The silver robes lead us deeper and up into the Archives, past what look like blocks of countless dizzying dungeon cells and up, up into a winding staircase lined with white mercury stripes. They’ve figured out how to make the lights into glass bars, instead of the glass lamps I’m used to from Vetris, and they wind around the walls in efficient, stark, otherworldly patterns, almost like blocky, precise veins in a body. This place feels…ancient. Deep and old, like the valkerax. But the technology screams of bleeding-edge newness—newer than even Breych with its airships and ultra-efficient white mercury lights—and the contrast makes me uneasy more than anything.

“It’s like a fortress,” Lucien marvels.

The leader speaks again, voice echoing. “We are about to enter the central library ward. Please keep your voices down to a minimum, and refrain from touching anything—”

“The usual,” Malachite grumbles.

“And, if you would, do not look directly at the machinery. It makes them rather uncomfortable.”

Malachite and Lucien and I all share a wary look. Uncomfortable? Since when do machines feel comfort?

Fione is still unmoved, her gaze straight ahead and fixed on the woman she follows stalwartly up the stairs. Not knowing what to expect, I lace my hand into Lucien’s, relieved when he laces his fingers in mine. Together. Together, at the very least.

The stairs finally flatten out, the view widening into a cavernous room of black glass. “Cavernous” doesn’t really cut it—this place is massive. The ceiling is so tall it utterly melts into forever-darkness. You could fit a hundred of the arenas where I trained Evlorasin into this one space. But the polymaths of the Black Archives have decided to fill every available inch of this seemingly infinite space with books. Not in the usual bookshelves, though—rather, the entire shell of the cavern is carved with hollows in which books are perfectly slotted. Thousands—no, millions. There are scrolls, too, stored in the traditional Avellish style—which is to say strung from copper rods by flax strands bookended with wooden slats. Dozens of scrolls hang from just one strand, looking like a string of butterfly cocoons swaying gently in an airless breeze.

And then there are the things that don’t even look like books—rotating copper orbs with specifically patterned indents, crosscuts of gelatin the size of walls with ink spirals of all colors frozen within them. What I presume to be polymaths in silver robes gather around these contraptions, peering into them and turning them with handles this way and that, as if…reading them? But that’s not possible—those things don’t even look like language. Language is with ink and words. Stranger still, no matter how high the bookshelves extend up, no matter the daunting distance the scrolls hang from, there are no ladders. But that—that doesn’t make any sense.

Malachite echoes my sentiments.