Forgotten Embers

Chapter 25: Forbidden Knowledge

Avera paced the floors of the house on Mayverch Street until she had thoroughly determined to leave.

"Annetta," she said, calling to the kitchen from the main hall, "I'm going out."

"You're leaving?" Annetta said, surprised. "But you haven't left the house in days. It's good you're getting out, I suppose, but where is it you're off to?"

She grabbed at the doorknob and held it for a moment, biting her lip. "I'm going to the library," she told her.

"The library?" Annetta replied in astonishment. "Why would you ever go there?"

"My father always wanted to take me," she told her, giving a soft reply after a brief silence. "That, and I have some research I need done."

"Avera, darling, your father died when you were still a child. I told you once already this week. You really must stop pretending."

"Ah, right..." Avera said softly, her voice low.

Annetta had been saying things like that, things that didn't make sense, and Avera was becoming increasingly uneasy over it.

'Annetta... ever since my visit to High Palace, she's been...'

"I don't see why you need to go," Annetta went on, unhindered by Avera's thoughts. "You can stay here and use the KLP, use the cerebral link, take a nap if you like. Let it do your research for you. It would be easier."

That was something else Annetta had been doing: always talking about using the KLP, which Avera hadn't been, and discouraging her from leaving the house.

Avera paused, leaning on the metal knob as she pensively wet her lips. "Yes, but I'm in need of a walk," she diplomatically replied. "I've been in too long, like you said."

"Well, alright..." Annetta said, "but wouldn't you like some lunch first?"

Avera's body became tense. This had happened several times when she had tried to leave the house. There was always something, some reason she shouldn't, another excuse to stay inside... forever. "Annetta, I..." she stopped.

'What can I say?' She gripped the knob and turned it, pulling the door open and feeling the sunlight for the first time in days. 'I'm sorry.'

"I'll be back before dinner!" she called back, rushing out the door and pulling it shut hastily behind her.

"Avera!" Annetta was saying, looking to add something more, but it wasn't anything she hadn't already heard.

Freed from the house, Avera made her way through the crowded city streets to the state sanctioned library at the heart of the capital.

The building was tall. It took up only a small amount of space on the city block, but it extended far into the sky as a mighty tower. She looked up at the silver letters marking the elaborately carved entrance:

Zephyr Almast Library Of Advanced Studies

For the Betterment of the State

She stepped inside the spacious lobby, well lit and comfortably furnished with modern accommodations. There were dark metal stairs which lined the glass front of the towering structure, winding around the perimeter of the square base upward, and she speedily began to climb them up to the resource floors.

The resource floors were different, and the first on which she now emerged had the added help of a librarian's desk. The room was large with high ceilings of tinted glass reinforced with maurium. There were bookshelves strategically placed throughout the floor, lining nearly every wall with some found in between. There were rolling ladders attached to a shelf on every wall for the sake of acquiring the higher levels of resources. There were small tables and padded armchairs arranged throughout the levels in remote pockets for the visitors to read or discuss.

Much of the lighting was provided by the ambient light of the sun through the glass wall of the front, though it was a particularly dreary day and the clouds had shut up much of the light, leaving only dark and grey. For days like these, there were, also, maurium lamps and floor lighting provided for convenience and style.

The shelves, which were designed with a grid of individual tiny compartments like shadow boxes, were filled with holodexes, technologically advanced units resembling scrolls and used for storing holographic virtual copies of books and information, each embossed with a symbol and lettering denoting its priority level, title, and usage.

The place was peppered with students, many of whom were about her age, if not a little older, young men and women dressed in the uniform of their respective academies.

The most common of the uniforms was that of the Royal Academy, plain black pants and a jacket which resembled a simplified version of the palace guard - double breasted with two lines of shining silver buttons, delicately accented with the careful embroidery of silver thread around the cuffs and collar. The collar itself wrapped around the neck of the wearer, standing an inch high, and parting only for a short distance at the front. It bore the royal insignia of the house of Almast, a snake constricting a diamond with a sword through its head. The insignia was stitched amidst the complex and dazzling design on the left side near the front of the collar.

Avera glanced around the room, the layout of which found a fine balance between employing maximum space efficiency while remaining uncluttered.

'That's...' she glanced again around the room, scanning the shelves, and considering the holodexes, which must have been in the scores of hundreds, 'a lot of information.'

She looked around again, this time for help. There was a librarian sitting at the service desk to her right. She was typing away on a computer, single-mindedly focused on her work when Avera approached.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Avera said, politely attracting the woman's attention.

"Oh, yes?" she said, looking up at Avera with a smile. "Hello, Miss. My name's Kara. What can I help you with?"

She was a nice looking lady - youthful, fit, pretty, and plain with fair skin and dark brown hair which she had pulled back fashionably with two strands left loose, framing her face.

"I..." Avera stopped, staring at the woman seated behind the desk.

The woman was conservatively dressed, topped off with the necessary maurium jacket bearing the insignia of the state. She wore a metal name tag which read Kara as she said, but there was something else that had caught Avera's attention - a small golden shield branded with a cross and boasting a three pointed crown.

'That pin... it's like the one that Benjamin wears.'

"Miss?" the librarian asked, offering a slightly concerned and puzzled look in return for Avera's hesitance.

"Sorry. It's just that I noticed your pin," she said, indicating the shield. She offered a friendly smile, treating it as an ordinary object of interest.

"Oh, why thank you," she said, appearing a little nervous, though she tried to hide it. "It's just an old family heirloom."

"Oh... well, it's very nice," Avera said, dropping the topic. "Anyway, I was hoping you could help me find some information on a Pyrean King by the name of Stephan Caliphus and a man called Ramus."

Kara frowned, her long fingers sliding slowly down from the elevated grid of black buttons stamped with lettering. "Stephan Caliphus, you said?" she asked, her head down and voice low.

"Uh... yes," Avera stammered as she watched the woman shrink. The delicate frames of the librarian's large round glasses were all that she could see of her bright blue eyes as the light of the computer screen reflected off of the lenses.

"I see..." Kara muttered, resuming her regular pose and entering some information into her computer. "There wasn't a lot published around that time... well," she stopped herself, shifting her shoulders as she weighed the statement, "not a lot that we have left of it, anyway."

"Why's that?" Avera asked with interest.

"It was all lost," Kara told her, issuing a glance in her direction. "You know," she added, "during the Great Fire." Avera looked at her, unknowing, and she began to elaborate. "See, Stephan prided himself on his public works projects, and one of his crowning achievements was this really illustrious library he had built. All of the official documents and the entirety of the collections of the Royal Library were stored there, and when the city burned, the books burned with it," Kara stated, continuing to search through the catalogue. "The people who saw it said that the library burned brighter than anything, but," she added with a final click and a triumphant expression, "we do have one book by Webber, but it's only available in classical book format."

"What's the name of it?"

"Til Here We Find Ourselves Again, but it's in the restricted section. You'll need a security pass to get there."

'More red tape?' Avera's heart sank, but she hadn't had the time to say anything more when she heard a familiar voice speaking.

"Anything more than a Security Access Pass from the Royal Academy might permit?" the man asked from behind her.

'Quince?' Avera spun around to the sight of her friend. He was a comely young man, tall and slender with dark hair similar to Benjamin's but kept shorter. His bright blue eyes danced like the light on the ocean, and yet still they seemed dark to her now, a deadness inside of them.

"No, sir," the librarian said, "you should find that works quite well here."

"Quince!" Avera exclaimed, surprised and delighted.

"Well, Avera, shall we go?" Quince asked, redirecting his address with an impish smile.

"Yes, actually. That is, if you don't mind it?"

"Not at all! It's a good chance to catch up, anyway." He smiled fondly. "It has been far too long."

She smiled. "It has. It's... good to see you, Quince."

"Likewise," he told her.

The two of them dashed one after the other up the many flights of spiral stairs until they came to the stairs with a panel of dark glass covering them. The atmosphere was quite unsettling. The room was dark and dimly lit with reddish lighting, concrete walls, empty space, and wooden floor boards, a drastic departure form the lower levels.

"Here," he said to her, indicating a carved lit piece of glass with Almast's serpent embossed, "this is a key code reader."

He held up his security pass and pressed it against the place he had shown her. Within seconds, there was the ascending sound of electronic chirping and a blue light appeared, a portion of the glass surrounding the stairs then turning aside to grant them entry.

"Voila!" Quince said, taking a jokingly accentuated bow.

"You haven't been here before, have you?" Avera asked him, making conversation.

"I haven't, but I have heard about it. The upperclassmen say it becomes useful later. They come here often searching for answers. We are given a security pass and a key code when we are accepted to the Royal Academy for studies. If we are to serve the state, we must have access to its secrets," he said. Then, realizing he had moved things from a nice chat to a dark and heavy topic, he became embarrassed. "Plus," he added quickly, "it really builds those calf muscles!" He laughed nervously, trying to relieve some of the tension. "It's great exercise to climb up here."

Avera laughed. "Right," she said, skeptically raising an eyebrow.

The top floor of the library's restricted section was dark, haunting, and built entirely of maurium. There were maurium lamps scattered senselessly throughout the room without reason, sloppily hanging from wall hooks and set carelessly on shelves or tables, establishing an eerie purple glow throughout the presently deserted area. She glanced around the shadowed room. Bookcases filled with books, dust, and cobwebs lined the walls. There was a large table in the center with a mat on it along with a few stray books with pens and papers. There were piles of books on the ground surrounding the table and some of the shelves, some nearing the height of the table itself. There were only a few holodexes found held in a smaller shelf roughly a third the length of the others but just as tall. There were also some scrolls mixed in with the holodexes, and she guessed that the number of them was about ninety in total.

"Wow, it sure is dark up here!" Kelvin observed, retrieving a lamp from one of the shelves. "Reminds me of High Palace."

"Yeah. Me, too," she frowned.

"Oh, really? You've been there?" he asked, his voice still maintaining the tone of a playful friend. "Probably because of your dad, huh?"

She smiled, glad not to have to explain. "Yeah, that's it," she told him, getting pulled into his good mood.

'He is himself still, isn't he? I've missed him.'

"Til Here We Find Ourselves Again, right?" he asked her, holding the lamp to light their way.

"That's it," Avera agreed pleasantly.

"Well, why don't we see if there's any remnants of order left here. I would think it's in the section on divine governance, but why don't you grab a lamp and we'll spread out," he cordially suggested.

After a short time searching around the dusty bookshelves and scattered piles, Kelvin returned holding two books.

"I found it," he triumphantly proclaimed, seeming quite pleased with himself. "And, I also found another book which might help. This one," he said, sliding one of the books down onto the table in front of her, "is a common history of the kings of Pyre from Ja'miel Elphaz, who was technically the first but is generally not considered in the lineage of kings because he violated his oath and was consequently removed from kingship without a successor, to Palmiere Caliphus, who replaced Elphaz and by whom the kings were reckoned, to Theoezra Caliphus who was Stephan's father." He pat the book with a smile. "It didn't come up in your search, because Stephan's not actually in it. Now, the other," he continued, setting the second book on top of it, "is the one you asked for. I flipped through it. It's a personal narrative detailing life in the kingdom under Stephan's reign, and it contains interviews with some of the king's advisors." 

She considered the book with the worn blue cover and the sparkling silver print, running her hand over the words embossed on its front.

"Wow..." she muttered softly, "thank you for finding this."

"Of course!" he said, still sporting a friendly smile. "Although," he began again, having taken a short break from speaking, "I am curious as to how you knew to ask about this."

"Oh?" she looked at him, puzzled. "Why's that?"

"Because," he addressed her quietly, leaning over the side of the table and putting his face close to hers, "most people don't remember Stephan to ask about him, but you do."