LSRO: Chapter 55 - Gathering (Patreon)

See... I honestly thought I'd end the book at 42, but got great feedback and thought - hey 50... but then that became 52, and 54, and now ... well.

This chapter still doesn't finish it hahahaha - also it's not an end so much as a very small stopping point that could serve as a book break.

Why am I telling you this before I even post 56?

Because I can BWAH HAH HAH

Enjoy!

~~

Chapter 55

Gathering

The book felt surprisingly light in her gloved hand. Even as she touched it, she could sense there was something about it that was drawn to her—an eagerness, a feeling akin to coming home. She closed her eyes and held it in both hands, oblivious to what anybody else was trying to say to her. It was almost as if the book was trying to speak, as if it wanted to be kept safe, as if it needed her to...

Oh! It needed her to put it in the bag.

Opening her eyes, she grabbed one of the satchels, shoved the book inside, and sealed it shut. With the last whisper of air sealed out of it, she felt as though the book actually sighed.

"Well," she said, "I guess that's Chaos Theory; Myth and Legend, all nice and locked up." She made her voice sound a lot brighter than she felt. Nothing about this place made her feel good, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt, as she clutched the petrified pebble given to her by the core in her hand, that retrieving the next few books was probably going to be a lot more difficult.

However, twenty minutes later, standing a good half mile or so further into what had once been the city of Dabilia, she stood in front of a desk. In the desk's drawer was the next book: Reality Combined; Chaos Fever Dream. She looked at it and couldn't help the overwhelming sense of uneasiness. "This seems too easy."

"Don't say that, Quinn. I thought you learned that lesson with Lynx back at the library," Malakai said.

She raised an eyebrow at him."You're very superstitious."

"I'm an elf. We're all very superstitious," he said.

"Oh, you're back in the bad mood again." she leveled a stare at him.

"I wasn't in a bad..." Malakai paused and his shoulders sagged a little. "Yeah, you know, you're right. I am. I'm back in the bad mood, but I will try to get back in a better one, okay?"

Quinn grinned at him. "Yep, perfectly okay."

She placed her hand on the book and this one also felt like it was trying to whisper to her again. She wondered if the gloves blocked the words out or if it was all in her mind. Was there some sort of chaos in the book now? Is that why it allowed them to learn how to manage and filtrate the chaos?

Quinn sighed. She was probably never going to know and pulled out a second satchel so she could lock this one away too. "That leaves just two more." she muttered.

She still couldn't shake the feeling that this was way too easy. But maybe this was really all it was—a dead world with a few invertebrate remnants of insects and creatures that had started to flourish while the world stayed frozen in its stony time lock. She shrugged, grabbed the satchel, pushed the book inside, sealed it shut, and felt yet another sigh of relief.

The physical sensation of a sigh coming from a satchel was actually very disconcerting. The books were sighing, or she was imagining that the books were sighing...

Eric raised his head from where he'd been studying one of the other desks in the room. "Did you hear that?" he asked.

Quinn paused, having heard nothing before he spoke, and listened. Unable to hear anything else, she shrugged. "I can't hear anything. There's no skittering. There are no vibrations. There's no sound. Oh, have the lights stopped?" she asked, looking around, not seeing any of the white, red, blue, and occasionally purple flashes of light they had grown really accustomed to.

Malakai frowned. "Now that you mention it..."

She shivered. It wasn't that she was cold. It was that this couldn't bode well. "Okay, we only have two left to get. Let's not waste time." She wanted to get out of here five minutes ago.

Aradie hooted, coming in to land quite roughly on her left shoulder this time.

Quinn grimaced as she had to brace herself against the weight distribution and then reached up to scratch the back of her neck. "What? What's wrong?"

Images flashed as Aradie hooted very softly. There were images of buildings nearby, of what looked like a completely imploded portion of the settlement, and beyond that, another room with another desk.

"Is that where the next one is?" Quinn asked her familiar. It was good that the bird was so attuned to the Library signature since Quinn was still having some difficulty with it herself. Aradie hooted, but in a way that seemed more like a question than an affirmation.

"Well, guess we're going to get it." They made their way over across the spongy type of ground, making sure that nothing skidded after them.

They had to circumvent holes in the road, test ahead to make sure the ground was stable, and circle around a few of those strange collapsed vehicles. After a short while they came to an almost identical warehouse with another desk in the main office section where the book lay.

Quinn took a deep breath, reached out and pulled the drawer open immediately jumping back just in case.

Nothing happened.

She frowned. "Oh, well, I guess there's just another book in another drawer." But even as she spoke, she felt a weird sense of unease.

First of all, before picking it up this time, she looked at it long and hard. She couldn't see any wires attached, she couldn't see any hairs that might trigger a trap, nothing. She reached in, grabbed the book, clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes.

Nothing happened.

"Were you expecting something to happen?" Malakai asked.

"Well, yes. Weren't you?" She didn't repeat again that she found this far too easy, because, well, that was beside the point. But she really did. She glanced at the cover, noted that the book pulsed in the same way that the other three had, that sort of welcoming, luring, interested, and yet put me away so I can become myself again sort of vibe that she'd had from the other two.

She shrugged, "Mastering Your Reality Through Chaos," she said. "I guess this is the next one."

Quinn pulled out the appropriate bag, shoved it in, sealed it shut, felt the sigh that ran all the way through her and heaved a sigh of relief herself.

"I guess, I guess we've only got one more left to go," she said, hesitantly.

"There, there, princess," the little imp said. "Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. We'll get that fourth book, get right out of here, back to your library."

The thing was, she'd spent enough hours now with Eric, as they were on their fifth air filtration food, that she knew the imp was using bravado right now. He was just as nervous as she was about where the next one would take them. Not that she could blame him, but it was definitely an interesting turn of events that all of them, approaching the retrieval of the fourth and final book, all felt that this was just somehow far too easy to do.

"I mean, Cook prepared enough food for three days, and we're sure there is no temporal displacement right?" she asked Malakai,

He shook his head. "No, not here, not in this world. It's just the same as any chaotic dimension, which is exactly the same as the chaotic filtration system. And just so you know, having misaligned temporal disturbances is actually a very rare thing. There are only, I don't know, like..." he paused in thought.

Quinn laughed. "Like what, a handful of worlds,"

"I guess that depends on your hands... but no, more like maybe 150 that are different time displacement scenarios." Malakai made the statement sound so matter-of-fact.

"Only?" She said almost choking on the word.

"You did absorb that book I gave you, right?" Malakai paused and makde an exasperated noise with his togue. "Oh, no, I need to give you the other one. Don't worry, when we get back, I have another book for you to absorb. Probably should have given it to you before we started training, I guess. I'm just not used to being around people who don't already know all this stuff."

"Yeah I get it," Quinn said. And then she frowned. She clutched the stone in her hand, and tried to locate the next book. "Huh, I'm not getting an immediate reading or even direction for the remaining one right now," she said.

Aradie hooted and pushed off from her shoulder. Quinn had to adjust her stance as the familiar took off. She was not yet used to how heavy the bird was. They had to find Laws of Chaos; Upside Down. It had to be somewhere here.

She positioned herself outside the other side of the warehouse this time, in the middle of what seemed to be an abandoned street. There were those odd cart-looking vehicles everywhere. "I mean, they looked like a cart, but they didn't have horse bones in front of them, so they probably also didn't have horse bones because they were massive humanoid scarabs to begin with," Quinn muttered to herself.

She faced north, south, east, and west by her best estimates and couldn't get any flash of where the book might be. "It can be destroyed, right? Do you think maybe this one got destroyed," she asked.

Malakai shrugged uncomfortably. He shrugged his shoulders like he was flexing them and looked around. "I'm not sure, but..."

Aradie dove down toward them, landing on the top of one of the solidified carts. She hooted.

"Oh, off in that direction?" Quinn asked with a frown. She looked up at where Aradie's images showed her to look, toward one of the larger buildings several blocks over. From what she could see it sort of looked like the rafters of a steeple might. From a place of worship.

She wasn't sure how long it'd take for them to get there, but there was no time like the present. "Okay, then," she said, "I guess we're headed there." She checked her timer, twelve more minutes. She popped her sixth ball wondering how they'd already managed to meander around for over half a day.

~~

Quinn did not like tromping through the remnants of a dead society. This time on the way, she saw a mother, Dabilia, and a child frozen in a running motion. Maybe that's why most of them were dust, particles, or broken. They'd been caught unawares, running for their lives.

Their facial expressions were an enigma considering the tiny insectoid-like heads they possessed. Still, though, it didn't look to be a slow jog but more of a frantic dash.

Quinn sobered up and continued on her way after looking at them wistfully for several moments. She sighed, not trying to spread her sadness, but just trying to rid herself of it.

Before them was a massive stone staircase that, indeed, led up to an awe-inducing structure. Or it would have been in its heyday.

She climbed the steps. There had to be at least forty of them. Some were wider as if she was approaching a grand entrance to some amazing building. The air felt heavier here, but she knew popping another ball wasn't going to help her. She still had two hours on this one, as it was.

"I don't like the feeling of this," Eric said, grimacing.

"If you don't like it, it must be horrible," Malakai quipped.

Eric glared at him. "Stop it, elf. Bite me."

"Can't, you're impervious, I'll break my teeth."

"Damn it, I was hoping you didn't know that."

Quinn thought they got along charmingly. An idle thought occurred to her and she really hoped that the library was doing okay.

"Hey," she said, "we need a doorway to return to the library. Maybe that's why I couldn't reach it when I tried while we were in the middle of nowhere."

"Sounds like a very plausible explanation, Quinn," Malakai said, but didn't offer anything else up.

Finally, at the threshold to the entrance, they stood before massive double doors that, in an eerie way, reminded Quinn of the Library's main entrance. Even though to the sides of them most of the walls were missing, it still felt right to enter through them.

Quinn gasped once she pushed them open she saw the interior of what had once definitely been an amazing cathedral of some sort. There were pews, most of them broken down, but she could see hundreds and hundreds of the Dabilia kneeling in prayer. Some of their stone bodies were broken, so many of them had crumbled, but it was obvious that everybody had been here, either trying to pray to some god they believed in, or perhaps trying to pool their power if they were the primordial species that Lynx had mentioned.

She felt tears brimming in her eyes and sniffed them back. She couldn't get emotional about a species that had died centuries ago. Could she?

"Must be in here," she said. "Maybe this was their last stand."

She inspected every row as she walked past, frowning, still not finding what she was looking for. The book was nowhere to be seen.

Holding each other's hands, holding their children, devolved into a complete and utter pile of ash in some cases.

But nobody was holding a book.

She felt like maybe the chaos was still eating away at these long-dead husks. That was sobering.

Aradie flew around, searching, Eric too, while Malachi and her each took a side of the pews. She was getting extremely frustrated, until right at the top, where usually there would be a lectern, was a chest. A massive chest that she'd first mistook for a table.

There was a familiar type of power emanating coming from it, even though it felt weak.

"Do you think they locked it in the chest?" Quinn asked, very confused. It didn't look like the safe. This thing looked impregnable.

Eric shrugged. "I don't know, but this isn't like the safe was."

"Yeah, I got that already," she said.

Aradie too, gathered around the massive, what had probably once been a golden chest, when it wasn't turned to igneous rock.

"Well," Quinn said concentrating for a moment through her Library connection with the petrified stone against her palm, "it's in there. I can sense it. It's just very weak. Could it be so corrupted by the surrounding chaos that it is ill or it just really needs its bag?"

Malachi shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't done this before. Couldn't they have sent us with somebody a little bit more experienced?"

Eric cleared his throat. "I have experience, just not with retrieving texts like this., that could be it. Just be careful as you open it." he warned, his voice trembling ever so slightly.

"Why me," Quinn asked. "I'm the least experienced adventure person here."

"Because you're the librarian, which already afforded certain protections against the book and the chaos." Eric shot back.

She sighed and reached out to try and push the lid up. It gave a lot easier than she expected. So much that the weight she'd been pushing into opening it redistributed too fast and made her stumble.

Which was very lucky, because where she'd been but a split second before, the lid and the rest of the chest smashed down with a loud toothy snarl.

~~

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

See you tomorrow folks!

Much love

KT