk, this core of this entire building was sitting there. It thrummed like a purring cat through the floor, as if it was eager to see her. 

Perhaps it was.

"And this is why you came to get me, isn't it?"

Lynx nodded, not taking his eyes off her.

"Will it hurt?" Quinn wasn't even sure why she was entertaining what she was, but there was a part of her that needed to do this.

Lynx hesitated before answering. "I cannot say. For I am already linked." He shrugged as much as a lynx can. "But I can tell you that if you take the plunge you won't only save the core and the Library, you'll be saving all of us."

"All of us," she murmured softly, keeping her gaze on the fading blue glow of the trunk. The sooner she did this, the sooner she could probably eat.

Plus, she loved books and trees.

Taking a breath, she glanced down at Lynx. This was why he'd somehow transported her here. What if this killed her? It was a prevalent thought in her mind. But she didn't get that sort of underlying tone from this tree. It smelled fragile, with hidden strength. 

And the blue was pale, but not sickly, just lacking in energy.

Maybe all it needed was a push.

She lifted her hands and placed them against the trunk, in the two slight indents that felt like that was where the heel of her palms should sit.

Nothing happened for a moment except this soft click that locked her hands in place.

And from one breath to the next it changed from nothing, to agony ripping through every single fiber of her body.

Quinn opened her mouth and screamed.

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Because we need to make Quinn scream, right?

Anyhu - There are more chapters but I don't want to bore you all.

Much love

KT