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The curative power of time is often overstated. However, old arguments do sometimes become dust beneath the march of years. Feuds often survive all recollection of their cause but are on rare occasions outlived by some of the participants.

Life’s Too Short , by Methuselah Adamspawn

Evar

The act of being throttled drew Mayland’s attention back to Evar, and once more Mayland’s will imposed itself on the library’s blood running through his brother’s veins. Evar’s grip loosened and Mayland pulled free.

The weight of the presence at Evar’s back, combined with his siblings’ focus in that direction, turned him around. The matter of Mayland’s crimes, and the control he held over Evar’s body, would have to wait.

Another round of thunder, the loudest yet, shattered the air, and for a time no speech was possible. It seemed, in the ringing aftermath, that perhaps the blast had been the crescendo. Certainly, the torrents of falling pages began to slow.

Somehow a lone figure, robed, cowled, and bearing a staff, had crossed the undulating surface of loose paper, advancing through the thickening page-fall to get within twenty yards of the canith without even Starval noticing. And Starval noticed everything . Only now as the paper downfall thinned was the newcomer’s presence obvious.

Evar eyed the stranger speculatively. The wizard who had earlier emerged from the rain of falling pages had turned out to be some piece of rogue fiction, trying to snare him into an archetypal story. This new arrival looked more obviously false, and also rather short. “It’s another story, right?” Evar muttered to nobody in particular.

The stranger proved to have remarkable hearing. “If I am, I’m a cautionary tale.”

Mayland took a step back, worry, perhaps even fear, taking possession of his face. Evar realised that he couldn’t remember ever seeing Mayland look worried.

“You took quite a risk returning to the vaults, Mayland.” It wasn’t a canith voice, or a human one, but something more guttural.

“Shit…” Starval drew his blades. Clovis kept her hands at her sides, still undecided in the matter of friend or foe.

Mayland managed to affect nonchalance and shrugged. “We fell.” He looked up, far above the newcomer’s head. “Besides, the view is better from down here.”

Evar followed his brother’s gaze and there, in the black heavens where there had been nothing before, was a red star. Beneath it, picked out in flecks of crimson by ten thousand falling pages, a pillar of light, as if the star were pouring almost all of its brightness into gravity’s arms.

“And lo, the star in the east which has led me hence,” the cowled stranger said, as if reciting a line.

“It’s only just appeared,” Evar protested. “It hasn’t led anyone anywhere.”

“And yet here you are.” The stranger lifted their head and offered a narrow slice of a smile.

Evar saw the big square teeth, the golden fur touched with grey covering cheeks and chin. “Ganar,” he breathed. Then more loudly, “Who are you?” And in the moment’s silence that followed, he turned to face his brothers. “Who is this? Both of you know.”

The ganar pulled back its cowl. To Evar it looked much like the automata that had plagued their travels through the library, but it felt presumptuous to accuse the first ganar he’d met of being the author of that misfortune.

“My name is Celcha. You’ve met my brother, Hellet. These two”—she gestured at Starval and Mayland—“ruined my life. But they also gave me a life by engineering my transfer from the Arthran mines to the library.” She looked from each sibling to the next, dark eyes giving nothing away. “What I can’t forgive”—the pagescape surged around them as if the graveyard of books had become a rolling sea—“is that they made me kill an entire city, from babies born to slavery to the queen born to her crown.”

“Made?” Mayland struggled to keep his feet as the ground rose and fell beneath him. The fear that had been in his face didn’t make it to his voice.

“Tricked me. Tricked us.” Celcha’s growl, very different to a canith’s, reverberated through the air as though she were the size of her largest avatar. The page-storm’s intensity picked up again, swirling around them.

“You knew you were going to poison them! That was always going to be a dangerous business,” Mayland shouted over the flutter and flap. “The stain on my hands doesn’t clean yours!”

Starval had one arm raised, ready to throw his knife. Evar caught his wrist. “Don’t.”

Evar knew the ganar before him had spent a lifetime trying to engineer her misplaced revenge on him and Livira. A revenge properly aimed at Mayland and to a lesser extent, Starval. And whilst he didn’t want to see his brothers die for that crime, the ganar deserved a better answer than a dagger in the throat.

The ganar advanced on them along a path that stayed level and untroubled by the storm. A final spasm of the page-quake threw Mayland to his hands and knees. The rest of them staggered but kept their feet. Clovis’s hand found the hilt of her white sword.

“I can’t forgive.” Celcha levelled her driftwood staff at Mayland, a gnarled thing, polished by age. “But I’ve watched the bitter harvest of revenge and the years since have tempered that old anger. Even exacted upon the correct targets, revenge…however tempting”—and here she looked meaningfully from Mayland to Starval and let her gaze linger on each—“is no longer my goal. I continue my journey to my own centre, and of necessity to the centre of the library.”

“There’s a centre?” Evar blinked.

“Of course there’s not a centre,” Mayland snapped. “It’s a quest to distract the gullible. It’s exactly what happened to you with that story trope just now. The old wizard comes to tell you you’re special, and that you need to save the world. It’s just like that, only on a grander scale. This ganar”—he waved a hand towards Celcha without sparing her a glance—“thinks she’s drained the library dry of every secret but the last. Instead, she’s been duped by a fiction that’s escaped the vaults. She thinks she’s some sort of mystic, and all that’s happened is she’s fallen for the simplest—”

“She knows more than you do?” Clovis asked. “It sounds like that’s what you’re saying.”

Evar couldn’t help snorting. Celcha barked something that might have been a laugh.

“I’m looking for a way to destroy the library,” Mayland said, ignoring his sister. “And that doesn’t start with finding the centre. It starts here. Or, more precisely”—he pointed to the red star—“up there!”

“On that we’re agreed.” Celcha raised her staff towards the star. “That’s why I’m here and where I’m heading.” She started to walk off across the paper dunes. “You may accompany me.”

Mayland stood, watching her go with a sour expression, as if few things might displease him more than being forgiven.

“Well?” Starval prompted. Starval had never had a problem with being forgiven. It was his standard operating procedure: to do what he wanted and then ask forgiveness afterwards. “What now?”

Mayland released a long sigh and, without comment, set off after the ganar.

“Wait!” Evar hurried after Celcha too. “I don’t care about stars and centres. I just want to get back to the library. Or wherever Livira is. The rest of it can go hang.”

“Oh, we’re going back to the library all right.” Celcha, who seemed ridiculously short now that Evar had drawn level with her, leaned on her staff as they climbed a rise. Despite her height, and the fact that she’d spent a large chunk of her life planning his and Livira’s demise, Evar’s sense of her was one of gravitas: she reminded him of Yute. Both of them wise and at the same time sad, as if the former bred the latter. “That’s the biggest chink I’ve seen, and I’ve been around awhile.” She nodded ahead to the star and the column of light beneath it. “Once we get close it’ll suck us all up, whether we want it to or not. It’s the mess on the other side you should be worrying about. Something bad happened to put that hole there. Something very bad.”

Evar resigned himself to following. His questions had multiplied beyond hope of answers. And when it came down to it, what he wanted most were results rather than answers. He wanted to find Livira and know she was safe. He wanted to apologise for leaving her behind when he went after Arpix, without saying that he wouldn’t do it again. Whether he had that right or not, he would always take the bullet in her place.

Evar and Clovis kept pace with Celcha, flanking the ganar. Clovis had her sword out now, and her eyes to the crests of each rise. It seemed Evar’s sister’s desire to get back matched his own. She’d been prepared to go to war for Arpix, but that wasn’t setting the bar particularly high for Clovis. The fact that she’d retreated to save Evar spoke volumes though, and he would not forget that particular testimonial to the depth of the bond between them.

Clovis looked serious now, focused, nervous even. Not the eager, fierce anticipation of combat he would have expected if it were simply a second chance to wage war on those who had slaughtered her people. Clovis saw Evar glancing at her and bared her teeth, but he knew her too well to miss the true feelings behind the bravado. Clovis was worried. Worried for Arpix. Worried they would be too late. And if he was honest, Evar was too. He’d never had a friend before, save Livira who was both that and more. But Arpix, he realised, was his first male friend, and as soon as he was sure of Livira’s safety, Evar would be turning all his thoughts towards aiding Clovis in rescuing him.

Celcha led on, circumventing the largest page-dunes, and steering clear of dust lakes in which she said a cart and horses could sink from sight even as the ropes to haul them out were being unslung. Evar noticed that the hazy, half-seen backgrounds that had seemed to shift when studied and to change when his attention wandered from them, were now closer though no less strange. To their left marched a grey jungle, its papery leaves slowly taking on a dark greenish-grey if he stared at them. A quick diversion would see him in among those trees, chasing whatever it was that could be glimpsed flitting between thick trunks. To his right the narrow streets and tiled roofs of some town where shadowy figures haunted the alleys—humans maybe, to judge from their walk.

“Hey…”

“What?” Clovis turned his way.

“I don’t…know.” For a moment he could almost have sworn he saw Kerrol vanish down one of those alleyways, following a pale human man and a human girl, towering over the pair.

“Don’t look,” Mayland instructed. “It’s very easy to be led astray here. And those who do, don’t come back.”

As the column of light beneath the star drew ever closer, so did the dreamlike surroundings, and the terrain became harder to navigate, as if the crimson ray had struck down with physical force that had created larger and larger page-dunes, like the ripples in a pond where a stone has fallen.

A strange vibration began to fill the air, a buzzing that made Evar lick his teeth. The beam seemed to touch down just over the next, and largest yet, page-dune, the light spreading to paint the ground blood-red and drench every member of their small group in crimson.

Celcha turned, seeking a path over the last obstacle, and as she did, something made Evar look up, squinting into the glare of the distant star.

“That can’t be good.” Beside him Starval looked too, shading his eyes.

The light flickered then faltered and was swallowed away. The descending page cloud looked like a heavy fluid poured into a lighter one, billowing, pluming, plunging down, spreading out, plunging again, spreading and spreading.

A descending ceiling of seething paper promised to engulf them within moments.

“Grab hold of each other,” Celcha instructed, her voice urgent.

And then, with a rustling whoof , everything was falling pages.

“Clovis?” The endless fall of paper swallowed Evar’s shout. “Starval?”

They’d been right beside him. Clovis to his left, Starval just behind. Yet now as he waded forward, climbing to keep from being buried, he felt utterly alone.

The vaults’ twilight, as sourceless as the library’s illumination, could not be cut off by the page-fall as the star’s red glare had been, and even amid the downpour Evar could see. His gaze caught for a moment on the most recent page to fill his reaching hand. Amazed, he snatched another from the air, then another.

“Livira?” It was her handwriting that sprawled across the paper. He scooped up a handful and flicked them away, one by one, spitting out an errant page that tried to enter his open mouth. “It’s not possible.” But surely a single book couldn’t account for the heaps around him, let alone the greater storm still descending. He reached for another as it fell.

Livira’s carelessly graceful hand occupied the page from one side to the other, devouring space with loops and curls. Brushing aside more page-fall, he started to read. “You’re sure they can’t see us?” As he read them the words sounded in his head, not in his voice but in one that carried a familiar edge.

Evar looked up. The storm had gone. Everything had gone. A startlingly blue sky reached across a wide expanse of churned earth spotted with the shattered stumps of trees. He turned in the direction the voice had seemed to come from. At first, he saw nothing but more wasteland. His eyes felt strange, his vision split into overlapping fields that offered confusing multiples of everything. But…there! Shimmering like a heat haze…there was something. He tilted his head, tried to squint. Faint, ghostly, but there. Not more than a hundred yards away, coming into sharper view as he focused. Four human females: Livira in her librarian’s robe, flanked by two women of similar age in tattered dresses, and at the fore, a child, Yute’s daughter, white as her father.

“You! Stop!” Someone behind him, barking the words like orders.

Evar started forward, trying to shout Livira’s name. He felt strange, barely in control of his body, but he kept his fractured vision focused on Livira. It’s me! he wanted to shout but somehow couldn’t. Livira should be running to his arms, not just standing there, watching with what seemed like a mixture of trepidation and distaste. Her two friends, one he recognised from Yute’s group, looked terrified, barely able to keep from sprinting away. The girl from Yute’s group—Meelan’s sister—looked as scared as when they’d first met and he’d been the first canith she’d ever seen up close, certainly the first not trying to kill her.

Evar readied himself to run. The four humans might be ghosts, just as he and Livira had been. If they flew away, he’d never catch them.

“Stop!” That voice again. Evar ignored it, only to find his whole body locked tight, utterly paralysed.

“Back in line!” the unseen master called, and Evar’s body answered. He turned and found himself unable even to flinch at the shock discovery that he was bracketed on either side by a full-grown skeer. Worse, he was marching back towards a column of hundreds of the things.

At the edge of his sight, he spotted the small figure that seemed to be the source of the commands. A ganar, a tiny, harmless ganar in charge of maybe two hundred skeer. It made no sense. What made even less sense was the growing realisation that not only was he not in command of his body, his body wasn’t his at all. With shuddering disgust Evar understood that some of the white limbs churning the dirt around him were in fact…his.

In desperation, Evar screamed Livira’s name. The cry emerged as nothing but message-scent, but it was enough to draw the scrutiny of the skeer to either side of him.

The skeer marched on. Evar couldn’t even turn his head to see Livira.

“This is a dream, a nightmare.” Understanding arrived late. “I’m in her story.” It should have been obvious but the sight of Livira just yards away had bound him to the narrative and the horror of finding himself a skeer had taken over, keeping his mind too occupied to ask the important questions instead of the immediate ones. “It’s just a story.”

But how had Livira written a tale about skeer? When had she written it? How could he escape it? He ignored the many-legged advance that surrounded him and tried to remember where he’d come from. The star! The page-fall!

Evar focused on the memory of the descending page-storm that had engulfed him and his siblings. He remembered the blackness as it had tried to smother him. And in that blind memory a sucking blackness drew him down a well of its own making.

Evar had hoped to escape, but when the darkness let him go, it wasn’t back into the page-storm.

Where? Where am I? What am I? He was no longer a skeer. He was something else, somewhere else, something worse. He lay on a table in a chamber lit by a pulsing crimson light, a chamber that looked more grown than made. Ganar moved around him, their pelts bloody in the light.

Evar had been drawn into Livira’s stories before, but they had never been like this. They had been charming, sometimes sad, but always a place to be with her, to explore together and to deepen his understanding of this being who had taken hold of his heart. But this was something else. Some dark and tainted fever-dream. He couldn’t move, not even to turn his head. At least when he had been the skeer he had been alone in the shell of that great beast, slave to the limitations of its body but at the helm in all other regards. Here he felt as though he were adrift in a small open boat on a vast black sea, heaved high and laid low by the swell, and that he was far from alone, for the sea was a mind much larger than his, and the huge waves were only the outer ripples of its pain and of its anger.