Page 34 of Tales of a Monstrous Heart
Fighting the childish urge to go to Master Hale’s office, I accepted the bitter realisation that he couldn’t help me anymore. I was on my own.
I took the endless west corridor that led to the Grand Library, ignoring the childish thrill that shot through me as I saw the ornate door.
I pulled the key from my pocket, slipping it into the lock. It turned of its own accord, a cracking of the mechanism as the door flung itself open, leaving the key in my palm.
Before me stood the grandeur of the library. White marble floors polished to a high gleam so the early morning light that poured down from the stained-glass ceilings bounced around the room, making multicoloured flecks of light dance. Rich, dark wood bookcases and tables filled the space. The golden inscriptions on each book glistened as if freshly labelled.
A large greeting desk sat in the centre that I approached cautiously. The echo of my footsteps too loud.
‘Can I help you?’ came the brittle voice from behind the desk, and the librarian looked up over her spectacles. She had a thin, disapproving face and her mousy hair harshly pulled back into a bun.
‘Can you point me in the direction of magical ailments and earth diseases?’ I asked politely.
‘Southern section, two floors down. Keep right.’ She scowled at me – at my ears specifically – before ducking back behind the desk.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured to no further response, moving cautiously deeper into the cavernous library.
I wished Alma was here to see it with me, despite knowing they’d never let her. The loneliness inside of me returned, eating ravenously at my heart.
I found the section just as spacious and empty as all the others. Where I’d anticipated the endless chatter of magesworking and the excitement of new spells being formed, there was nothing. Just silence and a dreadful draught.
It wasn’t what I imagined it to be. Everything too clean, nothing but the strong citrus scent of polish to greet me. No chaos trapped in compendium pages, no dust sprites or wayward spells. They had killed it all.
The key in my grasp became a dead weight.
I didn’t belong here. Not in their sterilised version of the world.
I longed for the damp of the ruins and the dust of the Fifth Library. Worst of all, I wanted the comfortable disorder of the Blackthorn study – William’s cheery interruptions and Alma’s presence.
Annoyed, I began to rummage through what little books they held on fey illness, seeing barely any records of use to me.
I needed to extract the magic from the valek scales I’d collected before it dried out. Only there were no books on the art of extraction for healing here.
I pulled a few new and recently printed volumes from the shelves, the pages sliding easily past one another as I flicked through the depictions. A bland and sterilised take, written more as a cautionary tale than with the purpose of giving any advice on how to help. It put most fey illness down to poverty, lack of intelligence and heathen practices.
I pushed the book aside, going for another, but finding little change. Not even a simple remedy to cure a rushing cough or goblin rash. Nothing. Like they didn’t exist at all. I found only charms to help with mortal ailments, or cures for common diseases from which most healing houses in the south made great profit.
I turned my attention to the volumes on curses instead, looking for any with ground sickness that could be quoted. Quickly copying down the sections of any use, I found myselfuncomfortable in the silence. No crackling hearth or murmur of voices. Not the creak of old wood or the whispering of wind through an open window. Just the endless silence, and how it seemed to swallow me whole. My thoughts too loud in my head in the hollow space.
I grabbed my notes, shoving them into my bag, and made my way back to the portal, annoyed I’d allowed myself to be fooled into thinking that an Institute library would solve any of my problems, or that it would be so vastly different to the men who ran it.
Early-morning light streamed through the Blackthorn library, dust dancing in the beams as I weaved my way through the shelves to the back section where William had indicated the books I’d find most interesting were kept. Finding myself in a small open space, wooden beams high above, curving up to a turret of a ceiling. Gargoyles made of black stone leering down as cobwebs hung from their claws.
A worn green velvet chair sat beneath a grand window, cushions welcomingly sunken with years of use. Remains of candles burned down to stubs were scattered across the window ledge, and water rings stained the wood from various cups over the years – evidence that this was once someone’s favourite retreat.
I pulled off my jacket and tossed it onto the chair, taking the papers and few notes I’d managed to make and scattering them across the nearest table.
I found a few volumes on species magic on the back shelves of Emrys’s collection, dumping them on the table and flicking through the pages. I knew that mages had once extracted magic from a secmor beast’s scale, and I focused on journals and compendiums that mentioned the creature, looking for any sign of how they had managed it.
I had the fourth book spread open, finger running down the convoluted text before I stumbled upon another dead end. None of the tomes spoke of extracting magic from a fresh scale or a shed one. Only fossils or dried flecks.
Blowing strands of hair from my face with a frustrated breath, I turned from the table, stretching my hands over my head to relieve some of the pain at the base of my spine from stooping too long. I took the valek scale sample from my pocket, letting it rattle around the tiny glass vial. If I couldn’t extract the healing potential, there was nowhere left to go with my theory.
An odd, croaked squeak came from behind me. The cupboard of the sideboard across from me rattling its drawers almost in warning.
I turned and there, gnawing at the corner of another priceless volume, was a miniature secmor beast, its bright green scales shining in the candlelight, ink smudges all over it from the book it had crawled out of.
My eyes darted to the open book in question, seeing the large gap where the illustration had been and the mess of ink now marring the page from its escape.
