Chapter 39: Stolen KnowledgeThe smog of Rurokitarin tasted like crushed coal and rusted iron, thick enough to chew but perfect for hiding.

  Miz’ri Niranath crouched on the steeply sloped ste roof of the University Library, her obsidian skin blending fwlessly into the soot-stained shadows of a leering stone gargoyle. Three stories below, the cobblestone paths of the campus were illuminated by flickering gasmps, casting long, distorted shadows of the students and faculty hurrying through the cold night air.

  Up here, in the dark, she was in her element.

  She shifted her weight, the leather of her boots making absolutely no sound against the ste. Her fingers drifted down to brush the hilt of the new dagger strapped to her ankle, at the red and white leather grounding her, reminding her of exactly why she was freezing on a rooftop in the middle of the night.

  Miz’ri looked down at the sprawling, gothic architecture of the campus and realized, with a sudden pang of crity, just how long it had been since she had done something like this. When she had first cwed her way to the surface, breaking into secure buildings had been a matter of brutal, desperate survival. She had been a thief driven by hunger, by the need for coin to buy wine, by the frantic urge to find a warm body to distract her from the crushing weight of her exile. She had been a rat scurrying through life; terrified and angry.

  But tonight was different, she felt different. She wasn’t desperate, and she wasn't alone. She was here by choice. She wasn’t breaking into this library to survive. She was breaking in to protect the girl she loved, and to recim a stolen legacy for a Matriarch who had actually looked at her with respect. She was no longer a rat in the walls, and for once she felt it.

  Even the Silence, the constant, itching void of her addiction, felt distant right now, drowned out by the adrenaline and the warmth lingering on her mouth.

  Miz’ri lifted a gloved hand, her fingertips lightly tracing her lower lip.

  The memory was only fifteen minutes old, but it burned bright and hot in her chest. Just before the Garden Gang had splintered off to execute their respective phases of the pn, they had paused in a blind alleyway behind the archival wing. While Baby was adjusting her robes and Artie was going over the distraction timing, Talisa had reached out and grabbed the pels of Miz’ri’s dark tunic.

  She hadn't pulled Miz’ri back in fear. She had yanked her lover into the shadows with a surprising, grounded strength.

  “Miz,” Talisa had whispered, her blue eyes completely devoid of the pious, frightened girl she used to be. There was a fierce, protective fire in them now. “Look at me.”

  Miz’ri had looked, her breath catching in her throat. And then Talisa had kissed her. It wasn’t a soft, hesitant peck. It was a deep, bruising, grounding kiss that tasted like mint and absolute certainty. It was an anchor dropped straight into the turbulent waters of Miz’ri’s anxiety.

  When Talisa pulled back, she had kept her hands firmly on Miz’ri’s chest, right over her heart. “You are the sharpest thing in this city,” the human girl had said, her voice steady and resolute. “You are not broken. You are my sanctuary, and I believe in you. Go get my Grandmother's book.”

  Up on the roof, Miz’ri smiled. It was a sharp, dangerous expression that bared her white teeth to the smoggy night. I believe in you. No one had ever said that to her in Doulmaedes. No one had ever believed she was anything more than a fwed weapon.

  The wind shifted, blowing the thick fog across the spires. And then, the vibration started.

  Miz’ri felt it in the stone beneath her boots a fraction of a second before the sound actually hit the air.

  BONG.

  The University’s massive hour clock chimed, the sound deep, resonant, and heavy enough to rattle the gss in the library windows below. It was midnight.

  Miz’ri looked up toward the towering, imposing silhouette of the North Tower—the Belltower. To her hypersensitive ears, the tolling didn't sound like gears and metal. It sounded like a voice. It felt as though Miriam Magleby, the Belltower Witch herself, was ringing the bell to give the order.

  ‘Time to get to work.’

  Miz’ri moved. She slid silently down the slope of the roof, her fingers catching the edge of the heavy iron grate that covered the library’s ventition intake. With a smooth, practiced twist of leverage, she popped the grate free, set it silently aside, and slipped into the pitch-bck maw of the iron ductwork.

  The heist had begun.

  The ventition shafts of the University Library smelled of ancient dust, dry parchment, and floor wax. To Miz’ri, navigating the tight, tin-lined spaces was effortless. She crawled with the fluid, sprawling grace of a hunting spider, her red eyes easily piercing the absolute darkness.

  She reached the first iron grating and peered down through the sts.

  Below her y the massive, echoing main atrium of the library. It was a cathedral of knowledge, lined with towering mahogany bookshelves and illuminated by floating, glowing orbs of warm yellow light. And right on schedule, the Garden Gang was turning it into a circus.

  "I told you, you pointy-eared cheat, a flush beats a straight!"

  The booming roar belonged to Gourdy. Miz’ri watched as the massive half-orc smmed a meaty fist onto a quiet study table, rattling the inkwells of several terrified students. Across from him, Artie was pying his part perfectly, looking appropriately offended and wildly defensive.

  "I didn't cheat! You just don't know how to py Rurokitarin rules, you oversized cabbage!" Artie shouted back, dramatically sweeping a pile of imaginary chips off the table.

  It was loud, it was obnoxious, and it worked beautifully. As Artie shoved Gourdy, the half-orc let out a theatrical bellow that echoed off the vaulted ceilings. Miz'ri watched with grim satisfaction as a dozen blue-robed campus security guards, wands and halberds drawn, abandoned their posts near the restricted corridors and converged on the escating "brawl."

  The decoy was set. Miz'ri scrambled further down the shaft, navigating toward the central circution desk.

  She paused at the next grate, looking directly down at the head archivist’s station. A young, nervous-looking wizard with thick spectacles was currently drowning in a sea of paperwork, utterly trapped in Baby Bok Choy's web.

  Baby was leaning heavily against the counter, practically pushing her modest breasts up to her chin as the lowest cut top she owned put everything on dispy. She was pying up her "dumb, lost blonde" persona with devastating effectiveness. She had a massive, complex requisition form id out in front of her, pointing at it with a perfectly manicured finger while twirling a vibrant curl around the other.

  "I just don't understand, can we start over?" Baby cooed, her voice pitched to a breathy, helpless register. "If Section Four requires a blood-seal, why did Section Three already ask for my astral sign? Am I supposed to bleed on the astral line, or just... think about bleeding?"

  The archivist stammered, his face flushing crimson as he tried to look at the paperwork and pointedly not look at Baby's plunging emerald neckline. "N-no, miss, the blood-seal goes on the appendix, you see, and the astral sign—"

  "It is a terribly archaic system, isn't it, darling?"

  Miz'ri stifled a ugh in the vents as Danni Emereneaux stepped up beside Baby. The High Elf looked devastatingly elegant, her violet eyes gleaming with predatory mischief. Danni leaned in close to the archivist, her presence commanding and icy, effectively pinning the poor man between two forces of nature.

  "I've seen better filing systems in goblin war-camps," Danni haughtily critiqued, reaching out to trace a slow, deliberate finger along the edge of the wizard's desk. She lowered her voice to a sultry purr. "Though, I suppose a man of your obvious... intellect... must get so bored babysitting these dusty old books."

  Baby shot Danni a sideways gre, her helpless persona cracking just a fraction as genuine jealousy fred. "Excuse me, I was asking him a question about my appendix."

  "And I'm sure he'll get to it, once he finishes expining this disastrous cataloging method to me," Danni replied smoothly, offering the wizard a wicked, devastating smile. Looming over the smaller man with her elven height and polished beauty working towards her advantage. Both women leaned in, and the archivist looked like he was going to hyperventite. Eyes cast up and down between cheek bones, breasts and bureaucracy. The trap was fwless. Every eye at the front desk was glued to the bickering, overwhelmingly beautiful women.

  Miz’ri tore her gaze away and moved deeper into the library's architecture, following the ductwork until it reached an exterior vent overlooking a secluded courtyard just outside the High Vault's tower walls.

  The campus watch had been pulled away by Gourdy and Artie's fight, leaving the quiet, cobblestone alleyway completely empty. Well, almost empty.

  Sitting on a cold stone bench beneath the towering, moonlit stained-gss window of the vault was a pile of heavy winter coats and scarves that looked vaguely human. Next to Pappy sat Marissa and Talisa. This was the drop zone.

  Miz’ri lingered for a moment, resting her chin on her forearms as she looked through the grating.

  Marissa Magleby was sitting so rigidly her spine looked like it might snap. Her hands were folded perfectly in her p, her expression frozen in the polite, detached mask of a woman trying desperately not to look like she was participating in a felony. She hated this deception; Miz'ri could see the anxiety vibrating off her.

  But Talisa was right there. The human girl had one arm looped casually through her mother’s, her hand resting warmly over Marissa’s tightly clenched knuckles. Talisa wasn't wearing a mask. She looked alert, calm, and incredibly brave. She whispered something to her mother, offering a gentle squeeze, and Miz'ri watched Marissa let out a long, shuddering breath, her shoulders finally dropping an inch.

  Miz’ri felt a profound swell of affection lodge in her throat. She looked at the two of them. They were beautiful. Not in the polished, fragile way of the high society they came from, but in the fierce, devoted way of survivors holding each other together in the dark.

  I am not going to let anything happen to them, Miz'ri promised herself.

  She took a slow breath, letting the image of them center her, before she reached out and silently untched the vent cover. She had a vault to crack. Miz’ri slipped the grate free and dropped from the ceiling like a shadow detaching itself from the wall. She nded in a perfect, silent crouch on the polished marble of the restricted corridor.

  She wasn't entirely alone. A lone sentry was still on patrol, his heavy boots clicking rhythmically against the stone as he rounded the corner, a glowing ntern wand held aloft.

  A month ago, Miz’ri wouldn't have hesitated. She would have stepped out of the shadows, drawn a bde across his throat, and let him bleed out quietly into the grout. The instinct fred hot in her chest, the predator demanding a clean, efficient kill.

  “No blood on the books. No blood on your name.” however was stamped across her mind; an edict she could not disobey. Miz’ri gritted her teeth, exhaling sharply through her nose as the memory of her vow to Marissa echoed in her ears. She drew her new dagger, her thumb running over the red and white leather. She flipped the bde backward, gripping the steel ft against her forearm so the heavy iron pommel was exposed.

  As the sentry passed the alcove, Miz’ri surged forward. She cmped a gloved hand over his mouth and brought the heavy pommel down hard against his temple. The guard went limp instantly with a soft, muted thud. She caught his dead weight before he could hit the floor, dragging him swiftly into a nearby janitorial closet and wedging him safely between two mop buckets.

  "Consider yourself lucky, human," she whispered to the unconscious man, before stepping back out and approaching the imposing iron door of the High Vault.

  Despite being housed in a magical university, the door's lock was distinctly, stubbornly physical. Anti-magic fields rippled softly across the metal, designed to disperse unlocking spells or knock cantrips. It was a lock that required hands, not wands.In a pce like this, that was more secure than any arcane lock.

  Miz’ri retrieved a set of slim steel picks from her belt pouch. She pressed her ear to the cold iron, closing her eyes as she visualized the heavy tumblers within. Click. Click. Clunk. It took her less than thirty seconds. Childspy she remarked internally, pleased with herself as she eased the heavy door open, slipping inside the High Vault, and immediately drove a splintered wooden wedge, snapped from a mop handle in the closet, deep into the door’s hinge mechanism, jamming it shut from the inside. It wouldn't hold forever, but it would buy her the minutes she needed should someone approach before she was gone.

  The interior of the vault smelled of dry rot, preserved herbs, and the sharp tang of dangerous enchantments. Towering bookshelves stretched into the dark, housing artifacts deemed too heretical or hazardous for the general student body..Only a single red, plush red velvet stanchion rope, the kind used to block off museum dispy, blocked her path.

  She went to move the soft fabric and it suddenly lunged for her hand. Miz’ri pulled it back instantly, but looked unnerved as the rope was uncoiling itself from a brass post, rearing up like a striking cobra, its tasseled end lunging blindly for her ankle.

  Miz’ri didn't even blink. Her dagger fshed out in a clean, vicious arc, decapitating the enchanted rope. The velvet severed cleanly, the animation spell breaking as the two halves dropped lifelessly to the floor. "Mundane, but annoying," she muttered, stepping over the fraying fabric.

  She navigated the byrinth of towering aisles, moving like a wraith through the gloom. Her red eyes swept over the university’s most carefully guarded secrets, taking in the bizarre and the profane. She passed gss terrariums housing preserved, pulsing organs that cast a sickly green luminescence against the stone. She stepped around pedestals holding grimoires wrapped tightly in silver chains, some of which rattled softly as she approached, as if sensing the heat of a living body. The air here was thick, heavy with the static charge of overpping preservation wards and the metallic tang of old blood. She ignored the faint, desperate whispers echoing from a shelf of cracked porcein death masks and kept her focus sharp, scanning the tarnished brass pques bolted to the end of each mahogany row. Finally, near the very back of the vault where the shadows were thickest, she found the section she needed: Magleby, M. - Prohibited Necromantic Theory.

  She approached the shelf, reaching out, and then stopped cold.

  She let out a low, frustrated groan.

  Sitting on the dusty shelf, nestled between a tome on undetectable poisons and a grimoire of trickery, were six identical, leather-bound books. Every single one had The Diary of the Belltower Witch embossed in faded gold lettering on the spine.

  "Decoys," Miz’ri hissed. "Of course there are decoys."

  She didn't have time to read them all, and taking all six would be far too bulky to hide on the drop. She had to guess. Trusting her instincts, she reached out for the third book from the left, wrapping her gloved fingers around the spine.

  The bookshelf growled.

  The wood beneath the books warped and bubbled. The "Diary" Miz’ri had grabbed suddenly snapped open, but there were no pages inside. Instead, a gaping maw of razor-sharp, paper-thin teeth and a wet, bck tongue lunged at her fingers.

  Miz’ri yanked her hand back just as the book snapped its jaws shut with a sound like a guillotine.

  It was a Mimic trap.

  Before she could process it, three of the other "books" sprouted leathery, bat-like wings from their covers and unched themselves off the shelf, their jagged maws snapping frantically at her face and throat, with the bookshelf itself stomping forward after her; books rattling everywhere off its shelves as this creature approached a fresh meal.

  Miz’ri fell back, dodging a snapping spine. A smirk crossing her obsidian face, the thrill of the moment flooding her veins.The addictive withdrawal, the anxiety of the looming death date, and the forced politeness around her girlfriend’s very intense mother—it had all been building a suffocating pressure inside her. The vow had held her back with the guard, but these? These were monsters.

  A flying book lunged for her eyes. Miz’ri spun, her new dagger slicing through the air. The bde sheared cleanly through the mimic's leather wing, sending it spiraling into a nearby desk. Another leaped from the shelf, aiming for her neck. Miz’ri caught it mid-air, her gloved hand cmping shut around its "covers," pinning its jaws shut. She drove the dagger straight through the center of the book, feeling the satisfying, visceral crunch of the mimic dying beneath her steel.

  She hurled the dead creature aside, a feral, silent grin spreading across her face as the book shelf finally approached. It lumbered forward, the lowest shelf snaking forward as a tongue to reach out to snare her. But it’s current form was not limber enough; she easily escaped it’s grasping appendage to get around the boxy side. Issuing stab after stab into the living book cast, hearing it squeal and shriek as the final blow nded. The mimic book shelf shuttered, it’s entire contents on the floor now as it colpsed to it’s side.

  Miz’ri shot up panting, proud and catching her breath. She was a predator, and the library had just served up prey she was actually allowed to kill.

  Miz’ri stood panting in the center of the aisle, the red-and-white handle of her dagger slick with the bck, inky ichor of the destroyed mimics. The torn remnants of the fake diaries y scattered across the floor like shredded trash. The feral grin slowly faded from her face, repced by a deep, shuddering exhale.

  She wiped her bde on the severed velvet rope she had kicked aside earlier and sheathed it at her ankle. It was then, in the dim, greenish light of the preserved organs glowing nearby, that she saw it.

  One book remained that had simply been knocked from the shelf during the scuffle and had fallen to the marble floor, nding open to a page near the middle.

  Miz’ri approached it cautiously, half-expecting the pages to turn into a maw. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. Nothing happened. It was just a book. Bound in worn, unassuming brown leather, its pages yellowed and brittle with age.

  She crouched down and picked it up, her red eyes scanning the frantic, elegantly sloped cursive written across the open page. It was clearly a journal entry, the ink smeared in pces as if the writer had been weeping.

  Miz’ri began to read.

  "A life without my Herkel was not a life worth living, because I realized when fate took him from me, I died too. My soul died along with him, drifting off to the void with him. When I pulled him from the darkness, I saved myself too. I could not have done that without the love he gave me that kept my poor broken heart beating when all I wanted to do is give up. Love is all, with that you can find your way through any darkness."

  The words hit Miz’ri like a physical blow. She stopped breathing for a second, her eyes locked on the faded ink. This was the great heresy? This was the dark, forbidden necromancy that the University feared so much they locked it behind anti-magic fields and armed guards?

  Miriam Magleby hadn't used demonic pacts or malicious, power-hungry rituals to raise Pappy from the dead. She hadn't been a power-mad witch. She had simply been a woman who refused to let go. She had used love as the anchor for her magic. Powerful, necromantic magic fueled by a pure source. She had weaponized her own broken heart to tether a soul back to the living world.

  Miz’ri ran a trembling, gloved finger over the word darkness.

  For her entire life in Doulmaedes, Miz'ri had been taught that love was a weakness. It was a chain that enemies could use to drag you down. She had been terrified of her own attachment to Talisa, treating her codependency like a shameful fw she had to hide, constantly fearing that caring too much would leave her soft and vulnerable.

  When the Silence crept in, it always told her that she was broken, that she was alone, and that the only way to survive was to give in to the cold, numb predation of her upbringing.

  But reading Miriam's words, a profound, shattering realization bloomed in Miz’ri’s chest. She thought of Talisa pulling her into the shadows just to kiss her. She thought of the fierce, unyielding strength in the human girl's blue eyes.

  Her love for Talisa wasn't a weakness, nor a dependency. It was the only thing keeping her soul from drifting off into the void of the Silence. It was the weapon she needed. The Matriarchs of her past were wrong. Love wasn't the chain that bound her; it was the anchor that saved her.

  Miz’ri let out a breath that was half-ugh, half-sob.

  "Love is all…" she whispered to the empty vault.

  She carefully closed the authentic book and slid it securely into her leather satchel. She had what she came for, but she still needed to get it to the drop zone so Pappy could verify the handwriting. It was time to move.

  It was time to go.

  The profound stillness of the vault was abruptly shattered by a sharp, violent CRACK.

  Miz’ri spun around. The heavy iron door at the far end of the vault shuddered in its frame. The thick wooden mop handle she had jammed into the hinges was splintering under immense force. Someone was violently jiggling the outer handle, and a low hum of arcane energy began to vibrate through the floorboards.

  They know. Miz’ri didn't hesitate. She slung the heavy leather satchel securely across her chest and bolted toward the towering mahogany bookshelves that lined the exterior wall. She didn't head for the door; she headed up. Using the ornate wooden carvings and the thick spines of the restricted grimoires as handholds, the Drow scrambled up the shelves with the desperate agility of a cornered spider.

  Her target was the high arched window near the vaulted ceiling, three stories directly above the quiet drop zone where Talisa, Marissa, and Pappy were waiting. If she could reach the rafters, she could slip out the gss, drop to the awning below, and vanish into the smog.

  CRACK-SNAP!

  The wooden wedge gave way completely. The iron door to the High Vault burst open, smming against the stone wall. An archive wizard, his blue robes fring, stepped into the gloom with his wand raised high.

  Miz’ri froze in the rafters, clinging to the shadows near the arched window, willing herself to be invisible. But the wizard heard the scuff of her boots against the wood. He looked up, his eyes locking onto the patch of darkness where she hid.

  ”Fiat Lux!" the archivist bellowed, driving his wand upward. The vault was instantly flooded with blinding, searing, midday-sun brilliance. For a human, it would have been dazzling. For a Dark Elf, whose sensitive red eyes were perfectly adapted to the pitch-bck tunnels of the Reaches Below, it was agonizing. As if the sun itself was sparked in its awful, noon-time misery inside her skull.

  "Argh!" Miz’ri screamed, a raw, feral sound tearing from her throat as her vision was instantly wiped out by an ocean of searing white. The pain was absolute, like white-hot needles being driven into her optic nerves. Her hands instinctively flew to her face, releasing her grip on the wooden rafters as she desperately tried to shield her eyes from the magical gre.

  It was a fatal mistake.

  Completely blinded and violently disoriented, her boots slipped on the polished mahogany. Shrinking away from the agonizing light, Miz’ri tipped backward into the empty air, her weight smming against the delicate leaded panes behind her. The majestic, moonlit image of the Schor’s Compass exploded into a thousand glittering shards as Miz’ri tumbled out of the vault, plummeting from the high window into the smog.

  Three stories down, on the secluded bench, Talisa and Marissa shot up. Talisa’s breath caught in her throat as a shower of broken, glittering gss rained down toward the cobblestones. She looked up, her blood turning to ice, and screamed. "Miz!" Marissa shot up in a panic as Pappy stood up and immediately began to rattle his bones towards where the elf was falling.

  Miz’ri heard the screams as she fell, a terrifying blur of motion and wind. She smmed hard onto a snted canvas awning of a lower portico, the heavy fabric tearing under her weight but slowing her deadly momentum just enough. She bounced off the metal framing and plummeted the rest of the way, crashing heavily into the muddy, rain-slicked cobblestones of the street below.

  The impact knocked the breath from her lungs in a violent rush.

  Miz’ri rolled, coughing up a mouthful of mud and smog, her hands desperately gripping the satchel to her chest. She forced her eyes open, but there was nothing. No shadows. No outlines. Just a blinding, throbbing sea of searing white afterimages.

  She was alive. She was battered. But she was completely, terrifyingly blind.

  And then, the deafening, metallic roar of the University's brass arm bells finally erupted into the night, signaling to every guard in Rurokitarin that the vault had been breached.

  Miz’ri pushed herself up onto her hands and knees in the mud, her red eyes burning uselessly as the sounds of shouting and heavy boots began to converge on her position. Involuntary tears streamed down her face as every blink felt like her head was full of broken gss shards, making every awful bright light a new dagger in her mind.

  The heist was over. The hunt had begun.