Frozen Kin, a Forbidden Library

The ice gave a hunter back a father and a brother he had never known. And deep in a library that killed its readers, a woman spat out the god that had ridden her mind, and kept a shadow of her own in its place.

Jamal and the wolf-shaped, triplicate Draz broke the last of the Skeletal Dragon, and Sylvie drew the seed of magic out of it so that it toppled dead — and the sparks it shed took to Jamal and trailed after him like a chain of little lights. Then the two frozen simiah thawed, and gave names. Vanco, the hard elder who wore a token of Heyou's old Syndicate — Draz's father. And Zevin, the younger, who greeted Draz as a sibling he had half-remembered all his life. Both of them had been sent to the Athenaeum to learn how Heyou, a construct, had been made.

Vanco gave Heyou back a device drawn from his own chest — the core that had once given him his motion — and, still bent on the heist that had frozen him here, agreed to go deeper with Heyou's help. Draz struck his father for leaving him, and got cold steel and a colder word for it; only later, still thawing, did Vanco own that necessity had split the family, each parent taking one child, and that he had long since given up on ever seeing his son again.

Inola pointed out the far regions on her world-map, and Sylvie said she might reach them quickly enough — if only she knew, with any accuracy, what they looked like. There were paintings in the Forbidden Library, Inola said, and other works, that might serve. So they broke into it — a well of shelves without a bottom, walked by Spectral Librarians and watched over by a vast Floating Eye that blasted Draz the moment he raised his voice.

And climbing down the shelves, Sylvie brought up at last the thing she had swallowed out of the dead dean: it came out of her mouth as a swarm of shrieking imps, and let her go, and flung itself off through the stacks at the eye — the Godshard gone out of her. Amid the wreck of it — Vanco off a ledge, Zevin throwing a rope he had forgotten to hold the far end of — Draz ran the walls to catch his father, and Heyou lifted a librarian's book clean out of its spectral hands. And Jamal ended the eye with a single thrown shard, a blast the like of which none of them had seen, that shattered it and rained its fluids down over the whole company.

Going down past the light into the dark below it, Sylvie took a tome someone had nailed shut, and came on a faceless stone thing; she tried to wake it first with a gift of Splendor, and it would not take — but a piece of her own Umbra did, and the thing woke at the giving, and came up after her. It named itself Speaker.

Their own heist unfinished, Vanco and Zevin turned back down into the dark with a promise to return; and Inola, who had brought them this far, had slipped away in the chaos and was nowhere to be found. Out at last, Draz spent the long rest teaching the Runt God to greet him gently; Heyou put the stolen ghost-book into Sylvie's hands; and the company lay down with Dagga and Pinchie to read what the vaults had given them. A father and a brother found on the ice, a god cast out, a guide vanished into the deep — and far places still waiting that Sylvie could reach only if she could first be shown their true faces.