The silence stretched, thick with Salih's suspicion and Serena's panic. Then, awkwardly, he cleared his throat, staring fixedly at a bookshelf to the side.
"Look," he began, the words stiff. "You don't... have to pretend you have no desire to go back. To your own world. Or to... people there." He shifted his weight. "Whoever this 'Virgil' is... even across worlds, he'll at least have his memories of you. And you of him. That's something."
Serena's mind conjured an image: Virgil, her, a tender embrace. It was so violently incongruous with the reality—a psychic parasite, a usurper drowning in blood—that her stomach lurched. She fought to keep her face neutral, afraid any expression would be a scream.
Salih, misinterpreting her stillness as profound grief, visibly cringed at his own attempt at comfort. "Right. Well. I have to go," he announced, his tone suddenly, unnaturally polite. "I need to draft the report for the council regarding your... probationary plan. I will present it tonight. Do not assume approval is guaranteed. Stay... on your toes."
With a jerky nod that refused to meet her eyes, he turned and almost fled between the shelves, leaving Serena alone with the ghost of a lover that never was.
She stood for a moment, a mix of profound relief and lingering nausea warring within her. 'Dodged a bullet.'
Shaking her head, she selected the simplest book she could find from the linguistics section: 'First Steps in Lyric', adorned with cheerful illustrations of animals and household objects. She took it to a table by a sun-drenched window.
Before opening it, her thoughts spiraled back to Virgil. Salih's ignorance of the name was a puzzle. Given the scale of Virgil's crimes—the epoch of genocide, slavery, systemic cruelty on a planetary scale—how could he not be a historical fixture?
The mana here was identical in every intricacy to his memories; this was where he was from. She felt its truth in her bones, a dreadful familiarity.
Perhaps he's remembered by another title. An epithet. The Blood-Emperor. The Soul-Devourer. Or, the more hopeful thought: he had been completely forgotten. Time, vast and healing, had buried him, aided by people like Ama who built better systems in the ruins. This led her thoughts to other figures from Virgil's memories—Mei, and the resistance.
Were they remembered? She hoped so. Her mind lingered on Mei, the brilliant betrayer. A name she'd only known as a ghost in another's memory.
"Mei," she whispered aloud, testing the syllable. It was a good name.
Salih had mentioned this library was a gift from a Witch Coven on the 'New Continent'. In Virgil's time, Mei had been known, famously, as 'the Witch', the acknowledged pinnacle of female mages. Perhaps it was merely a coincidence involving naming.
She shook her head. Antikleia first. Legacy-hunting second. Mei and any remnants of the resistance are a distant third. They most likely won't be able to help her.
She opened the primer. The translation spell for text was different. The spoken version worked on live intent, emotion, and thought-forms she could sense and transmute. Written words were mainly static. This version required tracing the history of the object, sensing the residual thoughts of the author poured into the script, along with past readers'. It was forensic, and without a reference point—a Rosetta Stone of linked concepts—it was like trying to decipher a complex lock by listening to echoes.
She examined the text. It bore no resemblance to Virgil's language, nor to English—unsurprisingly. She cast the spell, a delicate, controlled probe of mana. The effort was immense. The book was most likely a new copy, many generations removed from the original author, and unused. The residual intent was faint, diluted, like a whisper in a storm.
Transmutation and precise tracing had never been Virgil's greatest strengths; he was a master of overwhelming force and soul-deep predation, not subtle archaeology. She could extract the information another way—but it would require using Virgil's true magic. She didn't know if she could. She certainly didn't want to.
This would take time. She considered asking Salih for help but dismissed it immediately, recalling his awkward flight. No, she would grind through this herself. It was better this way. Learning too fast, as with the flight, would only raise dangerous questions. Slow, steady, and independent was safer.
The world narrowed to the page, the faint shimmer of her magic brushing against the ghost of intent in each symbol, pairing it with the illustrated concept: sun, snow fox, house, mother. It was painstaking mental archaeology.
Four hours vanished. She had traced through the entire primer twice. First pass: raw memorization, including forging neural links between symbol-shape, sound-concept, and image. Second pass: analysis, looking for patterns, grammatical hints. It was an inefficient way to learn a language.
She now possessed a jumbled mental pile of vocabulary—she knew the letters, syllables, and words like 'snow' and 'happy' and 'to run'—but no framework to assemble them into coherent thought. It was like having some bricks for a house but no mortar or blueprint. Tomorrow, she decided, 'I will find a dictionary. Memorize that. Maybe multiple. Then tackle grammar.'
A gentle but firm tap on her shoulder broke her concentration. She looked up. Salih stood over her, his expression one of profound, exasperated annoyance. Behind him, peeking from behind a shelf, were two wide-eyed individuals she assumed were librarians.
"Do you," Salih asked, his voice dangerously calm, "have any idea what you've been doing wrong for the past four hours?"
Serena's mind raced. Had she damaged the book? Is it secretly important? She glanced down at the pristine primer.
"No?" she said, using Lyric, tentative and confused.
He reached out and pinched her earlobe, not painfully, but with the long-suffering gesture of a tutor dealing with a catastrophically oblivious student. "You have been leaking mana. The entire library has been buzzing with your magic. They," he jabbed a thumb at the lurking librarians, "were too terrified to tell you to stop."
'Leaking mana?'
The humiliation was instant and total.
She pictured it: her, sitting there, intellectually diligent, while farting clouds of disruptive energy, driving everyone away. Her face burned.
[I am so sorry!] she broadcast, the thought laced with acute mortification, looking at the librarians. [I didn't know! I will never do it again!]
The librarians flinched at the telepathy but seemed somewhat mollified by the sheer, genuine distress in it. They nodded, then retreated quickly.
Salih released her ear, sighing. "Do you know how to contain your aura? Or to keep your magical emissions to yourself?"
[No,] she admitted, shrinking in her seat. 'That's a thing now?'
"Of course not," he muttered. "Fine. Let's have a lesson tomorrow, after the magic evaluation: Aura Suppression 101. Consider it a prerequisite for existing in polite society." He straightened up. "On a marginally more positive note, the council approved your probation. Your community service is officially on. Granted, you pass the test tomorrow." He gave her a final, withering look. "Now, please, stop polluting the learning environment. We're leaving."