Towering piles of books snaked their way across the surface of a wide table, sealing Kaius off from his companions. His team had their own piles; fortifications, protecting their own little fiefdoms as they mined for the nuggets of wisdom that lay deep in a mountain of useless treatises, ramblings, and baseless speculation.

From his seat at the table’s corner, Kaius peered over the edge of a thick tome of sailing legends, unable to bear to read another line about how Barasoolian sailors refused to navigate through the archipelago to the north-east of their coast. He refused to believe those islands moved — not when he’d read thirty pages ago that there was an aquatic mer township a few hundred leagues north of Barasool that actively used those islands to navigate.

His thin hope that his friends had something to share vanished quickly — they were all absorbed in their books. Even Porkchop was deep in focus, looming over the table as he used his Ghosthand artefact to turn a page.

Kaius suppressed the urge to groan, and did his best to keep reading. They’d been at it for five days. Even making a few small inroads, it had become exceedingly clear that the publicly accessible works in Aanthrast were largely generalist, out-dated, or dealt in matters of assumption and legend.

All that time, and Kanmost had yet to appear. Librarian Lyren had insisted it was normal, but it was still frustrating.

Ancient history especially had proven thin, just as Lyren has said on their first day. He smiled, thinking of those grey eyes. That drink, at least, had been a welcome distraction from the drudgery. Kaius was quickly finding he didn’t have the spirit for scholarship. It was maddening — almost like he was stuck in his Corporus trial again. Churning through book after book to search for promising sentences, then grabbing another book that was referenced, only to do it all again in a recursive cycle.

Their greatest find had been the series Kenva had found on their first day, Lost Heraldries — and that had been scant. A single, throw away footnote describing a half-shattered engraving of a sun, with remnants of additional iconography beneath it. It could have been Unterstern’s sigil — the blade beneath the sun — but a burning star wasn’t exactly an uncommon motif. The rest of the details had been scant, not even detailing an exact location or even who had discovered it beyond a nameless expedition. Suspected Imperial era, in a buried fort located on the western coast, somewhere in the wastes beyond the Drozag’s.

An area the size of the entire Frontier fit that description.

Eventually, they’d decided to switch tactics — spread out to cover more ground, as it were. Porkchop had continued to search the ancient history section, though it was born largely out of personal interest rather than faith in its promise. He’d had even less exposure than Kaius to the world outside of the Arboreal Sea. The rest of them had moved on: Ianmus had pivoted to works on the elves in the hopes of finding anything on House Dynia — though most volumes he insisted were largely conjecture, due to the insular nature of the race — and Kenva had switched to the dwarves.

He’d taken on the fun challenge of hunting down any scrap he could about the other continents. Given the leviathans that trawled the deep waters of the world, there wasn’t much — certainly not enough for a devoted shelf. Hunting through the sections on sailing and oceanography had been a trial of endless naval battles, sea shanty collections, and tall tales. Even the most serious of volumes on the topic were mostly fourth hand tales of apocryphal expeditions returning broken with word of aquatic behemoths, unending storms, and lands so hostile that no beachhead could be made — if they returned at all.

In between the legends of monsters and magic, the facts had been thin. There was a rough consensus that there were nine great landmasses on the world, identified through a weight of vaguely consistent clairvoyant impressions. Only two were in any semblance close to Vaastivar. One to the south, and one even further to the east.

That was it. No word of encounters with the native peoples of those lands, no trade, and definitely no foreign expeditions landing on their shores.

Kaius sighed, and reached for the next book on his stack. It was thin, less than two hundred, and bound in a pebbley black letter with gold embossed lettering. ‘Mapping the Great Oceanic Spiral’. He cocked his brow, cautiously optimistic. Nothing else he’d read had mentioned this ‘great spiral’, but it seemed promising.

He dove in. After a chapter, he had to force himself to relax — if he balled his fists, he’d tear the book to shreds, and that would be more than enough to get them barred for the rest of the week at least.

It was the ravings of a lunatic, even compared to the drivel he’d been reading all day. Barely coherent in his disjointed ramblings, one Isiah Throus had apparently devoted his entire life to proving the ‘prophetic’ visions he had suffered from. Unlike most in his position, he was also rich — a noble of some report from a small nation central to the continent that had lived only a few centuries into the beginning of the Age of Dawn. He’d bankrupted his estate pouring everything into some kind of grand runic formation — one to hone, clarify, and potentiate his visions.

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It had sounded promising — until Throus had detailed how their world was a flat plane that had been folded in on itself by a grand celestial maelstrom, and Vaastivar was the third of two hundred and one continents arranged in a straight line, that was somehow also a descending spiral leading to the centre of all things.

That was almost enough for him to hurl the book across the room, but the man could write, and he referenced other texts with clarity and detail. Ones that seemed tantalising, relevant, and more importantly scholarly.

He dove in, skimming through the drivel. Page after page turned, the hour burning away — until he suddenly stopped, fixated on a single paragraph.

‘They refuse to see — all of them blinded by the illusory materiality that surrounds us. Even the 183rd Explorator’s Symposium was a wash. They thought themselves shrewd, biting their tongues while I spoke revelation, interested only in the edifice that revealed the nature of our world in plain, unvarnished insight. How can they be so blinded? Not two hours before my presentation Lord Historian Hettian had spoken in support! It was a small section of his overall writings, but it was so clear! A vessel of shining potency, come from the western horizon? Hettian himself detailed the fractured and ancient myths of a south-bound circumnavigation of our land that stretched from the mage’s peninsula to the scattered coastal tribes of the southern wastes! Did they think it pure whimsy that those strange foreigners made headway into those barren lands, only to return and make south? No, it is clear! They were Way Walkers, supping at the essence of the lands in sequential pilgrimage on their journey to the Gate at the Centre of All Things!’

Kaius froze, his mind churning. It was the ramblings of a madman, but this Hettian? He was plainly describing a foreign expedition. Kaius knew for a fact that Imperial remnants had fled to a different continent, his family among them. A ‘vessel of shining potency’ sure sounded like something that could be ascribed to the complex and powerful runecraft of the empire. And they just so happen to voyage inland in the same location that held at least one imperial ruin with sun-containing heraldry?

That was a lead too tantalising to ignore, even if it had been borne by the writings of a millennia-dead madman. He’d need to look into the work of this Hettian, and the explorator’s symposium as well.

“I think I might have actually found something,” Kaius said, drawing his friend’s attention before he explained what he had been reading.

Ianmus placed his book down, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “I’m loathe to put any faith in writings of such dubious quality, but certainly this Hettian is worth looking into. They’re from the Age of Dawn, at least, so there's a much better chance the works survived to the present day.”

“You haven’t heard of the explorator’s symposium?” Kaius asked, hopeful.

Ianmus shook his head. “Academic gatherings of that sort are a dime a dozen, especially in the centuries following the dark age. It could still exist, but I haven’t heard of it. At the very least, I’ve found something potentially promising as well. An explorer's journal, who voyaged into the deep Sea. Nearly died, before he was rescued by my father’s folk — there’s a throwaway line about being refused access to a conclave called Aelon. It’s apparently where some of the eldest elven powers reside — perhaps even Dynia.”

It was a good lead — it seemed deciding to split their focus had been the right move. To his surprise, Kenva let out a frustrated sigh.

“I haven’t been so lucky — all I've read is that the dwarves are cantankerous, which I already knew. Nearly every single book is detailing some sort of war. Wars against goblin incursions; wars between individual deepholds; wars over veins of adamant and mythril; wars over grudges; wars over succession — they’re bloody endless. It’s enough to make me doubt that House Herzog still exists. I haven’t seen a single clan that’s managed to survive for more than four hundred years without getting conquered, subsumed, or merged with another,” Kenva complained, sinking into her chair.

She looked across the table at Porkchop. “What about you? Find anything picking through the remaining scraps?”

“Maybe?” Porkchop hesitated, “We’d already gotten through most of it, and I didn’t really think anything of it until Kaius brought up what he found…”

Kaius straightened in his seat. They already had two fragments pointing them towards the wastes beyond the mountains, more would be even more tantalising. He wanted to know. Who had been his family's ancient enemies? Who’d fled with them over the ocean? Perhaps most importantly, what was in the cache that his ancient ancestor had mentioned? Any and all of it could be the key to discovering who had sent the Onyx after Father, and what had forced them to flee to Vaastivar in the first place.

More importantly, he just wanted to know. To finally have a history.

“It was a book that attempted to pin down the location of the imperial capital. One of the chapters was plotting the danger of imperial defenses in known ruins, and found they were more heavily defended in both the wastes and the jungle beyond. It seemed a little self-evident at the time, since those were dangerous high-mana zones, but…”

Kaius nodded in understanding — combined, it stood that there was a decent chance of their being something in the wastes. Though it was still conjecture. A traveler from overseas, if they had ever really existed, didn’t necessarily mean that it was an Unterstern vessel, nor even that it had been returning to Unterstern lands if it was one.

“We need to find that work by Hettian,” Kaius muttered. He doubted they would find it in the open section even if it was in the Aanthrast library — they needed Archivist Kanmost, and his expertise and access.

Before they could discuss their plans further, a librarian in grey robes flowed silently out of the stacks. Not Lyren — she’d told him yesterday that she would be working in an archive upstairs.

“Excuse me,” the man said softly. “Curator Lisn wishes to speak with the four of you — he’s waiting by the front desk.

Kaius looked at the man in surprise. A curator? Why would one of the library's leadership want them? Had he heard that he and Lyren had spent an evening together? He hoped he hadn’t gotten her in trouble — she’d been nothing but professional while working the reception.

“Did he say what for?” Ianmus questioned. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

“No, sorry,” the librarian said with a shake of his head. “Only that it was important. Would you mind meeting him now? Don’t worry about the books, I can reshelve them.”

Sharing a confused look with his friends, Kaius got up from his seat.