Kaos followed his mother down the corridor while she told him about the party his father, who was apparently in the middle of a meeting with nobles about a party, and the guest of honor was him.
Kaos said nothing about it. He hadn't even gotten to know the person walking beside him yet, and they wanted to throw him a party. He knew he'd have to get through it eventually. That didn't mean he had to like it.
"So where are we going?"
"The library."
That worked. He needed to understand this world, and the dining hall hadn't exactly been a crash course.
The door at the end of the corridor was red, with a thin pale blue veil stretched across it. He slowed as they got close.
"What is that?"
Valera pressed her palm flat against it and the veil shimmered, light pulling inward from its edges until it collapsed and dissolved into the floor.
Kaos stared at the empty doorway for a second. He wanted to know how that worked, whether it was tied to her specifically, whether he could do it. Valera was already waving him through so he tucked the questions away and followed.
Inside, he stopped.
The library looked like it had no business being inside the castle. He had seen the building from the outside when his soul arrived and what he was looking at now didn't match. The shelves stretched back far enough that there was no far wall, just rows of books fading into dim light, and the floor between them was grass. Actual grass. Flowers too, small and scattered, like the library had made a private decision at some point to also be a garden. He couldn't find the ceiling no matter where he looked.
He was still looking when someone stepped in front of them and dropped to her knees.
Tall, with long black hair falling past her ankles and spreading across the grass around her, eyes that didn't match, one red and one black. A wide smile on her face even while kneeling.
"My queen."
Something settled into his thoughts when she spoke, warm and uninvited, and all he wanted was to hear her voice again. Just that, just the sound of it.
His vision drifted toward pink at the edges.
Then the familiar feeling hit, hollow and spreading outward through his chest the same way it had that morning before his legs gave out, and whatever had gotten into his head was gone. He blinked and looked at the girl in front of him. He had taken a step closer to his mother without deciding to.
That was weird.
"Elena."
Valera said it once, and the girl pressed her forehead all the way to the ground, shoulders pulling tight.
"I'm sorry for whatever happened, my queen. Please forgive me."
"You didn't know, so it's fine." Valera gestured toward Kaos. "But this is my son."
Elena raised her head. Her eyes moved between the two of them and her expression shifted, something going out of it fast.
"I didn't know, my queen. I should have controlled my powers. I'll accept any punishment you give me."
A pause.
"You may leave. I'll deal with you later."
Elena was on her feet and moving between the shelves before the sentence finished. She looked back at Kaos once from somewhere in the rows, then she was gone, and the sound of her footsteps faded until the library was quiet again.
He waited a beat.
"What was that?"
"Why weren't you affected by her charm?"
"I was," he said. "Then i felt something in my chest shift and then it was gone."
Valera smiled and kept walking. He fell into step beside her.
"She's a succubus dragon. Her voice alone is enough to make most people do whatever she wants and they don't even notice it's happening." A sideways glance. "Though I'm not surprised you broke through it. You're the first and only person in all eight universes to carry the Chaos element."
Kaos kept his face neutral.
He was already thinking about when he'd have time to test that.
He was curious about the other races too. If each universe held more than fifty thousand planets, the number of species spread across all eight was something his brain just kept sliding off. He let it go for now. There would be time.
~
The center of the library opened into a wide clearing, all grass and soft light from somewhere above, flowers scattered through it the same way they were between the shelves. It felt less like a room and more like somewhere someone built specifically to make you want to stay.
He could sleep here.
Valera sat down and patted the spot beside her.
Kaos hesitated, then sat, because she was his mother and she had been waiting five years for him to open his eyes, and he didn't want her efforts to be worthless.
She raised one hand and five books drifted out from different shelves and settled beside them in the grass.
She opened one and held it toward him. "Can you read this?"
He looked. The symbols on the page weren't anything he recognized, some sitting diagonal, some in colors he hadn't seen used as letters before, the whole thing suggesting a system without giving him any way into it.
She didn't wait for him to say no. She slid closer until their knees were touching and laid the book across both of them. "We'll start with the basics." She pointed to the first symbol. "This sound is 'ah.' Wherever you see it with another letter it always sounds the same, doesn't matter the word." Her finger moved. "This one is 'buh.' The stroke goes up and that's how you tell."
He traced it with his finger.
"Good. Now this one."
He studied the next symbol for a while, tried to find the direction of the stroke, tried to find the pattern, but nothing came. He kept looking and the longer he looked the less it gave him. He could feel the frustration building and kept it off his face.
"It's okay not to know," she said. "That's the point of being here."
He nodded and looked at the symbol again.
They worked through the page like that, her pointing and him studying, neither of them in a hurry. Some symbols clicked quickly. Others he stared at until she guided his hand to show him the stroke angle, and once he had it the answer was obvious in the way things only are after the fact. After a while she pointed to a short word made up of letters they had already covered.
He sounded each one out slowly. "Food."
He looked up at her.
She laughed. "That's right. Good job."
"Thank you," Kaos said.
She looked at him and something crossed her face, brief, and then she turned back to the page, her finger already on the next symbol.
Kaos watched the angle she held the book at, toward him instead of herself, adjusted so he could see it straight on. Her attention hadn't moved from the page once since they sat down except to check if he was keeping up.
"Alright that's enough learning letters let's talk about your element"