Chapter 24
The Restricted Wing
He went on the fourteenth night.
He'd been thinking about it since the orientation -- since the administrator had mentioned the restricted archive with the particular emphasis of someone listing a rule they expected to be broken. The tone wasn't warning so much as it was a note for the record: we told you, when you get caught, we told you.
He'd spent the intervening time learning the library's layout. The Academy's main library occupied the ground and first floors of the central tower and was accessible to all students during standard hours. The restricted wing was on the second floor, behind a mana-locked gate at the end of the east corridor. Bronze-level lock from what he could feel when he walked past it during the day -- not strong, just consistent. Designed to keep honest people out, not determined ones.
He went at the third hour after midnight.
The corridor was empty. The lock took about thirty seconds -- he pressed his palm against the mana-seal and drew from it slowly, carefully, the way Fen had showed him deliberate release worked in reverse. The seal depleted rather than disengaged, the enchantment starved of the mana that kept it active, and the gate swung open with a sound like a sigh.
The restricted wing smelled different from the main library. Older. The particular smell of documents that had been kept in low-mana environments to preserve them -- slightly dry, slightly cold, the smell of deliberate preservation.
He didn't use a light. The ambient mana from the enchantments in the walls was enough for him to navigate by now, though he couldn't have explained how that worked to anyone else.
He moved through the stacks methodically. Most of the restricted material was exactly what you'd expect: advanced spellwork documentation, historical records with political sensitivity, financial archives. He wasn't interested in those.
He was looking for something specific. He wasn't sure what, exactly. Something about the Runestone system. Something about null results. Something about the category of ability that the standard measurement framework didn't have a name for.
He found the relevant section in the third aisle -- a shelf of older texts, some of them considerably older, with a layer of dust that suggested they weren't consulted frequently. Most had titles. A few had their titles scraped off, the leather of the spine showing the raw marks where a blade had removed the text.
He reached for one of the untitled ones.
It crumbled.
Not dramatically -- not dust and nothing, but a collapse, the binding giving way, the pages folding into themselves, the whole thing becoming structurally incoherent in his hand before he'd fully gripped it. He pulled his hand back and the remnants settled onto the shelf in a loose pile of fragmented material.
He stared at it.
The book hadn't been old enough to be that fragile. He'd handled pre-Saint era documents at the monastery that were in better condition. Whatever had happened to this one was specific. Either it had been damaged by something over a long time, or --
Or it had been destroyed by contact with him.
He looked at the other untitled spines. There were seven of them.
He did not touch any of them.
He stood in the restricted archive and thought about what it meant for a book to crumble in his hand, and whether the thing that crumbled it was the same thing that cracked the Runestone, and whether the information inside those books was gone now or whether gone was even the right concept for what had happened to it.
Then he heard footsteps in the main library below.
He moved quickly and quietly back through the wing, pulled the gate shut behind him, and pressed his palm to the lock to restore the mana seal as best he could. It wasn't perfect -- the seal felt thinner than it had before -- but it would pass a casual inspection.
He was halfway back to the dormitory when he realized: the crumbled book. He'd left the fragments on the shelf.
He stopped.
He went back to bed.
There was nothing he could do about it now, and panicking about things you couldn't change was the most wasteful thing a person could do with their energy.
He lay in the dark and thought about seven books with their titles scraped off, and one of them in fragments on a shelf, and whatever had been written inside them that someone had decided shouldn't have a name anymore.