Memories of the Fall

...Why establish a school near Evergrove? This question has at turns perplexed and vexed many a scholar of the machinations of our world in the last few centuries. On the face of it, the land is certainly suitable, but the reality of its location is such that all but the most diffident would only consider it a rather inauspicious place. Close to the entrance points to the Undren Mare and the Dark Veils, many have argued that what was really needed there was a fortress, to quell the discontent of its populace and to guard against the dangers from the deep waters of that underworld ocean. Others have suggested that Emperor Lucius was swayed by his paramour to provide some means of returning Evergrove to Imperial prominence after its vitality and economy were nearly ruined by the incursions late in the previous Emperor Wenfel's prestigious, if tumultuous, reign.

In light of this, I wish to provide a third possibility. The school was placed where it was as an act of petty vengeance against the Dukes of Meltras, Reborin and Belthorne who were ousted in the early, troubled years of Emperor Lucius's reign as he struggled to control the various interests unhappy with the way Emperor Wenfel Abernathy's family was pushed out of court politics in favour of the Everkind and Grey Duchies. In placing the school where they did, the Empress and her clique within the court clearly intended to bury the memory of the glory days of the Meltras and Belthorne Duchies under Emperors Alosius, Vance and Wenfel – still longed for in the eyes of many in that region – with new grandeur that would elevate the Everkind family back to prominence in the land from which they were ousted for their misdeeds and corruption several thousand years before.

Had her ploy been successful, the new Academy might have supplanted the royal Academy of Gallicia or the Milford Institute, and this was undoubtedly her intention. However, in the years that have followed its establishment, it has rapidly cemented its reputation as an insatiable money pit – furthermore, with low standards of entry and a determination to welcome and even pay for common folk to attend, there is little hope of it maintaining any parity with our own other great institutes, never mind those to the South in the Holy Empire. Its leaders also engage in continued and petty strife with the Orthodox Conclave, to the detriment of many who might otherwise wish their endeavour well. As a final nail in its usefulness to our rather battered national image of late, its administrators have also begun to focus on insane or inane diplomatic endeavours to such far flung corners of the world as Renhallen, Chulut, Kesh, the Isles of the Ten Songs and even, heavens forbid, some of the Island Enclaves of the Sea People – those bloodthirsty elves who have ravaged our western coasts for millennia, giving no quarter to man, child nor beast – when instead they should be seeking to mend fences with the influences to the South in Gallicia and Kasten or to the north with the White Empire of Kesevic Rus.

So I can only reiterate, this great endeavour appears more as a task of sabotage to the learned onlooker than any act of national aggrandisement. Yet another reason why so many are now wondering whether or not our august emperor was wrong to shirk millennia of tradition upon his coronation and agree to co-rulership with the last scion of the Everkind Duchy, Sannae Everkind, as clearly this untried and untested princess is not suited to the rigours of governance of a grand empire such as ours.

Excerpt from "Ashes from Glory, a history of the Imperial Commonwealth since the Second Succession Crisis"

~By Johnson Carnellon Du Pont, Historian Extraordinaire, 8th Duke of Carnellon

~ Arai and Sana – Saint Roberta's Academy ~

Walking through the school, Arai found it was nothing like she had expected. Although, in fairness to herself, she had to admit she had no idea what exactly she was expecting. The written records of the Blue Duke’s expedition were non-existent, and the Blue Water Sage’s expedition was so long ago as to be functionally mythical to them. What it wasn’t like, however, was anything she had ever seen in Blue Water Province.

The traditional architecture of their hometown and Blue Water City leant itself heavily towards stone as a basic construction material and wood for supports and frequently decoration, even for large buildings. There were exceptions, like the Hunters’ Pavilion or the Alchemists’ Pagoda, which were almost all stone. However, that tended to be a function of their use. For most other places spirit wood could be almost as hard as stone, and was both more workable and had the added advantage of being seasonally replenishable whereas finding good quality qi-bearing stone, even in their province, was something of a time-consuming and economically expensive activity.

In any case, she mused as they walked along one of the colonnaded walkways on the edge of the lawns, even in a place like this most of the decoration and support pillars would be wood, unless it was a truly monumental construction or had some other special reason. Perhaps it was because she spent so much time traipsing through forests, but the predominance of stone, except for doors and the odd floor, left her feeling a bit cold and oppressed. However, it was undeniable that the school's halls had an ancient grandeur that was affecting no matter what your views on all-stone architecture. It did help a little that the wide stone-paved hallways and colonnades, arched ceilings and twisting columns were all filled with beautiful carvings of the natural world. Whoever had decorated this place had clearly shared her sentiments about the aesthetic oppression of stone on some level.

The longer they wandered through this place, the more nuance she started to see in how the ancient artisans had picked out the details. Exterior scenes were largely of the natural world; forests, skies, mountains, oceans, rolling landscapes and so on. Interior wall panels, still inlaid in stone largely, depicted scenes of daily life around the school. There were scenes of students training outside in the panels around the inside of this enclosed courtyard, for example. Sage-like teachers presenting different things on each panel, illustrated with curious stylised carvings she guessed were depictions of the elements. In other places they had been people fighting, while interior corridors they had ventured through were abstract scenes, people demonstrating the same kinds of arrays they had seen used on the beach and some she glanced down had processions of strange animals or shapes.

Every room had a number carved over it in Easten numerals, but the carved names beneath them or beside them, usually inset in wood, were not in any alphabet she recognised. Clearly the common alphabet of the school's occupants was not as, she had initially assumed, Easten. There were hints of Easten in it sometimes, in the letters but, with no frame of reference beyond that, she could only assume it was a phonetic alphabet as it had a maximum of 35 symbols or letters that they had seen. Easten in comparison, despite being mostly phonetic, had at least 300 and twice as many accent combinations, with lesser symbols acquired from other regional languages for common words.

“Well, the layout seems pretty straightforward,” Sana said, walking over and stowing her scrip.

“It’s as we randomly guessed then? Lower floors are all teaching and occasionally some places that might be general-purpose halls or open courtyards?”

“Pretty much,” her sister nodded with a wry smile. “At least from what we have seen so far.”

“All very abandoned too,” she mused, poking a collapsed bench with her foot.

“It has to be spirit wood of some description,” Sana said, squatting down to stare at it, tapping her fingers on her chin.

“Or some massive formation on this whole place that is preserving it.”

“Could be that as well,” Sana said, standing again. “No reason it can’t be both, wouldn’t that be fitting in a place like this? If you can have that in our house, you can certainly have it here.”

“At least it isn’t warded to within a hair's breadth of its existence like the city was.”

“This bench is by far the worst-preserved thing we have seen yet, though,” her sister said, reaching out and running her hand across the grain.

To their surprise, the arm actually broke under her gentle action and the bench slumped to the side with a crunch.

“Huh, oops!” Sana grimaced and put the arm down on the ground.

“…”

They both stared as the broken bench abruptly shivered and collapsed into dust. A moment later a ghostly version of the bench swirled out of nowhere with a faint echo of qi accompanying it. As they watched, mildly stunned, the dust swirled back up and a brand new, very unrotten wooden bench sat there. The whole process took less than ten seconds and was totally silent.

“Huh,” was all she could say.

Warily, her sister reached out and poked the bench.

“Well, it seems as good as new,” she said after a moment.

She watched as Sana sat down on it, then got up again and jumped on it a few times. “Yep, good as new.”

Leaving the newly repaired bench behind them, they made their way onwards, somewhat at random. Some of the halls had drawings in chalk on boards. A few were even recognisable from their desperate struggle to master the ‘arrays’ which were almost – but not quite – like formations. One hall even had a whole sequence of them, carved like teaching examples either side of a two-metre high by three-metre long section of wall that was clearly used to draw examples on. Sadly, whatever was on there was half rubbed out and she could make little of what remained. On a whim, she spent some time recording the symbol sequences around the edge of the room and on the different panels. This was clearly a hall dedicated to teaching them, so who was to say what future use might be gleaned from them?

Other halls, well lit, with large windows, were filled with benches of glasswork and various accoutrements that looked a lot like tools for alchemy as best she could guess. The cauldrons were at least familiar, after a fashion, but nothing else made much sense from either her own or Sana’s rather rudimentary understanding of the discipline. Alchemy required a lot of talent in Yang Arts and usually a Yang-type spirit root. Few alchemists were interested in teaching young women unless they were the scions of some wealthy family or had an exceptional constitution or talent tailored towards it.

After several more hours of wandering around, they had finally covered all of the lower halls that were accessible and recorded most of what they could find that looked at all interesting. They ate an early lunch of sorts on one of the lawns, considering the tangled mess of seasonal vegetation while polishing off a few more of the spirit fruits that Sana had gathered in the city. There were also some here, but those she had looked at were generally inedible. In any case, while the qi here was muted, they were still able to absorb it, unlike in the city, so it wasn’t as big a concern as it had been.

The second floor turned out to be much less accessible, mainly smaller rooms for teaching and various offices for officials or teachers. Many were left in mild disarray. One larger hall had a hole in the wall that was clearly melted, half the furniture in the room was inexplicably missing and what remained was worn and a bit scorched. It became pretty clear to her that whatever restored things was only doing so for the furniture. She suspected that it also required much of the original to be extant as well, but short of somehow acquiring the means to destroy one properly that would, in likelihood, forever remain just her hunch.

The third floor turned out to be mostly bedrooms, corridor after corridor of single-bedded rooms in various states of decay. Those facing the same outer wall as the ruined rooms below had all sustained severe fire damage and hadn’t recovered for whatever reason. They were mostly over trying to work that out in any case. A bit more annoyingly, it was impossible to see what direction the building faced within the wider context of whatever valley they were in. Low cloud obscured everything beyond the rooftops below, muffling sound and giving everything a faintly spooky air. She thought she could make out faint evidence of more damage here and there, and the occasional scorched tree, but that was it.

Elsewhere, there was more evidence of combat scattered around this floor. Warped floors, several corridors bisected bizarrely by a series of mere-wide lines through the outer wall at various angles that had effectively removed a dozen bedrooms from existence. Peering out over the edge, she saw that a vertical one almost reached the ground below.

“Odd, I don’t remember seeing that damage below, do you know where we are?” she asked Sana, who was poking around the remains of a wardrobe.

“Upper right side, I think there are actually more halls we missed now, on the ground floor. Remember when we went left early on?”

“Oh.” She nodded.

She did, there had been a few corridors that had a lot of damage and sealed doors so they had just given up, still paranoid about wards, rather than scramble over the damage.

“Clearly whatever happened here involved quite a bit of combat,” Sana sighed, “That wardrobe looks like it was cut in half with a sword.”

“I wonder why it hasn’t recovered?” she said turning to look at it, slumped weirdly as it was.

“Maybe the ward only applies to stuff down below? Or it's low on qi, or damaged or something. Damage to the stonework isn’t recovering… watch.” Sana walked over to the wall and cut a piece out of it with the arborundum leaf.

They both watched as the wall resolutely refused to repair itself.

“It is what it is, I guess,” she said eventually.

“No corpses though, or creepy afterimages. Not even any bones,” Sana said, staring around again.

“That’s probably a mercy. I don’t think I could stand to explore this place if it was like that charnel pit that pretended to be a city,” she shuddered.

“True,” Sana said with a faintly haunted grimace.

While there were no remains, they did find quite a lot in the way of accoutrements that previously belonged to the room’s occupants. A few even had paintings in frames showing young, frequently rather bored, men and women wearing weird robes in vibrant colours that rather resembled family uniforms. Odd floppy hats and feathers were also a recurring theme. There were books, but they couldn’t read any of them, which made her rather frustrated. She did record a few that had vaguely esoteric diagrams, but mostly they were just walls of illegible text. A particularly humorous low point was a book Sana found wedged in a wardrobe that contained nothing but pictures of smut, showing several very busty women and muscular men having sex in various stylised ways. That room also had in its wardrobe what looked for all the world like a shrine, with three white marble statues of beautiful naked women.

Most rooms also had stacks of flat grey slabs of rock with etched designs on them. Their similarity to jade scrips was uncanny enough to make them put qi into them to see what they did. Mostly that was nothing, but occasionally they showed ‘password’ or ‘locked’. They eventually found one that was unlocked, but it turned out to be some kind of personal diary, containing images of a young man and a woman in various places around the city they had just been in. Others were just pictures of people laughing or dancing in some tea house, pictures of trees, fountains and the occasional small cat. They left it where it was, the memory of the city itself too clear in their minds. And looking at it felt disrespectful somehow.

The two floors above were just more of the same, while the uppermost floor was long galleries that seemed devoted to physical exercise or combat training and various places that had all the hallmarks of being for training in using arts. Here the battle damage was much more ingrained into the fabric of the long galleries. There was suppression there, especially around the walls of those rooms, and it put her in mind of the training halls in the Martial Pavilions back in West Flower Picking Town or the duelling arena in the Blue Gate School.

…

By the time they made it to the ground floor again, it was late afternoon. The battle-damaged areas on the perimeter turned out to be remarkably mundane for what they were. They did, however, provide a means to get ‘outside’ the building complex within which they had arrived. The broad lawns beyond had become tangled scrubland, filled with briars. Thankfully though, they had paths through them that were still just about traversable. Completing a circuit of the building brought them back to the broad series of lawns and courtyards they had entered by.

Those buildings, although much smaller in scale, turned out to be full of much the same. Halls, teaching spaces, somewhat larger bedrooms and ruined recreation areas, all long abandoned. Some had been remarkably badly damaged, their walls scoured with fire or corroded. A few had masonry so degraded and corroded by attacks that she could put her hands through it like it was paper. Others had been left almost untouched except for the occasional hole in a roof or wall or some smashed windows. In the bedrooms of those places, what effects remained spoke of privilege, mainly. Better furniture, more carving, bigger rooms and more ornate portraits, more books and such.

After exploring a few more, they finally ended up in one of the small pavilions dotted across the gardens. This one wasn’t too overgrown as it sat in the middle of a small ornamental lake that was mostly coated with lotus plants, which was what had drawn them to it, really. A sense of familiarity amid the strange grandness and abandonment of this place.

“So… what do we do for the night?” Sana said eventually, leaning on the railing looking out over the lake.

“I guess we could just stay here?” she suggested.

“Not go inside?” her sister said, giving her a sideways look as it was mostly a rhetorical question.

“Stuff was either destroyed or rather weirdly abandoned; it’s weird to say it, but the lack of any kind of remains in that place bothers me.”

“Mmm… I know what you mean… also, it was hard to shift the feeling that we were not quite alone.”

She stared at a crane that was picking its way along the edge of the water, hunting for frogs or small fish, maybe. Her sister was right as well. It wasn’t until they came out here, a good way away from the buildings themselves, in the aim of exploring the limits of the gardens, that she realised that there had been a faint hint of something odd about the halls. Like something else was there, but just not paying any attention to them for whatever reason.

“It’s not even a sense of watching, more like a feeling that the geomancy of the place was just a touch off-kilter,” she mused.

“And it wasn’t everywhere either, mainly just in the upper levels,” Sana mused.

“How did you work that out?”

“I just put points on the scrip whenever I really noticed it or something felt off,” Sana said, handing her over the jade rectangle.

She spent a few minutes flicking through it before sighing herself and handing it back.

“Whatever it is, it could well be related to whatever happened here at the same time as the city got ruined. The impression the bell gave was that it’s all connected. I just wish I had a better recollection of those moments before the collapse in the valley.”

“You and me both,” Sana said, flicking a stone into the water and watching it go *plop*

“In any case, it’s actually quite peaceful out here,” she said, admiring the last rays of sunshine reflecting off the pond.

“It is much better when the sun comes out,” her sister agreed, staring up at the beams of sunlight shining through the mists that swirled overhead.

Exhaling, she sat down against a column and turned her attention to her own scrip while munching on one of the spirit fruits. The diffuse and scattered feeling to the qi of this place even extended out here in the gardens. It was somewhat reassuring to realise that it wasn’t just them, though. Everything had, when they examined it closely, the same issue with qi gathering. The qi itself here was somehow disturbed in a strange way that forced it not to aggregate or integrate properly with things. As a result, worrying about advancing her cultivation was kind of fruitless, so she had decided to return to an earlier bit of scholarly endeavour. Namely, the symbol sets that Maria, Eleanora and Edward had demonstrated and how they meshed up with all the different frameworks Elaria had been experimenting with.

She had gotten a few to work already in various circumstances as she tried to get the five elemental symbols for the transmutation array drawn correctly. The explosion one, one that melted rocks very successfully, the one that cut or split things, one that made the grass grow a bit and one that made water vapour explode. That latter one had been an unpleasant surprise. There were others as well, but the complexity of each one was problematic and testing them at random, especially after the water in the air exploded like firecrackers, had seemed a bad idea. Now, however, with new understandings on how they actually ‘activated’ – like the knowledge that she had been drawing some of the array’s core symbols the wrong way around – she figured she should return to them again.

In the end, they passed the whole night like that. Sana reviewing something on her own scrip relating to the things they had recorded during the day while she meditated on the arrays and their symbols. When she finally set the scrip aside, happy with her progress, dawn had almost arrived. The last gloom of night was now being serenaded by the gentle sound of rain on vegetation which had started at some point in the night. Closing her eyes, she sat there and meditated properly for an hour, listening to the hiss of rain and the emergent calls of birds in the surrounding parkland, the chirp and croak of frogs in the lake and the occasional *plop* she took to be a fish.

It was only when she felt the air change faintly and the feng shui shift into the most auspicious hour of dawn that she opened her eyes again and exhaled softly. Sana was sat there against another pillar, also meditating quietly. Standing and stretching, she did a few quiet breathing and motion exercises to shift the lethargy from her body. It was a pleasant surprise to find she still remembered most of them, having not really done or needed them in any capacity beyond recreation since she was ten or eleven.

She was about halfway through them when Sana finally stirred and got up herself. Rather than do the exercises, her sister just jumped on the spot for a minute or so and then did a few twists and stretches while she waited for her to finish.

“So what do we do today?” she said after she finished the final form and observed the ritual of bowing to the gate of heaven.

“I guess we finish exploring the parkland and then head towards the other end of the buildings we passed on the way here?” Sana said.

“Yeah, I am still pondering what that old bell said.”

“About sending us to the end of the path?” Sana said with a pensive look.

“Yep, I mean we made it in here… but as far as I can see this is in fact little different from the valley in many respects.”

“Indeed, I guess all we can do is explore it in every direction and then worry about how we tear it up three shovels deep to find out what we need to do to get out of here,” Sana said, holding up a lock of her hair with a grimace.

“There is no point in worrying about that,” she said wryly.

“I know, it’s just annoying me a bit because I can see my reflection for the first time in a good while and I look like I am a walking bird's nest. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m no better,” she pointed out.

“That’s fair, I suppose,” Sana muttered, walking over to the edge of the water.

Kneeling down, she scooped up a handful of the water contemplatively and then just scooped up a few more handfuls and doused her hair a few times, attempting to wash out the muck of days of toil.

“You know…”

“Don’t say it,” Sana said blandly.

Shaking her head, she ran a hand speculatively through her own hair, wincing at how knotted it was. Still, she had no intention of rinsing it in lake water. That would only be momentary relief and it would just dry to be even more matted afterwards. Instead, she spent a few minutes combing it with her fingers and contemplating if she should just cut it all off and pretend to be a nun for a few weeks. The odds of it having grown back by the time they got out of here were pretty good, at the rate events were currently progressing.

~ Sana – Saint Roberta's Academy ~

Much of the rest of that morning was spent discovering that the gardens – probably better described as parkland – were much bigger than they had first appeared and that the academy was divided up into quite a few zones, several of which were very ruined indeed. Sana’s mood was not helped by her sister's vexingly correct assertion that washing your hair in lake water was was only a short-term reprieve. Still, she was loath to waste qi on it with the weird way that the ambient energies were behaving. They did find the source for that during their exploration: a huge symbol array with eighteen mostly unrecognisable characters that was imprinted across half a lawn and a rather ruined building. Its whole purpose, from what she could grasp, seemed to be to make the ambient qi so disturbed that it refused any kind of manipulation.

Elsewhere, it finally became clear that the gate they had ‘entered’ by was effectively the back entrance to the school. The front entrance, which they finally stumbled across around mid-afternoon, was sealed shut in some way and the buildings around it were badly damaged. Two more of the qi-disrupting symbols were fused into the locality, making the surroundings so unpleasant that they couldn’t linger for more than a few minutes before it started to turn the qi in both their bodies into what felt rather like a sack of rats trying to get away.

Equally frustrating, the access to several other parts of the school appeared to be downright impossible. The entrance to the gardens with the pagoda, running across the slope, was sealed by a huge symbol ward that had to be the most complex thing she had ever seen as either a formation or an array, the lands beyond it rendered misty and ethereal. The other great building on that side of the grounds, a sprawling red-brick edifice with sweeping arches and columns, was also unreachable when they attempted to visit it, the misty dells and rolling hills of parkland always manifesting the same boundary-enforcing properties the mists had upon first arriving in the valley below.

The whole endeavour wasn’t totally wasted though, because not only did they find an actual map of the place, but it demonstrated something she had suspected for a while; this wasn’t really on the slopes of the mountain, instead the entire school was in a sprawling higher vale above the foothills they had been seeing before. It also confirmed, in her own mind at least, that the mountains above or beyond them were exerting some really weird visual properties she didn’t feel capable of comprehending. Certainly, there had been no sense of the sprawling nature of the place looking at them and the ruins from below.

“You know,” she said eventually, as they sat on a convenient stone bench looking at the aforementioned map. “It strikes me that we have somehow managed to walk in a giant circle and never cross through the middle of this place?”

“Yeah… some kind of obfuscation? Akin to the way the parkland just never ends if you walk in certain directions?” Arai mused, eating one of the spirit fruits they had found growing on a tree nearby.

“Has to be,” she sighed. “It’s still amazing to me that we can wander around this place so easily in all honesty.”

“Probably because of whatever lingering damage those symbols have done to the qi here,” Arai frowned.

“Probably,” she agreed. “So whatcha poring over there like it’s a decision on the name of your firstborn child?”

Her sister laughed at that and then put the scrip aside with a sigh.

“I was trying to see if the symbols on those disrupting arrays were in the lists we made. I think they are, but it occurs to me at last that there might be a bunch of different systems for them.”

“That seems… kinda obvious,” she said after a moment. “This is clearly an era with a lot of fragmentation between powers, they talked about different systems and had a wide range of interpretations for stuff like formations, talismans, these arrays that are not really formations but somewhere between them and arts, and so on.”

“Yeah… but the ones in the symbols that ruined the qi of this place seem… I dunno… off, somehow,” Arai sighed.

“Could be a by-product of whatever they do?” she suggested, thinking back on what she could remember of Maria talking about it.

“Could be,” Arai said with another sigh.

“Well, there comes a point where you just can’t do anything about it,” she added. “Are those spirit fruits any good?”

“Bit sharp, not poisonous,” Arai said, tossing her one.

Considering it, she eventually took a bite. It was tart and fibrous inside and its qi was largely disturbed like everything else – however, in terms of nutrition, it still provided a remarkable amount of sustenance which amounted to the same thing, just by a more circuitous route.

“Curious,” she said after a few more mouthfuls.

“Indeed, those arrays are clearly aimed at making this entire place inhospitable. But, however they are doing it, it doesn’t seem to affect the natural workings of the plants,” Arai said, staring up at the chilly afternoon sky.

“There are formations that do that aren't there?” she said, thinking back through what she remembered of them.

“Sortov,” her sister agreed.

“That said…” she went on after a moment… “This disruption reminds me more of the turbulence you get when you deliberately try to mess with the feng shui of a place on a fundamental level.”

“Huh… now that you mention it...” her sister said pensively, starting on another fruit.

“Obviously the scale is completely out,” she said, tucking her knees up and sitting cross-legged. “However, that seems the most plausible method for something like this. I’ve seen something similar in gardens in Blue Water City on occasion. Maybe that’s why the symbols feel off?”

“Something about them is making this place deliberately inauspicious with regard to qi gathering, rather than them interfering with the qi itself directly?” her sister said quizzically.

“It’s possible. You can do it with feng shui, with a collapsing element cycle. It has a few useful applications if you’re trying to force mutations in spirit plants. Or if you want to sabotage someone’s expensive garden for kicks. I’ve also heard of it being used by people to sabotage gravesites, or being put on tombs to curse enemies.”

“Seems eminently plausible. It would be a nightmare to fight in this environment though, wouldn’t it be just as hindering to the attackers as the defenders?” her sister mused.

“Depends what their goal was, possibly it only affects people up to a certain realm or something.” she shrugged. “It’s a wild guess, but feng shui affects immortals differently from mortals, for example. Even within spiritual cultivation laws, there is a lot of difference, not to mention a person’s own comprehensions in regards to natural harmony and Daos.”

They sat there in silence for a while longer, just watching the world. She tried considering the disturbances in the qi around them, but whatever it was doing was just outright obscure, so she gave up quite quickly. In any case, focusing on it in too much detail seemed to make the disruptive effects more prominent somehow.

She was stirred out of her reverie of watching two ground squirrels – entirely normal ones, thankfully – fighting over some nuts that had fallen from a tree, by Arai standing up and stretching.

“Shall we try and find this bit we have somehow managed to avoid walking through on your map?” her sister said, looking around them.

…

In truth, she had to admit that the reason why they had walked around it was nothing so mystical as a feng shui alignment or a formation stopping their path. Rather, it was just that the fate-thrashed place was so big that they had decided to walk through the edges of the gardens... and accidentally bypassed it because they had been more interested in finding the outer limits of the place.

The unexplored region was another series of interlinked large buildings in the same sweeping, ornate style, with carvings covering everything and more small statues of little demons and beast-like things than you could shake a stick at. The ground floor was more long halls dedicated, she guessed, to teaching, based on the huge numbers of chairs and benches in them and the raised podiums. What stood out was that things here were a little less ruined. Even the battle damage, minimal as it was, showed signs of recovery. The feeling of not quite being alone in some subtle way returned as well. It made her want to keep looking behind her as they made their way from hall to hall through the lowest level, seeing if there was anything at all that stood out.

“You know, it’s strange,” she remarked after a while, as they stood in one of the halls looking at another set of symbols arrayed around it.

Looking around, what was nagging her had finally become apparent, perhaps because these halls were just better lit than the last ones they had looked at. The weathering wasn’t right.

“Many things are strange here…” her sister said drily.

“Hah, yes, that’s fair, but it is strange. This place has weather, and a lot of it has been open to the elements, yet the interiors of buildings, especially these buildings, while desolate and run down don’t look like they have been exposed in the way they clearly have been.”

“More work of whatever repairs broken furniture?” her sister suggested as she recorded the symbols with her scrip.

“Possibly,” she conceded, “But in this place, it’s even less… than elsewhere.”

“Hmmm,” Arai paused to consider the room again. “That is true, now that you mention it.”

“Also, the weird sense of not being alone is a bit stronger here,” she said as an afterthought.

In the end, it was another hour before they finally found the probable reason for the better condition of this complex: a series of interconnected halls that screamed ‘Scripture Hall’, filled as it was with shelves and books. There was even fabric on the floors for fates’ sakes. It also had what she could only think of as a ‘proper’ preservation formation on it as, despite the broad disarray within, the books were in much better condition than many they had found elsewhere. There was very little dust and nothing in the way of leaves or anything.

The halls themselves had high windows that let in a lot of light, even in the late afternoon. All the halls had two or three levels at least and appeared to be themed around topics or collections of topics. As they wandered around the first set, she found herself wondering how they had avoided the moderate ransacking that appeared to have occurred elsewhere. In the end, they only worked out the answer when she carefully tried to poke one of the glass doors that covered many of the shelves open, only to see a symbol ghost out of it.

With a curse, she dived away, pushing qi into her skin in expectation of some incoming attack, only for nothing to arrive. Peering around the edge of a sturdy wooden counter where she had taken refuge, she watched dully as text below the symbol shifted through a dozen alphabets in short order before settling on Easten.

[Secure Lock – Authority Access Needed]

“Well, that’s a rather dramatic way to say ‘access restricted’,” Arai shuddered.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking around, cursing her own bad judgement in her head.

“Don’t worry about it, no harm was done,” her sister said, helping her up.

“…”

She winced, “There is definitely something about this place that… I dunno, maybe it’s just the abandonment or the lack of overt danger…”

“Or the stress from before finally rebounding,” her sister sighed.

“Yeah…” she said, sitting on a counter and taking a few calming breaths. “I guess it’s that… we have been so on edge about everything for so long…”

“On the bright side, this seems as good a place as any to start seeing if there is anything at all that we can read in here,” her sister mused, looking around at the piles of books scattered over tables.

“Yep. It’s horribly boring but right now I'd commit murder for a dictionary or a childrens’ guide to alphabets.” She agreed, eyeing a series of thin books on the counter beside her.

Picking one up, she noted they all had pictures of a big metal cauldron on the front and a similar-looking title. The different character below was presumably a number, so ten volumes in the same manual or whatever it was.

“Still,” her sister said, looking around. “This place is really unsecured for what seems to have been a scripture pavilion.”

The next ten minutes were spent flipping through books in the increasingly vain hope that there was something written in Easten... anything at all, even a dictionary. Given the prevalence of different languages and scripts she encountered in that time, she was certain there had to be one somewhere. Out of fifty books, she had eventually found a dozen different scripts and writing systems for fates’ sakes, including ones that appeared to track vertically like Imperial Common.

Finally, exasperated, she put down a book that had nothing but pretty pictures of cities and short paragraphs on the opposing pages. “Most of these are about mundane topics, this one is a city guide, and the ones before are a weird collection of tables and numbers and drawings of common animals.”

“This one appears to be a dictionary of plants or similar,” her sister remarked.

She came over and looked at it over her sister’s shoulder as she flipped rapidly through it. There were admittedly beautiful illustrations of flowering plants and trees with what were presumably short descriptions of their uses and habitats. Each spread even had a map, showing a world with five continents and a lot of shaded areas.

“It would probably be quite interesting were it not in some kind of phonetic moon rune alphabet,” her sister remarked drily, sharing her frustrations.

They went back to sorting through books for several more minutes before her sister slammed a hefty tome on a table with a disgusted sigh. “Fates be cursed, now that we DO find a dictionary it’s not in any recognisable language.”

“Ohh?”

“Well, I say unrecognisable, it's translating the flowing loop script into some kind of angular runic script I’ve not seen in anything beyond this book so far,” her sister said, giving it a final disgusted look and turning to another of the piles by a table.

She picked up another one and flipped through it, sighing. Several of the books – like this one – were trying to provide information, she was certain of it. Looking at the words, she got a faint pressure behind her eyes and a sense that it was trying to tell her what was on the page without her even really needing to read it. Certainly, it would be a useful innovation for reading a book fast, but it meant nothing in this case because the language it was presenting them in might as well have been gibberish. Closing it with a wince, she rubbed her temples.

-Yeah, maybe randomly looking through books like this in a place that is clearly a knowledge repository isn’t a smart idea, she thought to herself.

Then again, looking around nothing felt in any way dangerous, or even inauspicious beyond the qi being weird and that sense of not being entirely alone.

“Have you had any books try to put knowledge in your head directly?” she asked eventually.

“No…” her sister said frowning, “You have?”

“Yeah, this one,” she pointed to the one she had just cast aside.

Coming over, her sister opened in and flipped through a few pages before repeating the same action she just had. “Confusing.”

“Yes, rather, it doesn’t feel dangerous though, just…”

“Confusing gibberish,” her sister sighed and leant against the table, staring around them.

“This place is also open and has no obvious wards apart from the ones on the shelves and whatever is preserving the books… it’s really weird honestly. Either they were much freer with knowledge than any sect I’ve ever heard of, or...”

“Or the danger here is so high-level that we are just waltzing past death until we get unlucky,” she grumbled, looking at another book, more carefully this time.

“That’s a cheery thought,” her sister pulled one of the spirit fruits out of her pouch and was about to bite into it when she yelped in shock and jumped backwards.

[Don’t eat in the (unintelligible) Library.]

Words floated in the air before them in glittering gold, shuffling rapidly through letters to arrive at Easten.

[Don’t shout either – respect the silence of others.]

“What in the fates?”

Arai picked herself up, and she cautiously waved her hands through the words in Easten that floated between them. Her hand passed through them with a ripple. There was no sense of qi from them at all that she could see. Were they manifestations of pure intention?

“What a weird thing. Although it makes sense on a level. If you had lots of people eating in here with paper books, it could get bothersome.” Arai mused.

She stared at the words shimmering in the air and then on a whim, in Easten, said, “Help please.”

To her complete shock, a list of words that rapidly formed into phrases in Easten appeared in the air before her.

“What in the fates?” she muttered again, somewhat redundantly.

She waved a hand through it again and it rippled oddly for a second, then reset itself.

“There’s no way that should have worked,” she felt almost compelled to say.

“Admit it, we have known for two days that this place is just weird,” her sister said resignedly, sitting back on the edge of the table.

The list, once it finished resolving itself, was at least mostly straightforward.

- General Section

- Landscape Section

- History Section

- (Unintelligible) Section

- (Unintelligible) Section

- Medicine Section

- …

“General Section,” her sister said speculatively in Easten.

[You are currently in the General Section: Shelf layout locked by (unintelligible) (unintelligible) override]

The new message floated in the air, replacing the list. They both looked around. ‘General’ presumably meant basic or something like it, she guessed.

“Landscape Section,” her sister tried.

[Unrecognised, please redefine.]

“Well that’s not helpful,” she muttered.

“Land Section.”

[Unrecognised…]

“Environment Section."

[Unrecognised…]

…

That continued for a few minutes until they were eventually forced to conclude that whatever it was that was doing this just didn’t recognise some of the words for whatever reason. Landscape, Medicine, Provinces, Sects and a bunch of others all just got an [Unrecognised].

“History Section,” she tried.

[Upper floor, (unintelligible) one, take left stair access, follow gallery. Shelf layout locked….]

“There’s a left staircase?” she looked, wondering how they had missed such a thing given the open layout of this floor.

“We could just climb up?” her sister said dubiously.

“What are the odds there’s a rule about climbing on shelves though?” she pointed out. “I for one don’t want to incur anything regarding restrictions in this place. It clearly has something that controls it, to assume there are no ‘defences’ at all would be idiotic now.”

“Hmmm… true,” her sister said drily. “I wasn’t being serious.”

In the end, it turned out that they had missed the ‘left staircase’ because they were looking in the wrong place entirely. It was in the central hall of the scriptorium that all the other halls seemed to branch off of. Climbing it brought them out on the upper floor, along the upper level of the hall they had just been in, and through into another wide hall. On the way in, she noticed that the wooden sign labelled ‘History Section’ which should have been above the door had been scoured out by someone’s trailing hand at some point in the distant past.

The windows here were nearly floor to ceiling. Various tables dotted the section, with scattered books. They looked for several minutes before finding one in Easten, which appeared to be an account of ancient battles between two factions; some place called Isla Duan and a person or faction led by a Duke Reborin. The prose was flowery beyond compare, even for Easten, and committed the secondary sin of being full of strange metaphors and allusions she couldn’t understand. A few other books in Easten turned out to be similar in fashion, either lists of nobles, histories of generals, sages or rulers or discussions about the way kings ruled or what rights people had in some year or other. A few bits were recognisable to her from listening to the lakeside conversations, but most of it went right over her and her sisters’ heads.

Fortunately the next section, on the other side of the hall, turned out to be ‘Medicine’, despite the glowing text in the air clearly not recognising them asking for it. As she had come to expect at this point, almost none of it was written in Easten. Even so, the books on the tables had a lot of pictures, allowing her to determine that they were largely treatises on curing various injuries. In the middle of the hall, on specially designed desks, were huge books, almost half a metre by half a metre in dimensions, with scale drawings of organs, blood vessels, bone joints and various other aspects of the mortal body. One of the few books they did find in Easten talked about treating diseases that came from bad water. Another was a discussion on theories of managing lands and towns to make occupants less subject to sickness.

After almost an hour of looking through them, the light was finally beginning to fade to the point where it was getting gloomy.

“So shall we call it there and head back to the pavilion in the lotus pond?” she asked, setting aside a book in Easten that talked about the uses of herbs to treat wound infections. “This place seems to be mostly related to mortal medicine.”

“Hmmm… yeah…” her sister agreed, closing one of the big books which she had been recording images from with her scrip. “First though…”

“‘Array’ Section?” her sister asked, using the word that Maria had used to describe the symbol sets.

[Hall 6, ground floor, take two halls left, descend stairs: Shelf layout locked…]

“…”

They stared dully at the shimmering text.

“Okay, that was unexpected,” her sister said after a moment.

She sighed, agreeing.

-Why in the fates didn’t we try that first, she wondered to herself.

It wasn’t that the history and medicine wasn’t interesting… but neither was going to get them out of here, that much was certain.

“Shall we check it out quickly then, before we call it a day?”

“Sure,” she agreed, putting the book back on the table. “It can only be more helpful than here after all.”

On the way there they stumbled across a few more sections that largely confirmed her theory that this was a scriptorium related to mainly ‘mortal’ or ‘intellectual’ things if you could term them that. There was a section, listed as ‘unintelligible’, that turned out to be about money. Another was about reasoned thought, a third was even about ‘religions’. To finally reinforce that conclusion, the ‘Array Section’, which should patently not be a ‘mortal matters’ kind of topic, was situated in a further set of halls. To enter it, they had to pass through another hall with counters that were mainly devoid of books and gave her all the vibes of being a guard post or elders’ station of some sort.

For all that though, the section itself was anti-climactic. There were very few books lying around here. There was, however, a series of desks in the middle of the room and another set of ornate counters, collectively arranged in a large rectangle.

“This is some kind of place to watch over the entire hall?” she mused, looking over the counters and chairs inside the rectangle and also several stacks of books within carved circles on the floor.

“Possibly? Come over here, someone made a really concerted effort to break the protections on the shelves on this side.” Arai called, getting another polite warning for silence for her trouble.

Making her way across to where her sister was, she took in the damage to the shelves. Two had actually been entirely emptied. A third was badly torn up but its ‘protection’, the door in front, was still intact. Someone, or someones, had tried to get into several more but had no success.

“Were these shelves for those grey slabs or something similar?” she looked at the design, which seemed to suggest items placed onto the shelves facing out, rather than stacked front to back like the books were.

“Or there were just less of them.” her sister said, casting around to see if anything had been missed.

“Or there were just less… yes.”

“What was over there?” her sister said, gesturing to where she had been.

“Central area, some kind of hall master’s post, I think. There was a door to access it but I didn’t try before you called me.”

She picked up a book that had been on the floor beside a nearby table and opened it. It contained page after page of what might have been taken for text in a language she couldn’t read, opposite half-page spreads of symbols that looked somewhat like those Elaria had been putting in circles early on. These ones, however, were much simpler. It took two further books and a bit of cross-referencing with her scrip to see why. These were, or so it appeared, simplifications on the simplest of the simple designs that Maria and Eleanora had demonstrated. The script they were written in was, as she continued looking at book after book, almost certainly the ‘common’ one of this place, akin to what Imperial Common was back home. There was also another, more angular script that showed up with a lot of regularity. Both were phonetic from what she could make out, and a few letters here and there in the angular one had similarities to Easten, but that was about it. Neither she nor Arai were anywhere near an expert on that kind of thing, so it was just their wild guess in the end.

Putting another book back on a desk, she leant back and sighed. “My province for a fate-thrashed language dictionary.”

“Preach that Dao,” her sister muttered sourly from nearby.

Idly she pulled out her scrip and started to record one of the books that had symbols, only for a line of ghostly letters to appear in front of her.

[No Recording in Scripture Hall, First Warning, Desist or be Removed]

She stared darkly at the words before her and then tossed the book back on the table and stalked back to the central area where her sister was poking around the central room within the hall, that had counters facing in all directions.

“What’s up?” her sister asked, presumably noting her annoyed body language.

“You can’t record things in here, I got a warning trying to use my scrip to image a book, claimed I would be… ‘Removed’, which is not at all ominous.”

“Huh, well that’s handy to know at least, and yes, not at all ominous,” her sister said, putting a book down.

“This area is all just… I dunno, without knowing anything that’s written in them I get the impression it’s mainly a place where they had a huge catalogue of the symbols.”

“From what I could see, the ones here are much more basic compared to any we saw before,” she noted.

“I had noted that, yes,” Arai said, staring at another book as if it had offended her in some way.

“As far as I can see, there is very little of actual use in this place at all, all that remains is the stuff inside here really,” Arai said a bit sadly.

“Is the door even open?” she said, eyeing it speculatively.

Taking a chair, her sister poked it and it swung open without any restriction.

Inside, they could see several stacks of grey slabs, a few other, more ornate books on shelves under the counter and some somewhat more plush chairs.

“How come this place hasn’t had its—”

“This is off-limits to visitors. If you trespass here you will be forcibly removed from the Library.”

A shimmering figure coalesced out of nowhere and stood with arms folded, staring at her. A middle-aged man in appearance, wearing a dark grey and brown robe edged with gold.

“Oh… it’s called a Library…” she said, more in shock than anything else.

Reality caught up with her, with both of them, and they jumped back.

“W..what are you?” her sister said, mostly managing not to stutter in shock.

“I am the Administrative Spirit for Hall Six…. where are your Library visiting tokens?” The shimmering figure asked in an authoritative tone.

Warily, she took another step back and rapidly signed: “This is bad, is it like the other one? Run?”

“Run, worry later.” her sister signed back.

“Uh, there has been a misunder—”

“Ah, you snuck in. That’s against the rules. What are they doing at the front desk, letting random mortals waltz in here from the peasantry below?”

-Peasantry? she thought dully, then remembered that they did probably look like wandering vagrants at this point.

The… spirit gave a haughty sniff. “Come with me. We will sort this out immediately.”

Both of them had half turned, intending to use their movement arts as best they could to get out of there, when they were grasped by an unseen force and rooted to the spot. The spirit walked out of the room and whatever gripped them dragged both of them after it as it strode back through the halls. It looked more and more perplexed as it did so, however, before eventually trailing off in the ‘General’ hall, looking at the overall sense of chaotic abandonment. Arriving at the very first hall with its long counters to either side and tables of scattered books in the middle, it stared around dully, giving off a distinct impression that this was not what it was meant to be seeing.

[Librarian Administration Spirit, Appear]

The old man spoke authoritatively, only for nothing whatsoever to appear. He paced back and forth for a few moments before speaking again.

[Wing Management Spirits?]

The words Hall Spirit Six spoke were quiet, but somehow travelled throughout the whole Library in a way the previous utterance had not. Seconds later, a few figures appeared out of nowhere, all dressed in the same way as the old man, though beyond that their appearances varied wildly. A young woman with her hair plaited, an elderly lady with a severe nose and a weird hairstyle and two middle-aged men, one with a plaited beard and one with a bushy beard.

They all stared around, looking a bit nonplussed, before the old woman finally spoke. “Did they all run off somewhere? I’ve never known it to be this quiet, even during that quarantine for the (unintelligible) accident in the teaching (unintelligible).”

It took her a second to realise that she was hearing them speak without actually hearing them speak which was rather unnerving. It did explain though, why words were registering as ‘unintelligible’ in her head, as she was hearing things she didn’t recognise at all. It was helpful, and yet somewhat not, in a way she couldn’t articulate.

“Err…”

She was about to speak up, because it was clear that this was now well beyond their control, so being polite and inoffensive was probably the only way they were extricating themselves from this. However, Arai beat her to it.

“Honoured Spirit Guardians, this place was abandoned when we arrived here.”

“What is going on here!” another voice hissed, and a dour-faced youth with dark hair, wearing a white and blue robe, appeared abruptly at the entrance of the Library.

All the other spirits turned to look at him consideringly before turning their backs to him as if he was a piece of furniture.

“What is going on here?” the spirit repeated flatly. “Who are these two?”

“Ah, Spirit One, your authority does not extend here?" Hall Spirit Six said absently.

“They appear to be trespassers without entry tokens to the Academy. As the spirit in charge of general security, I believe I should be dealing with them?”

“Perhaps, but this is the Library, the Security Spirits don’t have authority here,” one of the middle-aged men, the one with a plaited beard, said equally absently.

“So you are stating that because they are trespassing in the Library, without tokens, you will deal with them first, then I will deal with them after?” Security Spirit One was sounding a bit bored now.

“That is the protocol,” the old woman said simply.

“What are you going to do with us?” she asked, her voice quavering a bit.

She was very pleased that she managed to say that without sounding more than slightly scared. If these spirits were anything like the power of the other one, she and Arai might as well be mortals who walked into an immortal mansion unawares. This was outside either of their expectations by a long margin, and not in any ways that were good.

“You get banned and can’t enter for a day. Don’t you know the rules?” the old woman sniffed.

“And for a month for trespassing into the administrators’ areas without proper permission,” Hall Spirit Six added.

“What rules? There’s nobody here, and they aren't written down anywhere?” Arai pointed out, mustering her courage.

All the spirits stared around at the general disarray. “It’s just lunch break?” one of the younger ones ventured a trifle… hopefully, she thought.

“It’s getting dark outside,” the old woman said pointedly.

“Huh, so it is,” the young woman said, effecting mild surprise. “How didn’t I notice that?”

“You live in the basement,” the other young woman pointed out.

“Yes, actually… where is everyone?” Hall Spirit Six asked suspiciously, turning to Security Spirit One.

“It’s just dinner time…” Spirit One sniffed. “Are you done with them? I’ll see that they are dealt with for wide-scale trespass.”

“There aren't any students though.” the middle-aged man with a bushy beard said, folding his arms and frowning. “Not even any monitors... there should be monitors.”

“Also, someone stole a bunch of array stele from my hall,” Hall Spirit Six mused, eyeing the general disarray again.

“They also stole?” Security Spirit One said, yawning.

“Not these two, they are far too weak,” Hall Spirit Six said, dismissing them both absently.

The old woman walked over to the wall and considered the glass doors. “They are locked down by Academy authority.”

“There is a wide-scale override in progress, yes,” Security Spirit One said with a nod.

“In any case, thank you all of you for apprehending these two, I’ll take them with me and deal with them appropriately.” It waved a hand, and she felt something ominous tug at her for a second.

Panicking, she tried to muster something to resist, futile as it was. Getting banned from the Library was one thing, but her intuition said that the penalty for trespassing on the Academy grounds might be quite a bit worse than a few days being barred from the Library.

To her surprise though, it was Hall Spirit Six who interceded. “That’s not how we do things, there is a proper process, and you are just a Security Spirit.”

“Emergency (unintelligible) are in effect, so it’s at my discretion as a Security Spirit.” Security Spirit One said blandly.

“First, we must understand what has occurred here,” Hall Spirit Six said, frowning. “Unless this is a Headmaster’s Override?”

“…”

“It isn’t,” Security Spirit One said a bit sourly.

“In that case, we should confer with the others first.” the old woman said. “I’m not fond of (unintelligible) at the best of times but we are bound by rules regarding visitors.”

Spirit One shrugged and went on “But they are (unintelligible), not (unintelligible), they have no (unintelligible) and they look like thieves. No self-respecting (unintelligible) would be dressed like that. So, they are my problem. Thank you for bringing them here. I shall deal with them approp—”

[Hall Spirits’ Meeting Assemble]

The old woman spoke in much the same way that Hall Spirit Six had, but her voice resonated far more stridently through the whole wing. More spirits appeared: several young women in their teens, a very old man who looked like a walking sheet of paper, three more middle-aged men, indistinguishable beyond their hairstyles, and a youthful woman with a sisterly appearance. All of them eyed the spirits already there with respect... except for the Security Spirit, she noted. That feeling appeared mutual, because the Security Spirit's expression also flickered to ‘gloomy’ for a second before returning to its default one of boredom.

All of them turned to stare at the two of them.

“Right,” the severe elderly woman said, turning to the two of them, still suspended in the air.

“Please explain what you meant by ‘abandoned’.”

Given no other real alternative, she found herself acknowledging a bit sadly that once you skimmed over all the specific aspects of anything vaguely suspicious, their account of their ‘exploration’ of here, and in the valley, took surprisingly little time to recount. It wasn’t lying, she was wary of that on the assumption that any of these spirits might have ways to tell truth and falsehood. Instead, it involved a lot of abbreviation by strategic omission of everything of specific import. The spirits stared at them with varying degrees of bemusement initially, but that turned to confusion and then to mild panic by the time they talked about their experience in Evergrove.

“If this place was attacked, why are we still here…?” one of the young women asked, sounding confused.

“Logically, this entire place should have been smashed like an egg under a sledgehammer if someone brought enough power to actually break through the great wards of the city.”

“Err… we said this place shifts about a lot…” she pointed out

“Yes, but that’s preposterous,” The old lady sniffed. “That would mean this entire area was suffering some high-level dimensional distortion or—”

“That is indeed quite preposterous, old woman.” Spirit One cut in. “Based on my understanding, anyway.”

“In any case, they are clearly Heaven's Path practitioners,” the pale old man added.

“They are?” the old lady and a few others echoed, looking at them.

“I don’t sense any recognisable practical art from them though,” she said after a considered pause.

“You’re practitioners?” one of the men said with a frown… “I don’t sense any recognisable practical law on you.”

Cursing the pale old man in her heart, they shared a look.

“Well, you see, we live in a place called West Flower Picking Town, and we hunt spiritual herbs for a living. So… one day…”

By the time they were half done fleshing out the background to their earlier explanation, taking great pains as they did so to stress ignorance and harmlessness in all things, the shadows had grown quite long in the hall. This didn’t seem to bother the Hall Spirits at first, but eventually Hall Spirit Six did try to turn the lights on, muttering about ambience. When nothing happened, as she had mostly expected, there was some muted discussion and one of the young women vanished, requiring their story to be suspended until she returned twenty minutes later, looking annoyed, and turned the lights on properly.

“What was wrong?” Hall Spirit Six said in concern, while Spirit One just sat there looking bored.

“Main (unintelligible) was severed from the core (unintelligible), had to shift over to the second (unintelligible) and make a new lighting array. Was a huge pain.”

The woman scowled and kicked her foot through a desk, “It’s not within my (unintelligible), but there are almost no Maintenance Spirits awake for some reason. All those that are awake are either hideously damaged – such that they are basically bleeding out on the (unintelligible) floor – or focused completely on basic maintenance routines to ensure the integrity of the buildings or bound furniture.”

“Well, you oversee all the (unintelligible) (unintelligible) reference (unintelligible)” the elderly woman said. “There’re probably Masters who know less about that than you do.”

“Still doesn’t stop it being a huge pain in my spirit core,” The young woman sniffed and sat on a desk, kicking her heels against it softly.

“You had just gotten to the bit where you were attacked by people and fell off a cliff…” she said brightly. “Please continue…”

“…”

Once they had finally finished recounting an extended version of their previous tale, the spirits sat around looking vexed for a while.

Eventually she asked, as nicely as she could muster, “Could you Honourable Spirits maybe… release us from whatever it is you did? Even if we trespassed, it was without ill intent.”

As a plea to lenience, it was the best route she could see out of this now. All of them appeared to be fairly logical, sapient beings with the possible exception of the Security Spirit, who definitely gave her bad vibes.

“Oh…” Hall Spirit Six waved a hand, and they dropped to the floor.

“What do we do about these two?” the old man creaked.

“So long as they use the Library appropriately and don’t damage the books, they can do what they like as far as I can see.” The other young woman said with a shrug. “This is a circumstance outside any clear protocol, so we get to decide?”

“But they don’t have any kind of…. authority?” the old woman shivered.

“I think we should just seal the place up and go back to sleep.” Spirit One said eventually.

“Ahh... That would be boring,” whined the young female spirit – who had turned out to be the spirit of one of the unintelligible sections, overseeing Hall Nine – playfully. “And anyway, what good is a library if people don’t actually use it. Then it’s no better than a bloody bank harmony of some rich kid.”

The old woman nodded pensively and tapped her foot on the ground. “I don’t think your metaphor is quite right dear, but I agree – A library with no one to use it is a poor thing.”

“As the spirit in charge of general oversight and security—” Security Spirit One tried to speak up but was cut off by the old man.

“In any case, this is this, and that is that. They are apologetic. We can just provide them with an access pass from behind the desk and consider it a warning. There are other more important matters.”

“There are,” one of the middle-aged men agreed.

“You can start by unlocking the shelves.” The pale old man said, eyeing Security Spirit One. “I’ve almost two-thirds of my construct stuck in my shelves at the moment, and it’s an (unintelligible) pain in my core, boy.”

“I also have parts of my (unintelligible) I cannot access. While I was asleep, it was okay. But now that we are awake it’s annoying,” the sisterly woman said, with a smile that never reached her eyes.

“And besides, we are all equals here,” one of the younger girls, with blonde hair tied back with a red ribbon, said with a serene grin.

“No politics!” almost every other spirit snapped in unison.

Sat on the side of this bizarre unfolding of events, she could only watch in silence and consider if it was worth trying to make a run for it.

-Probably not just yet, on balance, her instincts told her.

Even if she and her Arai managed to get out of the Library, the spirits seemed able to exit at will, if the explanation given by the young woman from Hall Nine was right. Neither of them had been able to resist the spirit from the array section at all. Curiously, the symbols that were merged with them had also sunk into absolute obscurity.

“Something about this doesn’t sit right.” Arai signed to her unobtrusively.

“Yeah, the security ghost, not surprised at the damage,” she signed back in agreement.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to unlock the shelves.” Security Spirit One was arguing with the others.

The more she listened to it, the more off she found its tone. The others were all fairly emotive, but it seemed more like it had heard the idea of being vexed but wasn’t quite sure what it should sound like. It also seemed to have a very dim view of the other spirits, which was reciprocated, but in some way that didn’t quite seem to be for the same reasons. The Security Spirit was clearly looking down on them, holding itself to have higher status somehow within the school, yet the Hall Spirits' dislike of it in return suggested something deeper, like they found its actual existence faintly offensive?

“Once exit, straight valley,” she signed.

“Agree,” was all she got back.

“I find that hard to believe!” the old woman eventually slapped a hand on a counter.

“You may be a class one (unintelligible) spirit. And wing (unintelligible). Yes, you are no Hall Master like us and your authority, while high, is only akin to a senior teacher. But in this area I know you DO have the authority, given the current external hierarchy, and you don’t look that badly damaged.”

The middle-aged spirit with a plaited beard nodded in agreement, crossing his arms. “If the academy was attacked, and it was all sealed down, you should have override authority.”

“….the (unintelligible) are damaged, and I was also down during the attack for some reason.” Spirit One said at last, sounding like someone who wanted to come across as vexatiously inconvenienced in this one thing, but again, hadn’t quite understood what that tone implied.

“Anyway. They cannot stay here. There are rules.” Something, Spirit One presumably, grasped them and pushed them firmly out of the Library, sending them sprawling in the corridor outside.

“Wait!” Hall Spirit Six said, narrowing his eyes abruptly. “We haven’t—”

The others were also halfway across the room to the doorway when a seal, with text below it in Easten, appeared over the library entrance.

{Library Closed for Emergency Mending}

The sound from inside was immediately cut off as they were thrown over the outer threshold of the hall, out into the courtyard beyond, and a new seal hung in the air covering that door as well.

{Access by Security Authority Only}

‘We leave now.’ she signed as she scrambled up.

‘Yes. Something not right.’ Arai replied

There was no question of subtlety. She pushed as much qi as she dared into her meridians and they both hurtled across the lawn, blurring through corridors towards the gate they had entered by. Bursting out of the building and into the parkland, which was misty in the cold night air, she exhaled and—

[It seems my command authority is still lacking in the Library.]

A voice whispered all around them in the gloom. Realisation settled in her stomach like a lead brick. The strange sense of being watched had absolutely been this spirit, or maybe the Maintenance Spirits that were mentioned.

[You run fast.]

[Out here, however, it works just fine.]

Everything froze around them even as the hair on her neck stood on end.

[You monkeys woke those mediocre things up. I was nearly done refining them all, now they suspect. Now it will be bothersome.]

-Shit, shit, fate-thrashed monkeyshit, she cursed to herself.

[For that I will make you pay.]

Something pushed down on her, making her thoughts sluggish for a disturbing second before it passed.

[Ah.]

[How vexing. Those security procedures are broken on a fundamental level.]

[The Aggression Restriction Protocols are still active.]

[Void Protocol is broken.]

[Incursion Protocol is inactive.]

[Disjunction is still in effect.]

[Vexing.]

[Saddening.]

[Still…]

[Transportation is possible.]

[Ha. Ha. Ha.]

Her blood ran colder still at the unnatural way the voice laughed. It was totally devoid of any kind of normal intonation now, more reminiscent of the way the bell had spoken initially before it moderated its voice subtly. Even then, that had only had a faint resonance. This, on the other hand, felt downright oppressive.

[I can still send you into that place, it seems.]

[With your level you will not survive down there.]

-Shit, nameless-cursed monkeyshit of a heavenly fate, may your mother disown you and your father strike you from your family annals…

Her thoughts became a stream of invective as the words of the spirit echoed around them. Suddenly she was very glad she had made no mention of any formations and such in the explanations, strictly to—

[Oh.]

Her heart skipped several beats and sank as it belatedly occurred to her that a thing this powerful might well be able to read her inner thoughts...

[...Perhaps this is an opportunity?]

-Uhhh???

On one level she was confused by its random aside, and the same time got a distinct impression that those words... hadn't really been for them?

-What opportunity?

In any case, it seemed it couldn't see her inner thoughts, which was a tiny spark of relief.-

-Or it just doesn't care, a part of her mumbled.

-Gee thanks inner me, way to make this better, she remonstrated with herself.

[Oh well...]

The spirit’s next, very mocking, words, however, made her blood run properly cold and her heart skip a beat.

[You won’t be lonely, ha. Ha. Ha. That’s where I put all the others after all.]

Something shifted around her, around them. Everything went dark and then she was hanging in the air for a sickening second, still grasping her sister's arm.

[That is odd.]

[It has been left to go wild for... oh… 219,291,581 years 6 months 17 days 23 minutes and 9 seconds.]

[Maybe the time-measuring array that tracks the link is broken?]

[Concerning... has that...?]

[...]

Whatever was holding them finally relinquished its grip and they fell, hitting silty water with a splash. Fetid sludge splashed around her even as she struggled to her feet. It was impossible not to gasp at the smell of rot and decay, and then equally impossible to not regret having just done so, because the smell was horrible.

The colours of the world reordered themselves before her and she could finally see… nothing much at all. Wincing, she pushed a bit of qi into her ocular meridians and the world shifted into some kind of visible spectrum, revealing the mould-covered walls and damp stonework of a tunnel, stretching in both directions. Around her she could see murky water which was, her senses told her, about knee-deep.