The Library? Lmao, Nerd.

“Are you sure, Miss Elisabeth?” Marie’s concerned face hovered above my bed. This was the third time she’d asked me that.

“Yes, Marie. I’ll be fine. Promise. Please, go enjoy yourself. It’s the last day of the festival. With all the excitement… I just want to sleep.”

Marie’s eyebrows unfurrowed. “Alright, if you promise. There was another stall of baked goods I wanted to investigate. And the evening bonfire looked fun, too…”

I giggled. “Go, have fun, Marie. You deserve it.”

“Understood, Miss Elisabeth. I did bring a few of your novels with us, in the green suitcase, should you get bored. Please rest well.” Marie bowed and took her leave.

I waited for a while after the door was closed, just to be safe. Just like faking sick to stay home from school. When I was sure that everyone had left for the Dawn of Spring, I hopped out of bed and got dressed, picking out a flower from the bouquet Finley had given me and nestling it in my hair.

After all, I had other plans for the morning.

There was a lot I still didn’t know about this world, and frankly, it was beginning to irk me. While playing the part of the clueless princess was fun at first, I needed to be able to rely on myself. I was already taking charge of studying magic on my own, why not do the same for the world around me? I was originally going to ask Marie about the Kingdom’s views on magic, the deal with the Emperor, and the history of the country, but I still felt a little tension from the other day. I didn’t want to have to rely on her for every little thing. Plus, it might blow my cover. You know, the whole being from another world thing.

I figured the palace had to have a library of some sort. I would go there, ask for some books on history and magic, and learn for myself what was going on. I will be doing some reading, Marie. Just not what you expected. Sorry.

A pang of guilt struck my heart, going behind Marie’s back like this. It’s necessary, though, me. I have to become more independent. Just like learning magic.

~~~~~~

To say the palace library was magnificent would be an understatement. Fifteen-foot-tall shelves lined the walls on two floors, small display cases held artifacts and trinkets of unknown purpose, and a giant skeleton of some beast hung from the ceiling in the middle of it all. A rich aroma of parchment, leather, and pine needles filled the air.

It was strangely quiet.

…Okay, you know what I meant. Obviously, libraries are quiet, but this room was dead silent. The only even remotely living thing here keeping me company was the monster skeleton, and I was pretty sure that guy was dead. Pretty sure.

I tentatively began peering at the volumes on the shelves surrounding me. The names all blended together as I scanned them: Rare Reagents and Their Applications; Herbs: The Definitive Field Guide; A Second Harvest; RavenLord: lmao how is he doing this; On the Use of Frui-

Wait. What? I stopped. That wasn’t a book title!

Frantically, I went back. Reagents, yeah, Herbs, yeah, Harvest, yeah… Huh? What I had just read looked like… well, a chat message. From a stream. My stream. But on that spine, it clearly read, embossed in green: “Raven’s Lore II: How to Dose a Tincture.”

I nervously laughed. Must have just been a trick on my eyes. Probably just a combination of poor sleep, an overactive imagination, the events of last week, and a career of reading chat messages-

Suddenly, a man in a fancy dark green vest sporting a pair of spectacles with glowing rims backed out from an aisle across from me, balancing a tall pile of books in his arms.

“Easy, easy. Hey! What’s this doing here? Take it back to Literature, section 3. …Don’t you sass me! You want to get assigned to dusting duty again this week? …That’s what I thought.”

Who the hell is he talking to? There were no other people around.

“Um, excuse me!” I called out.

The man jumped. “What!? Oh! Princess Lumineuse. They said you’d be here, right.”

What? I never told anyone I intended to go to the library. I took a step back. “H-How did you know that?”

He set the stack of books down on a table. “Sure, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t seen.” Pointing to something in the air, he spoke as if it were obvious. “And my, my, can they see.”

Perplexed, I asked, “What can?”

“My finches.”

Is this guy crazy?

I took another step back. “Um… I don’t see anything.”

The man looked around him and adjusted his glowing glasses. “Huh? Hold on, are you all hiding again? I told you to stop that! Guests need to know who’s helping them!” He batted something in the air.

All at once, thirty small birds appeared around him, fluttering from shelf to shelf and whizzing through the air. Each glowed a slight blue in the same color as his strange spectacles and shimmered with the same spectral veneer as Finley’s magical objects.

Startled, I almost fell over. “Whoa!” Wait, are these magic? I thought only nobles could use magic here. “Are you a part of the royal family?”

He chuckled. “No, no, not at all. Just their humble archivist, Stuart.”

“Then, how come…?” I looked at all the birds flitting around.

“Ah, the magic? Well, as one of Emperor Caestra’s retainers, I also have that privilege. High Scholar Finley himself taught me how to summon these little rascals.” Stuart shook his head with a smile. “Now that was a day, I tell you. Getting taught by a boy of seven!”

I didn’t realize you could summon living things with magic. That’s awesome.

“Now, what may I help you with, Princess Lumineuse?”

I explained to Stuart how I was looking for some books on history and magic, specifically about the Lumineuse kingdom. He commanded one of his spectral birds to guide me to a section on history, and basically told me to go nuts.

It would have been easy to get lost in the stacks.

And I did. My neck tiring from being turned sideways and scanning the spines of thousands of tomes, I gathered a generous handful of books that seemed like they had what I was looking for and took them to a table beneath the skeleton.

I won’t bore you with the details of it all. To be honest, the reading was dense and peppered with words that I didn’t understand, just like how Finley and Diana spoke.

There were a few highlights, however. At the beginning of my skimming, I came across something that, for some reason, caught my eye.

In A Collected History of the Incande Region: From First Steps to the Lumineuse Kingdom (volume 4!), while flipping through dusty pages about some conflict with a church and some princess of an ancient kingdom called “Incande,” a long footnote gave me pause.

Note - 22. While it remains largely understudied, contemporaneous reports from trusted confidants of the Radiant Princess describe a complex phenomenon that we have come to call Soul Bifurcation. She described, to her lover and close friends, roinn that stood far away from our own, with its own draodhachd. She insisted upon living an alternate life and felt at points that her very essence was torn in twain. The princess additionally described a difficult decision, though records of the event are lost. For further study, see index, page 592.

Something about it drew me in, despite some words meaning nothing to me. The weird chat message I hallucinated earlier came to the front of my mind, but I pushed the thought aside. I just misread a book title.

But this passage…

Later, I thought. I need to know more about contemporary history. I looked for a bookmark, but none were around. Maybe something in my pockets? Oh, right. Don’t have those. I settled on the alstroemeria in my hair. I took it out (sorry Finley!) and flattened it in the page, leaving the stem out as a bookmark, and moved to volume 5.

It was a few tomes later before I finally saw my own family in the pages. Volume 8 told the gripping story of the founding of the Lumineuse Kingdom.

I’ll translate it from stuffy historian-speak for you.

In the past, my kingdom actually had magic. Everyone could use it, too, not just the nobles (I know, it surprised me, too). An ancestor of mine, some number of great-grandfathers back, had made some discovery about an ancient princess’ use of magic and began a crusade against it, leading to a complete eradication of all use of it in the country. His house, House Lumineuse, steamrolled over the rest of the region with (ironically) the use of powerful magic to force everyone to fall in line. A genocide of mages ensued. It went from being a common thing that everyone enjoyed to a cloistered art kept secret, even from nobles. My ancestor then eliminated all the magic users who had made his conquest possible. Over time, people saw it as incredibly taboo, and magic faded from the Lumineuse Kingdom entirely, save for one person.

I was completely engrossed. This view of my Kingdom’s history — from the outside, an objective source written by an Andrastian historian — was a totally different perspective. Magic wasn’t inherently evil; it was one man’s reservations spun into a kingdom-wide cultural proscription.

One thing in particular really sparked my interest.

The historian wrote how magic was not absolutely gone from the kingdom, but how, in fact, knowledge and prodigious use of it flowed through one lineage.

Passed down from king to king, magic was used in earnest.

I sat back in shock. My father had some explaining to do.