by Jade Alters
“That they are, daughter,” Horace tells me, his affect flat. I feel eyes on me from every side. The eyes of comrades, by choice or circumstance. For them, for now, I try to leave it at that. Chief Botan takes the opportunity to step in, drawing a massive iron key from a satchel beside him. A gorgeous, deep crimson gem is set in its base. Its teeth glisten with a jet black sheen, like it was only just forged.
“Stay together. Find the Mystic Core. Never forget that the Forbidden Shelves want you to fail. Suspect treachery of everything,” Botan announces. He about-faces to the Archives section, wherein tomes are lined up that detail the history of the Grand Library itself. Chief Botan slides a thick-spined book from its squashed resting place. When the resultant puff of dust clears, we can see a diamond-shaped hole in the back of the bookshelf. Botan clicks his key into place and steps back.
Sorceress Lily steps up next. The removal of the book to the left of Botan’s unveils yet another odd-shaped keyhole. The Sorceress of the Six Rivers Witches and Wizards draws a similar key, with a massive deposit of amethyst set in it. She clicks it into place. Horace moves a book more to the right and slips his own dark, glossy key into place. The crystal embedded in it is translucent, with cloudlike mineral deposits within. A pearl. That I’ve never seen it before makes me hate him all the more. Yet another well-guarded family secret he saw fit to keep from Serge and me. Horace steps back from the shelf. Only when all three keys are in place do they turn, and with no help from the hands of those who left them. Each key turns by itself. A symphony of gearwork percussion begins.
The entire Grand Library comes alive with the drum and cymbal of mechanisms in the wall. Desks shift on their own. Books rumble off of shelves. Lights dim and brighten in a massive shift of magical energy that sends goosebumped ripples through everyone present. I stammer out from the center of the room with the rest of the eight when the cobbles of the floor begin to shift. Like a child’s puzzle box, solved at last, chunks of stone rearrange themselves in the center of the room. They click down, then fold away. Some reposition themselves as stairs. Others vanish completely. It happens so fast, it almost looks like the floor is dissolving.
When the last of the magical machinations pops into its final resting place, the eerie silence is accompanied by a cool breath coming up from the void in the floor. I lean over the side of the hole, along with Helena and Cece beside me. We can see down as far as a few spiraling steps. Beyond that, there’s only shadow. How this can be, could only be explained by the power of a truly immense trick. The Grand Library is on the bottom floor of the Academy, and the Prismatic Ballroom isn’t assembled this time of year. If anything, we should be seeing the prison blocks that housed Darius not too long ago. But what waits below… we can’t see a damn thing about it, yet it houses an even more foreboding air.
“Good luck, all of you,” Dragonlord Thise’s voice snaps us all back to attention. She stands with the rest of the Council and Kyrie, who will remain behind in wait for us. “If anything goes wrong, try to get a message to us, somehow. The Forbidden Shelves will remain unsealed for twenty-four hours. Beyond that… we won’t be able to help you.”
There’s nothing to be said to that. No reply to inspire confidence. No vow to return. So I just nod and step down onto the top stair to the Forbidden Shelves. Seven others step into rank behind me, just as ready to give it all they have. To find the answer to the Fiend problem, or perhaps be lost forever within the illusions in the heart of the Academy’s most ancient wisdom. I begin the descent into darkness, followed by Hoster, Darius, Helena, Rock, Cece, Bart, and River. The Grand Library rises with each step further.
The first step I take down past where I can see the Grand Library and the others waiting there is like a step into another world. The way we came from is swallowed entirely by darkness. Even when I look straight up, I can’t find the way back, only the last few stairs I descended, and those close at my back. But, with the disappearance of the Academy above comes the revelation of everything I couldn’t see from the other side. The eternal plunge of the Forbidden Shelves.
We appear to be inside a four-walled pillar of actual bookshelves. All of them are too far to reach, even for our best jumper. From the confines of our tightly spiraling staircase, we can only marvel at it all as we descend. There are no lamps or torches, yet everything is plain to see in a mysterious sort of glow that emanates from everywhere and nowhere at once. Hundreds upon thousands of faded, patchy, multicolor tomes cascade down the infinitely falling walls of bookshelves. I stare down the center gap in our staircase but can’t even hope to estimate how far down it goes. We’ve already descended at least eight flights.
“I… didn’t expect it to be so literal,” Hoster comments. His voice bounces through the hollow air, around us, above us, and below.
“It can’t be this simple,” Bart agrees. “Stay vigilant for breaks in the illusion, or traps.” Obviously. I see Cece keeps company with others of her own mental caliber. I wince when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look back to find none other than the daughter of Dorian herself, smirking a silent dare at me.
“Think you can find a chink in the armor of your ancestors?” Cece asks. It pains me to see in her face that she genuinely means it as a way to lighten the mood. I only feel the weight heavier on my shoulders. This is all because of her. Because she kidnapped Helena. Because she helped the Kyrie open the doors to Realms they didn’t understand. Because she left. She was never my favorite person, but seeing her here, trying to lighten things like she used to…
“Maybe, if I have some quiet,” I bite back. Cece’s eyes betray a slight sign of remorse just before she peels her hand away from me.
“Alright, alright,” she surrenders. Cece falls back to walk beside River and Bart, eyes wandering the endless shelves that cascade down around us. The tremor, however, flings her forward right back into me.
“What the hell?” someone cries out, but I don’t even have time to recognize the voice. The quake triggers a momentous shift in the energy around us when I’d counted on things happening the other way around. I only sense the intention of the Forbidden Shelves’ trick too late. The stairs splinter apart beneath us.
“Emery!” Helena screams. Her hand flings out for mine in the chaos of tumbling bodies. Our fingers just miss one another.
“Hang tight!” I scream to everyone. I clutch my eyes shut, reading the currents of energy through the mysterious trick light. I try to gather it in. I try to bind the stairs back together like puzzle pieces, but the light I need betrays me. It refracts and reflects in a pre-designed way to keep me from any kind of trick. Our staircase shatters into giant hunks. Our eight is split in three, plunging into the eternal dark and away from one another.
The stone dissolves to dust beneath me. Endless shadow snaps up to swallow me. Alone. I’ll never-
“Gotcha!” Cece seizes the back of my collar with all of her Dragon-strength. She hoists me up onto a huge island of dislodged stairs. We lock arms to plummet together.
Deep Water
Hoster,
The Forbidden Shelves, Drain Chamber
Everything flings around so wildly, I can hardly tell which direction is up. Trying to track where anyone else ended up is pointless. All I can do is crouch as low to my feeble little stair as possible, and hold on. I cling to the sides of it on my knees, bracing hard against the turbulence of my plunge into darkness. Everything broke apart so quickly, I didn’t even have time to scream.
The urge to do so leaves me, slowly, to be replaced by a creeping curiosity. I’m slowing down. I cling to the sides of the stair long after my wild dive has turned to a gentle float. There’s no predicting what the Forbidden Shelves will jostle us with next. Us, I think to myself instinctually, when really it might just be me now.
Eventually, I work up the courage to unclamp my fingers from the cold, rocky sides of my uncanny vessel. I drift downwards on a fractured hunk of stone as if I’m a flea on a feather, in a gentle breeze. The eternal
waterfall of bookshelves still walls me in. If my eyes aren’t playing tricks on me, they’re closing in, too. With my slow descent past each level of bookshelves, there’s less and less room for my little stair to drift around.
I shuffle to the edge and stare down into the abyss that awaits me. In it, though, I’m surprised to find something new. Something we couldn’t see from so high up, when the staircase was whole. A tiny, blue glimmer of light. It’s like the reflection of a precious stone, still so small at the bottom of this book-lined well. But it’s not bottomless. The question now, as the corridor downwards shrinks around me, is what’s at the bottom? That, and where in the hell the others could be.
Then it strikes me. I throw my head back to gaze into the darkness from whence I came. Sure enough, a downpour of staircase fragments cascades in slow motion, just like my own. They drift into the bookshelf walls and one another. They flip and twirl from collisions with one another. I squint at them, and between them, for any sign of my companions. Even if they’re just bodies. That last part makes me shudder almost too hard to call out. But I have to be sure. I… can’t be the only one left.
“He-hello?” I call up into the darkness.
“He-hello!” a distorted echo of my voice booms back at me. With each quieter reiteration, I somehow sound less human, more desperate. I sound exactly how I feel. Empty. Horrified. Why in the hell did I volunteer to come here? The ancestral booby trap put together by the Dalshaks, the Ahwahneechee, the Six Rivers Witches and Warlocks… this is so over my head! The hell was I think-
“Hoster?” booms down a voice I know. It’s never been one at the top of my list of people I’d like to hear- well, not until now. Now the sound of anything familiar sends a wave of warmth under my goosebumped skin.
“Rock! You’re here!” I shout back before I can contain myself. “Is there anyone else with you?” I’m answered by the poke of Rock’s head over the side of a falling stair, high above me.
“Not that I see!” he calls back. However, directly following this, another head pokes out from above another stair, considerably higher than Rock. Higher than I can see accurately. The head speaks with something resembling a woman’s voice, but I can’t make out a thing she says. Rock shouts something back to her with minor irritation, which I also don’t understand since he’s facing up and away. Then he turns back down to me. “What are we headed for?”
I lean over the side of my stair, expecting to have to squint. The last thing I expect is to be able to make it out clearly. But, suddenly, it soars up at me with incredible speed. I fall faster with each fraction of a second. My eyes hardly have time to decode what they’re seeing before it’s upon me, or rather I’m upon it. I dig my fingernails into the sides of my stair to brace for impact and look straight up to scream,
“Water!”
My stony vehicle craters the previously peaceful surface of a shimmering teal pool. My knees bounce and buckle with the impact, but I hardly have time to wince. After the initial slap, my stair immediately begins to sink. I wobble to my feet on a chaotic platform, tossed about by waves. I sprint to the edge of the sinking stone, climbing the slightest incline of it to safety. At the end of it, I’m just close enough to clear the gap to solid ground. I lunge. My shoes scrape off the stone, hover over the churning blue well, then scuff across a new, safer platform.
A shower of other dislodged stairs plunk into the water behind me. The endless crash is deafening. The explosion of powerful waves douses me, then shoves me into the book-lined walls. I struggle against the kick of the maelstrom to turn around and brace my back against the shelves. From there, I watch piece after piece of the spiral staircase blast water across the wall on impact, then shoot down into its glowing depths. From this shower of stone emerges a body. Rock had the foresight to jump before his ride hit the water, and so stumbles across the platform around the edge of the pool, right into me. I put out my arms to catch him. It’s a group effort to keep Rock on his feet, but no group could have done the same for River Murtagh. When she, the woman I saw so high above, leaps from her stair, she crashes straight into us. All three of us tangle up in a heap on the floor.
“You couldn’t have jumped anywhere else?” Rock complains. He dislodges a leg from between my now sore asscheeks. River’s too busy pulling her breasts back from my face to answer right away. We don’t make eye contact until some of the rosy color has drained from both our cheeks. Despite his annoyance, Rock offers us both a hand.
“Why would I do that…” River pants as she pulls herself up, “when there was a perfectly good landing pad standing right here?” Rock grumbles something to himself and sighs. Then he turns, along with River and me, to face the eerie pool that occupies most of the room. We watch a few idle stair chunks plop down into it from above, but the bulk of the shower is done. The rising crests of waves begin to fade. With the beginning of something like calm settling over the odd chamber, my eyes climb inevitably upwards. There’s no trace there ever was a staircase anymore. Just an infinite shaft of bookcases and darkness.
“Where… did the others end up?” I ask the shadow. I watch for more stairs. I watch for bodies. I stare up into the void, only to receive a lack of answers even grimmer than the potential truth. I trace a little sprinkle of dust as it floats down to the surface of the calming water. I watch how quickly it vanishes beneath the settling tide, despite the light dancing through it. “You don’t think… they got here before us?” I gulp. Rock and River join me in my deep gaze at the water for a moment, before the former shakes his head.
“No. The Shelves must have divided us. This is all an illusion. It has to be,” Rock refuses. “I mean, it’s not like there’s actually enough space under the Academy for all this to be there.”
“Valid point,” I admit.
“Illusion or not, we’re stuck,” River sighs, She turns around to face the countless tomes that line the wall around our platform. It skirts the perimeter of the chamber with wide, wooden planks like a dock. She takes a few idle, creaky steps along the edge and puts her hand on a book. “It’s real for us. We have to work through it.” River tugs the spine of the book out just an inch from its shelf. A tremor shoots through our platform, instantly.
“Quit it!” Rock shouts. River releases the book, which pulls itself right back into place on its shelf but not before the water level of the pool rises. When the quaking stops, it laps the walls a few inches closer to our platform of safety.
“Oh, like you could have known touching the books would mess with the water!” River snips when the threat of death is less apparent. Rock’s forehead wrinkles with his attempt to squish all the leaking aggression back inside the cracks of his skull. Of all people… I had to get stuck with these two?
“I could have told you that touching anything would mess with something! You heard the Chief. This place is a living maze with one job: keep us from forbidden knowledge,” Rock digs in. Each word deepens the cringe of my teeth in my cheeks, but he can’t seem to stop himself. “You thought you were just going to be able to pull a book off a shelf with no consequences?”
“Of course I heard the Chief. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a thought of my own every once in a while,” River simmers. A vein bulges with an influx of blood on Rock’s forehead.
“So let’s not touch anything,” I realize just in time. I sensed a punch flying soon before both Shifters seem to suddenly remember I’m in the room too. “We know what’s above us, and we can’t go back… but maybe we can go down. I can check it out, and I don’t even have to get wet.” Rock and River exchange dumbfounded looks, then realize what I mean at once.
“Solid, little Astral,” River admits.
“Hoster,” I correct her. “And thanks.” I put my back against the bookshelves and slide down to a comfortable sit. I close my eyes to focus on the essence of energy within my physical vessel.
“Send a signal up to your body if something goes wrong. Raise your right arm,” I hear Rock’s voice echo in the
distant dark. Him and his damn chivalry. The guy doesn’t even like me. I nod, then nod off, as my Astral form rises into the Blue Plane ever-present around us.
I give a brief glance back to my body, an old habit to make sure I’ve actually projected. In truth, I know the days when I might just have stood up and thought I’d projected are long behind me. I haven’t made an amateur mistake like that in over a year. The time I spend in the Blue Plane now is willing, and often about the same in length as my time in the waking world. So, in my comfortable, floating blue wisp form, I descend.
I don’t feel a thing when I pass through the bobbing surface of the water. Not so much as a chill. It feels just like air. I float down amongst drifting stone, from the size of pebbles to enormous pieces I only recognize as stairs because I saw them as one piece. Otherwise, I might have guessed they were chunks of something’s foundation. I weave around them as I descend, despite the fact I could just pass through them, for a better view of the glimmering depths. I squint through a messy spiral of bubbles, cast up by all the fallen stone. Through straining eyes, I can just barely make out the bottom.
The remains of the entry stairs lay in mounds across a bed of gemstone. The bottom of the pool is lined with a layer of perfectly smooth blue mineral that seems to glow all on its own. It makes it hard to look directly at it. This does, however, bring heavy contrast to anything different from the crystal bottom of the pool. I drift from one dark spot to the next, to investigate every anomaly I can find. Most of it turns out to be crumbled bits of stairs, stacked up like the ruins of a small village.
But, somewhere close to the center of the pool, is something slightly different. I solidify the tips of my fingers to feel it. Smooth. This pillar, easily doubling me in size, is gilded in the same precious stone as the bottom of the pool, though it’s just plain stone beneath. It stands straight up from the bottom of the pool, without a crack or blemish. This didn’t fall. This was down here already. I float down to the base of it. I squeeze my nose into the corner of where it meets with the floor for the closest look I can get. Sure enough, I peer a little gap in the floor, on the other side of the pillar’s crystal coating. A drain.
