The Celsian Vaults

The Athenaeum had hoarded what it could of a dying world, and set its dead to guard the hoard. In the coldest room at the bottom of it, a hunter found two frozen faces he had never met, and knew.

In the thin safety of the half-relit Sacred Pyre — a small, steady ring of light, with worse things waiting just past it, and a full pyre a week's work for Dagga and twenty hands — The Enduring Lesser Lights caught their breath. Draz shed the bird-shape as though nothing had happened, and remembered none of the flying. And Sylvie poured the whole of it into Inola's ear — Drosven's Gate, Ygva's plan, her own torn-out heart — and the Keeper of Splendor found it fit her strangest knowledge too closely to wave off, and granted that the compound was no longer safe. Heyou parcelled out his plunder: a raw arcane shard to Draz, a fire-jar and a Lore Keeper tome to Jamal, a portal-seed and a draught of stability to Sylvie.

Draz went to the Runt God and put his arms about its leg, and came away moving in triplicate — three of him a half-beat out of step, hard to watch — and left Pinchie to keep the god company. Sylvie tried to reach Ygva in meditation, and the Godshard tore loose in her mind like a thing running wild through a library, scattering her focus and slipping away whenever she turned on it; no dream would come.

Inola led them down into The Stacks — a warehouse-deep hoard of the world's salvaged knowledge — past columns carved with faces and stone Library Sentinels that fired on Heyou for lifting unauthorized things, so that he went invisible and flattened himself against the pillars. Sylvie found a bench of stoneweaver focus-stones, and took up one that answered her hand as her own dead stone no longer would; and in the testing of it she learned the truth of her lost craft — that her stone-magic had always run on instinct, not the book-knowledge she had drilled into herself as a wizard.

A ghostly face spoke to Draz from a mannequin of old armor and named him a survivor of "the basement below," where he and his father had gone — and drew the old thread tight again: the father and the twins he had never known, said to have gone west to the Amber Reach. In the Map Room Inola showed them a chart of the known world and the Athenaeum's craft with it — that power gathers in shapes a careful eye can predict, and that under the Runt God's shield the party might reach the far, guarded places the archivists never could — and gave Heyou the log of an expedition that had lost sixty of its eighty.

The Stoneheart Peaks shelves had been stripped near bare — one broken-spined book naming Ulmira’s Step, another gutted of its middle — though Sylvie struck a lode of old-gods theology to carry off and study. And in the lowest room, past a mounted skeletal dragon, Draz found two frozen simiah. Heyou's suppressor-pendant thawed the elder of them, who wore a token of Heyou's old Syndicate, and who looked at Draz and asked why he wore the face of his child.

As the second one began to thaw, the mounted Skeletal Dragon woke and came off its stand at them. Draz took the shape of a wolf; Jamal cracked its tail; and there the night left them — in the cold room at the bottom of the vaults, with the thawing dead, and a dragon of bone, and the father and sibling Draz had never known found.