Page 33 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

Of course, I’m not much more graceful a dancer than I am a sparring partner.

As Casimir keeps playing, an unexpected sense of peace settles over me. Stavros turns Ivy with the music, Rheave sways in his own sort of dance, and the mid-day sun beams down on all of us as if we’re part of a strange new family.

And I’m on the outskirts of that family, even though I’ve been by Ivy’s side for far longer than the daimon has.

The serenity I felt disintegrates. I don’t want to feel like an outsider in this unnervingly immense mission we’ve found ourselves on.

The ground has shifted beneath all of us, and I need to get my footing.

The cotton shirt I wore for sparring has stiffened against my torso with dried sweat. I duck through the nearby doorway and make my way up to the sleeping building where I left my regular clothes.

Sulla has managed to provide us with a couple of spare sets, washing what we’ve discarded despite our insistence that we could take care of that ourselves. It was easier to stop protesting when she showed us the washer tub that churns the clothing all by itself once it’s filled with soapy water.

I’m not sure where our host has gone off to at the moment. She seems to prefer to give us our space—or to recover her own—outside of meals and her training sessions with Ivy.

But she did give us permission to explore all of the Haven’s buildings. I don’t think she keeps even her own bedroom locked.

Not that bedrooms are on my mind right now. After a quick shower thanks to the magic conveying the mountain stream’s water through the Haven, I head back to the main building where I found one particular spot I can put the skills I’ve already cultivated to use.

A room down the hall from the dining area has built-in shelves on either side. One set holds various sources of entertainment: wooden board games, a couple of faded sets of cards, toys that suggest some of the Haven’s inhabitants arrived here at an even younger age than Sulla did, and a few musical instruments. I assume this is where Casimir found the flute.

The other set of shelves holds a varied assortment of books, many of their covers crumbling with age.

I’ve already perused the contents a few times in the past couple of days. Most are fiction, either books of tales past residents brought with them or stories they wrote themselves. I found a journal kept by a sorcerer who lived here nearly a century ago, which I spent a few hours yesterday carefully paging through, but he mostly talked about his efforts cultivating new crops through both traditional means and magic in the Haven’s gardens.

So far, I’ve avoided the oldest volumes in the collection, mostly out of respect. I’d be a horrid guest if I destroyed the Haven’s archives by having the ancient texts fall apart in my hands.

The books stashed away here haven’t benefitted from the professional archival efforts of royal or temple librarians. I can see signs of rot in the leather, scraps of paper that’ve already cracked off their brittle pages.

But there’s nothing else left for me to check. And those aged volumes are the ones most likely to contain some piece of information I don’t already know.

Something that’ll help us convince the king of Ivy’s worthiness or defeat the scourge sorcerers? That might be too much to hope, but I have to try.

I ease one of the older books off the shelf, wincing as the leather binding crumbles more against my fingers. Sinking into one of the two armchairs set against the wall between the shelves, I open the pages as carefully as I can.

This one is handwritten, and it took some water damage before it arrived here. Many of the words are lost to splotches. Some of the paper sticks together too tightly for me to risk cracking it apart.

What I can read appears to be instructions for various games I’ve never heard of, with other pages holding tallies of scores. New entertainments that past inhabitants made up to pass the time here?

I set that one back in its place and lift another book that looks more professionally bound. It turns out to be printed, with ink that’s held up fairly well over the years, but it’s a guidebook to the animals of the Abandoned Realms. Interesting but not particularly useful to my purposes.

I work my way through several more books until I reach one with thick leather binding and an attached strap. The strap snaps in half when I loosen it, and in my horror, I almost put it back.

Leaving it alone won’t fix the damage, though. I take a deep breath and peel back the cover ever so delicately.

This is one of the books where the pages have started to fragment. Chunks are missing along the edges in an erratic pattern.

What’s left of the pages is hand-written in a scrawling, disjointed style that I’d find difficult to decipher even without pieces missing. Staring at it, I almost give up again.

Then my eyes catch on the word riven in the midst of the mess.

Girding myself, I study the letters closely.

They call us riven… don’t know what that… something happened to us… I want to keep a record… went through the Great Retribution… but when the fire came…

My heart beats faster. Is this the writing of one of the original riven sorcerers, born in the wake of the Great Retribution? They might know more about the scourge sorcery that brought down the All-Giver’s rage than we do.

I peer at page after page until my head starts to ache from deciphering the messy scrawl and the fractured sentences.

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