LSRO: Chapter 133 - Gates of Halschius (Patreon)

Weeee I did it. I should catch back up on my productivity by next week sometime and resume posting in the mornings. Today was my first completely fever free day, so I'm bouncing back now. Yay!

Not a cliffy

~~

Chapter 133

Gates of Halschius

Lynx was nowhere to be seen as Quinn poured over the information she'd received from Carafax in her office. She could understand it though. He'd yet to come to grips with the fact that he'd been betrayed by someone he'd known for tens of thousands of years.

Totally understandable to be fair.

Quinn thought she'd react in a much stronger manner. Then again, she wasn't as old as most of the universe.

Aradie, however, was perched on her shoulder, peering at the pages with her as if she too was trying to understand the sheer magnitude of what Carafax's observations meant.

"Does this really mean that she was planning this for thousands of years before she retired?" Quinn asked. 

Aradie cooed for a moment before answering in Quinn's mind, Not exactly. More like 1,200 years, if my understanding is correct that is.

"Fantastic," Quinn said, her frustration bubbling over. Aradie, perhaps wisely, chose not to dignify that comment with a response.

Scouring the pages, trying to read through sections and find clues she hadn't seen before, Quinn felt completely out of her depth. 

There were subtle shifts in her behavior from about 1,200 years before she announced her retirement. Very subtle shifts, differences in the way people reacted to her. Short-temperedness, irritability, classic signs that something had changed, often in a chemistry type of way, Aradie explained what Quinn could see, leaving no room for other possibilities. 

Quinn didn't know enough about Korradine's species to know if that was common, but she was willing to bet that mood and personality changes weren't something common and thus it had been out of the ordinary, or else Carafax probably wouldn't have noticed it. He recorded multiple interactions where her greeting towards him changed, her demeanor from friendly through to almost openly hostile when he requested restricted section information, or else advanced section information from any of the branches.

As much as the universe appeared to be magical now, it was a fact that high-level magic was still only the purview of a select few. Not necessarily because others didn't have an affinity that would allow them to pursue such magical heights, but that perhaps not as many people wanted to pursue those heights.

The sheer magnitude of the books in the Library was starting to take its toll on Quinn. She thought she'd understood before they opened the culinary branch, but now she realized she did in fact not. She hadn't even absorbed a fraction of the Library's contents. For all intents and purposes, Quinn was still a rank amateur when it came to magic and magical defenses. Her ability to safeguard the Library currently relied on the generosity of those people around her, and the more she realized that, the more uncomfortable she became.

And figuring out when Korradine turned bad was important, but moreso, at least in Quinn's opinion, was the necessity to determine the why. Because the why very obviously involved all of the bigger picture elements they were scrambling to figure out.

Any shortcut to finding out the identities of all of their detractors should help them solve the entire problem.

In theory at any rate.

She dove back into the notes 1,232 years before Korradine announced retirement. Carafax made note of her being ill.

"She was sick..." Quinn muttered. "How many times was Korradine sick over the years she was Librarian?" She directed the question at the Library.

There was a moment of silence before an answer came. Twice. The first time was right after her arrival here due to the dimensional shift of planes and how it had a rolling effect on her at first.

"And the second time?" Quinn asked.

That would be close to 1700 years ago, the Library said.

"That makes these dates coincide, right?" Quinn glanced at the information flashed up on her hood and frowned. "Yeah, that would coincide with the date. What's Ariticavia fever?"

It plays with the mind. It gives you an extremely high fever that basically causes hallucinations and sweats and a healthy bout of paranoia. While you're sick you tend to believe that 90% of the people coming anywhere near you are out to kill you, or worse.

"Oh, well that sounds like a very pleasant illness." she said, not commenting on the worse aspect.

The worst thing is its duration. It can last up to three months. Pretty long time just for what would amount to a common flu?

"There's nothing common about influenza. Do you mean a cold? Just a head cold?" Quinn corrected before asking.

The Library paused for a moment and then backtracked. No, I meant influenza.

"Well, influenza sucks, so this would just be like a prolonged version of that?" Quinn wanted more clarification to understand the illness. Even if she felt like she was grasping at straws. 

The hallucinations can take many forms.

An idea came to Quinn, one that she wasn't precisely sure where she'd heard it. She'd read some pretty sketchy mind magic books, however. She was pretty sure it came from one of those.

"Could it be that those hefty hallucinations might have encased specific attacks?" She spoke the words slowly, sounding out the thoughts in her mind.

I'm not sure I follow your train of thought. Clarify?

"Could this illness have hidden mental attacks that were disguised as hallucinations so that not even Corridine would realize the ideas that began to start in her mind and blossomed as time passed, weren't necessarily her own?" It sounded convoluted and fantastical even to Quinn's own ears.

The Library was silent and Quinn realized that she had inherently been reaching for multiple straws at that point in time, but it was an idea that wouldn't let her go. From the way Lynx described his relationship with Korradine, down to most people's initial impressions of her. She had been a fantastic Librarian, an all-around nice person, generous, excellent at her job for thousands of years. 

There had to be some origin point that changed her behavior and that needed to be either an immediate realization that she'd been living her life completely wrong, which should have resulted in a complete 180 that was immediately noticeable by everyone. Or else something so subtle it wasn't necessarily her own doing, or even her own thoughts, but a type of influence.

As the recipient of a mind-bomb implantation in her head in her first encounter with somebody who knew anything about mind magic, Quinn was quite certain that was a possibility. She didn't feel the need to defend Korradine. She just felt the need to find a logical explanation for the things that had happened.

You know, the Library suddenly spoke up, that could be a possibility. Let me see if we can figure out if anybody other than general Librarian staff came to see her. 

What about an assistant?" Quinn asked, trying to push the idea further. For the sake of Lynx and his current level of dejection, she was willing to entertain a lot of avenues. "Was she particularly close to any of the assistants?"

Suddenly, Lynx appeared in front of Quinn, blinking at her. "Yeah, yeah, she had maybe three or four really good assistant friends, one of whom started maybe 50 years before she got sick."

Another idea occurred to Quinn. Maybe she'd just watched too many CSI dramas, but she had to ask. "This fever, is it common enough that it could be deliberately triggered?"

He frowned. "I mean most viruses being contagious means you can trigger them, right? So technically, I guess. But it could also have been an illness that just opened an opportunity." Then he paused and frowned. "Though I guess that sounds naive."

Quinn offered him a commiseratory smile. "So, tell me about the assistant."

"Daphne," he began, "Daphne was an Esposian who came to us about fifty years before this date... forty-eight to be precise if I go off the system information. She was with us for, oh, maybe a thousand years, until shortly before we had to shut the Library down. She quit just after Korradine triggered her retirement." 

"Doesn't that sound a little bit too coincidental?" Quinn asked.

She realized, of course, that she hadn't been close to the whole situation. That meant she was able to look at all of the information they got without being emotionally attached to whatever outcome they had. The thing was, Lynx was still extremely emotionally attached to his memories, what remained of them, of Korradine.

Lynx sighed and looked up at Quinn, a sad smile on his face. "You know, I really do appreciate that you are trying so hard to find a reason that she betrayed everything, but that doesn't negate the fact that she did what she did."

"But sometimes it might not be her actions that did it. If these thoughts were planted in her head, like that bomb was planted in mine, then it wasn't of her own volition. She didn't consciously make this choice herself. It was inserted for her." Quinn didn't know if this was true yet, but she did have a strong inkling that it might in fact be. Because accounts of who Korradine had been didn't line up. And things that didn't work factually, sincerely bothered her.

Lynx perked up a little bit at that and then he flagged again. "Korradine had amazing mental facilities. She was one of the best mind magic users I've ever witnessed."

"Including Milaro?"

"Including Milaro."

Quinn couldn't get around it. "Wait, could that fever lower any of your basic defenses?"

The Library paused. "Yes and no. It basically just makes everything more difficult than it was in the beginning. It makes it difficult to maintain any long-term magical defenses of offenses of your own. So it's possible that her mental defenses were weakened at the time. I mean, it's actually very plausible," the Library said.

Lynx grinned. "So then it's plausible that her defenses were breached and she was thus left vulnerable to any type of attack that could have been delivered by, perhaps, a wretch called Daphne who had gained her trust."

"Well, we don't know if the Esposian is actually the culprit here," Quinn said. "I'm just throwing out ideas from these descriptions that Carafax has given us. It's great that it pinpoints a timeline for us. It also pinpoints a timeline we can research. We can find perhaps more memories from the owls in these specific windows. But the really great thing is that it allows us to realize that there could have been outside influences. And to specifically look at other memories or recollections that were tampered with in that time period. Maybe, though she did betray you in the end, she didn't mean to. Or if she'd been herself, she never really would have."

Lynx watched her for several seconds, so much so that Quinn thought maybe he'd figured out a way to multitask without getting that odd blank stare in his eyes. And then he smiled. "You know, Quinn, even if it turns out that we have no evidence that anything was planted or that her mind was screwed with in any way, the fact that you're willing to entertain that she wasn't just some secret, manipulative, conniving Librarian, that means a lot to me. Thank you."

"Of course," Quinn said. "What are friends for?"

"Yeah," he said. "Thank you." And he was gone.

"Wow," Quinn muttered out loud, leaning back in her chair. "Sometimes he can be almost human."

Don't insult him that way, the Library chuckled. Anyway, there's a lot of work to be done, Quinn. You need to-

And that was when the alarm began to blare overhead. Quinn paused. "What is that?" She couldn't sense any movement coming from anywhere in the Library, which meant that sound was for her alone.

The Library sighed audibly in Quinn's head. 

The gates of Halschius have opened. Arrival imminent.

Quinn blinked. Eric shot into the room faster than she'd seen him move in quite some time. "What's this?" Quinn asked.

"That would be my uncle," he said. "He likes fanfare, and I wasn't expecting him now."

"Oh, well, we were expecting him soon, right?" Quinn smiled at him, trying to put him at ease. "So this isn't all that unusual. But what about the gates of Halschius? I know we've had other imps in here. It has never given me an alarm like that before."

"That's his direct door from his throne room." Eric's eyes were fully fired up, and his tail end sparked as he flit around the office. "He's literally the king of Halschius."

"Yes. And what should I call your uncle?" Quinn asked, feeling some nerves start to fray in her stomach right then.

"You should probably-" He paused for a moment, as if pondering whether she'd be able to pronounce the name in the first place. Since Quinn knew that she couldn't actually pronounce Eric's real name, she didn't have much hope for his uncle. Eric grinned at her like he knew exactly what she was thinking. "You should probably just call him Uncle Hal."

She crossed her arms and glared at him. "Seriously, Uncle Hal?"

"Yes," a voice intoned from the doorway. The sound filled the room with majesty and danger. Quinn shivered.

She looked up. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting. Maybe a slightly larger imp floating in the air. Not what appeared to be a black-furred, red-horned and red-eyed satyr standing in the doorway that had miraculously enlarged itself to accommodate the king of Halschius. His lava hair dripped down his back only to evaporate just before it hit the ground. 

He smiled what she'd call a wicked smile before he spoke. "You may call me Uncle Hal, and I want to know how the hell the Library lost the books we entrusted to it."

~~

TADAAAA

Hope you enjoyed this one.

It turned out better than I intended lol