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“The Antiquarian Society is charged with safeguarding the Library of Arindell’s precious store of knowledge. The Library does a pretty good job of protecting itself, though; so it is perhaps more accurate to say the Antiquarians are charged with organizing it. This, it should be noted, is in fact a far more challenging task.”
- An Incomplete History of the Great Library
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Chapter 19:
Oaths
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#19.1 – Thursday, the 3rd day of the 10th month…
Scarlet wasn’t entirely sure why she’d been called to the headquarters of the Antiquarian Society*, but she was happy to see it all the same. For its role in preserving the culture of Arindell, the Society owned several important, high-status buildings. Many of these were ruins from the old Alliance era, or built from salvaged materials.
The elegant, five story structure a few miles from the great Library† was covered in marble in a hundred different hues. The grounds surrounding it were dotted with ancient columns, some dating back even to before the old city.
Being close(ish) to her house, Scarlet walked the grounds often. But unlike the various museums and galleries run by the society, their headquarters was a business center. Scarlet never got to see the inside, until today.
With her mother in tow, Scarlet put her hand on the front door and tried to open it.
“It says ‘push’, sweetie,” Ann informed her.
Once inside(and feeling slightly less embarrassed) Scarlet gazed around in wonder. She stepped into the building’s entrance, a junction point where three large halls met. Marble columns rose as tree trunks in each corner, climbing to the barrel-vaulted roof enclosing the space. Her mother’s shoes clicked behind her on the polished red sandstone as Scarlet beelined to the room’s center where a few staff members typed away behind ornately carved oaken desks.
The bones of the building had once been an intake-annex for the Library. In ages long past, books from all over the known worlds arrived to be sorted, cataloged, and then just sort of tossed wherever. Today, the acquisitions went a lot slower and the shelving a lot better, so the intake-annex moved to a boring warehouse at the mouth of the valley.
“Where do we go, mom?” Scarlet asked.
“I don’t really know,” Ann admitted. “The message just said to ‘meet here’.”
“But it has to be good, right?” a not of urgency crept into Scarlet’s whisper. “T-they wouldn’t ask us to come down here just to say no, right?”
As if on cue, Alabus Norman came down one of the large hallways, accompanied by a small squadron of assistants. He lit a pipe while barking orders and dictating a letter.
For a moment, Scarlet thought he was going to walk right past them, but he paused in mid-stride and turned to face her. “Ah, punctuality, I love it. Thank you for coming, Ms. Jusenkyou, and Mrs. Jusenkyou. We can do this right here, shant take long.”
“The message on our answering service was just a little vague,” Ann said.
“Well, I don’t believe we need to stand so much on formality,” Mr. Norman explained. “It all comes down to this: thirteen-year-old girls are not allowed to be Assistant Members of the New Stormwind Antiquarian Society.”
Scarlet hung her head.
“However,” Mr. Norman continued. “Scarlet Jusenkyou is.”
“What?!” Scarlet’s mouth gaped open.
“A motion was made. It passed. You’re in,” Mr. Norman told her. “The by-laws state that a person has to be twenty-five to hold such a membership. Assuming you are not terminally ill, you’ll reach that age eventually. So we simply voted you in. It seemed easier than modifying the by-laws.”
Scarlet threw her arms around Mr. Norman and banged her head painfully into his medallion again, crying tears of joy.
“Of course, that’s all assuming your fees and dues are in order,” Mr. Norman continued. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that, I believe a letter should be on the way. In the meantime…” Alabus paused and snapped his fingers a few times, holding his free hand out. One of his assistants handed him a large envelope along with a key on a silk lanyard. “I believe this is yours?”
The key to Emmerich’s lab, and an official writ deeding all of its contents to Scarlet.
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* #19.2 *
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After leaving the headquarters, Scarlet had her mother drive her straight to the Library and drop her off. There, Scarlet sprinted straight across the parking lot. She only nearly got run over twice.
This wasn’t the first time Scarlet penetrated past the velvet cordon separating the Antiquarian’s research wing from the rest of the Library. The less said about that previous visit, the better*.
She found Emmerich’s lab and began to explore, treating it with the same reverence as Eieber’s tomb. Standing on a stool, Scarlet leaned over the large table at the center of the room, squinting at the strange map spread across it. She still had the key in one hand, complete with the long ribbon, and dangled it absently while she looked over the paper.
The room wasn’t all that impressive, not that Scarlet expected anything else.
It was perhaps twelve feet wide by forty long, with furniture arrayed so as to keep open walking paths. A large, wide work table with drawers underneath and a series of overhead lights made up the study and handling space. There were also several lateral filing cabinets where Scarlet guessed Emmerich kept his notes. In one corner, a comfortable but ancient arm chair and lamp sat on a rug, forming the perfect reading space.
Shelves piled with books filled the back half of the room. Emmerich kept his research materials here. Funnily enough, it was mostly lay-publications from the end of the old Alliance-era; pulp books and magazines, folios of ancient newspapers.
“Oh,” a distant voice said, sounding a bit disappointed but mostly surprised.
Scarlet looked up to see a young woman entering the narrow room and staring at her.
“So, you really are a child?” she said, somewhat aghast. “When the solicitor told us grandfather had changed his will to leave his research to a young woman, well, I thought… I didn’t think he meant—”
“Meep?” Scarlet offered helpfully.
“You… you’re really just a little girl,” the woman repeated.
“I’m thirteen if that helps,” Scarlet offered.
Scrunching her face, the woman closed her eyes for a moment and nodded. “That helps.” She came around to the table and sat gingerly on one of the research stools.
“My name is Evelyn,” she introduced herself. “I’m—I was—Emmerich’s grand-daughter.”
“I… mm… I’m sorry, I never met his family,” Scarlet forced herself to swallow. “We didn’t talk about much besides,” she raised her hand and gestured at the room.
“Which, of course, makes this even weirder,” Evelyn sighed, leaning her elbows on the table. She stared around for a moment, then eyed Scarlet again. “What does all this mean to you? When you think of this place, is this a clubhouse, a quiet place to read? To you, what is this?”
“A monument,” Scarlet replied automatically. She hopped down off her stool and moved to one of the book cases, scanning the titles for one she’d half seen earlier. Finding it, she took out the well-worn volume and expertly navigated to the page, then placed her finger on the passage and pushed the book towards Evelyn.
“In the mid-to-late Second Age, Pendragon Rhys Rayborn popularized the idea of preserving entire rooms,” Scarlet explained. “Exactly as they were, when the person who used them most died. He was one of the last Pendragons to own an estate outside of the Keep, and as he lay on his death bed, he dictated the dispensation of his assets. At his manor home on the outskirts of the city—today a parking lot for one of those big-box stores—his attendants discovered a sealed room that had been his wife’s sewing room. She had died thirty years earlier, and the room—which Rayborn recalled she spent nearly all her time in—was kept perfectly as a monument to her. Since he knew the manor would not stay forever, Rayborn gave orders that the room be re-created, as perfectly as possible—within his tomb in the Valley of Sleeping Dragons. So far as we know, it still sits there today, exactly as his late wife left it.”
Evelyn stared at Scarlet blankly for several moments. “I’m sorry, do you do that sort of thing all the time?”
“Do what?” Scarlet replied.
Evelyn leaned back and shook her head to clear it. “Just, sort of, speak in entire paragraphs? You sound just like him.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Scarlet gestured. “But I know Emmerich spent his whole life in this room. I mean, this is where he really lived. I know it’s just a rented space, but you can re-trace every step he took in here. This place is… well he made it his own.”
“I’m really understanding what he saw in you,” Evelyn admitted. “And… I think you can maybe understand why his family might not so readily want to let such a treasure go to a stranger.”
Scarlet’s face fell.
“I’m, ah, ahem,” she cleared her throat and looked away from Evelyn. “You have to understand how antiquarians do their research. There’s a whole world inside this Library, more books than you could count in a lifetime. Most of it’s not catalogued or sorted or anything. The antiquarians, they pick things out, they sift through it all, and they try to make sense of it.” Scarlet gestured around her at the rows of metal shelves crowding the back of the room. “Emmerich put this collection together for a reason. These aren’t random. He’s pursuing a thread, chasing some rabbit down the history hole; and trying to learn something important.”
Evelyn looked at Scarlet and cocked her head to the side. “I’m starting to re-think my plans. I came here to tell you we were contesting the will and to catalogue everything in the place, but… now I’m not so sure.”
“I haven’t taken anything,” Scarlet said in a small voice. “Just… looked around, is all.”
“There’s little of value in here, anyway,” Evelyn said. “The books all belong to the Library. The furnishings… well, we might have kept some of it for sentiment. The valuable thing in here is grandfather’s research. We… were going to donate his papers to the university.”
“D-don’t do that!” Scarlet sputtered, throwing herself defensively over the nearest filing cabinet. “They’ll be boxed up and lost! Thrown in the stack, separated, disconnected!”
“That is kind of what I needed to hear,” Evelyn admitted. “What matters more than anything is that my grandfather’s work is put to some use. It’s not hard to see what he saw in you, why he chose to pass his torch to you. I think… we can try it. For now. All I ask is that if you become in danger of losing this place, you come to me. Can you do that?”
Scarlet nodded.
Evelyn covered her eyes and dropped her chin, laughing. “If you weren’t a frizzy-haired little girl you’d be exactly like him!”
“C-can you tell me what his research was about?” Scarlet asked.
Evelyn drew a deep breath and let out a long sigh.
“Grand-dad was an expert on… I believe his name was… Jason Burrell. Something with a B,” Evelyn said. “He was known historically as The Shadow of the Light, a figure associated somehow with the last Pendragon. Maybe they were lovers?”
Scarlet stared at Evelyn with her jaw slack and her hands dropping to her sides.
“Do you mean ‘Jason Bur’I‡’?” she asked after a long silence.
“Yes, that was it,” Evelyn paused and glanced at Scarlet out of the corner of her eye. “You have a strange inflection, did you just somehow pronounce a double-dagger symbol?”
“It’s a fricative shift,” Scarlet replied. “Anyway, I am reasonably certain Hunter and Jason weren’t lovers,” she growled, then added “I think” under her breath.
“I honestly never paid that close attention,” Evelyn admitted. “I’ve never been very good at history.”
Ya don’t say? Scarlet thought to herself, then said: “Well, Jason was a very enigmatic figure.”
“I just know that grandpa studied Jason,” Evelyn explained. “We always assumed he was writing a book, but he’d tend to laugh at us whenever we mentioned it. I… think, once, when I was a little girl, he told me a story about how he thought Jason had left a key to The Arsenal of Freedom, whatever that is. He didn’t… he didn’t say it like that, though, he said it was the key to a relic ‘like in the arsenal’. I don’t really remember, I’m sorry.”
Scarlet’s ears perked and she looked at Evelyn sideways. “Oh?”
Evelyn forced a smile. “I don’t remember much about it, I don’t even know what that is.”
“During the ages of the Old Alliance+,” Scarlet explained. “The Arden Star EmpireP gathered a really impressive collection of enchanted weapons and armor, mostly from the Mage Wars, and assembled them in a museum. They called the collection ‘The Arsenal of Freedom#’. It went missing sometime after the Death of Hope**.”
“Right,” Evelyn agreed. “I think my grandfather found some sort of connection between it and Jason. Of course, it’s normal for all historians to chase lost treasures…”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.”
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* #19.3 *
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Alone in the lab, Scarlet sat for to her solemn task. Preserving Emmerich’s work would honor him more so than anything else. In The Great Library of Arindell*, that meant transforming dozens of loose stacks of notes into books.
Traditionally, when a great researcher passed, the Society gathered his notes and organized them to be bound into folios. If the work proved important enough, these books would even be reproduced. Research folios from the greatest scholars of the Age were most sought-after pieces of any good collection.
Scarlet had to be meticulous; each page, carefully scanned, lined up, then glued and stitched to the others. Mindful of any margin notes too close to the new stitching, Scarlet copied any handwritten entries to the top or bottom of pages. It was painstaking work, made easier only by the fastidious way Emmerich already had the papers organized.
Scarlet knew the technique well. She had done it for her report over the summer.
But only hours into the project, Scarlet lost herself in the notes. A single scrap of paper proved particularly poignant:
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I am looking for something. I don’t know what it is. But in the sunset of the Long Night, the shadow stole something of great value and hid it away at a place known only to him. He took this thing and he hid it there, and he sent the place away.
I will be searching much longer, but today I have the name of that place, and it is called ‘The Feast of the Aeons’.
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“What were you searching for, Emmerich?” Scarlet breathed. Despite what Evelyn told her, none of Emmerich’s notes mentioned the Arsenal of Freedom. She began to scan through all the pages she’d arranged so far. But his research did focus around Jason Bur’I.
“The shadow of the light,” Scarlet said to no one in particular. “More myth than man, aren’t you?”
Jason had been the closest friend and confidant of the last Pendragon. Even to a seasoned scholar like Scarlet, he was a mystery. Most researchers didn’t believe he ever existed. A ‘composite character’ they called him: an amalgam of seven or eight different people stitched together.
But Scarlet knew that Jason existed. She was among the elite few, those scholars who had delved so deep into the ancient tomes of long forgotten lore. No question remained; and Emmerich clearly knew the same. He couldn’t have put together a body of work like this any other way.
As page after page crossed before her eyes, Scarlet realized she wasn’t breathing. Emmerich’s notes—a lifetime of meticulous research—focused on an era known as ‘The Sunset’. The most poorly-understood portion of the Long Night.
The same era Scarlet herself intently studied in her search for the sword.
Thoughts and ideas coalesced in her head like a gathering storm. Emmerich knew many things, but his work focused on Jason and his connection to the enigmatic Feast of Aeons. He hadn’t spared so much as a thought to the fate of the sword.
It hit her like a bolt of lighting. Scarlet’s back arched and her eyes narrowed.
It was all so obvious now.
Calm and measured, she turned back to Emmerich’s original note, scrawled some many decades earlier. He did not know, but she did.
And together, they had found the location of the sword.
“Emmerich, you old codger,” Scarlet whispered, tears streaming down her face. “We did it, you and I. We found the Echbalder.”
The series of events fell into place. When Emily Jusenkyou fell in battle, Jason Bur’I took the sword from her, and hid at the Feast of Aeons. Somewhere along the way, he paused to write the eulogy.
All the known events lined up.
Quickening with ferver, Scarlet busied herself assembling the rest of the folios, keeping that one slip of paper aside to motivate her. It would take years to follow the full trail of Emmerich’s research.
But for now, Scarlet had something.
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* * *
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#19.4 – Friday, the 4th day of the 10th month…
Roy Jusenkyou pushed back his glasses and scratched his head, then replaced them and completed his task of tidying up his desk for the evening. As a department head, most of his job involved delegating, but he always liked to keep a little of the high-level work for himself.
A knock came at his office door, and he pushed his glasses back again.
“Enter!” he called.
The door opened and a youngish man in a wool sweater tip-toed in.
“Sir?” he said fearfully.
“Yes, underling?” Roy replied. He full-well knew the man’s name, but if you can’t be feared then what good are you as a boss?
“I’m… just a little un-clear on my current assignment,” the man gulped. “It appears that you’ve given me a middle-grade math textbook and a stack of worksheets?”
“Yes,” Roy nodded. “And?”
“Well, sir, I’m just not certain why you have me doing…” the man paused and looked at the book in his hand. “Remedial Math I exercises.”
“It’s my daughter’s homework,” Roy said.
“You want me to tutor your daughter in math, now?” the man asked.
“No, I want you to do her homework for her,” Roy stated. “Given the way you fumbled the Peterson account, I figure you could use a little brush-up.”
The man blinked unhappily several times, then glanced at the book again.
“YOUR daughter is in ‘remedial’ math?” he questioned.
Roy glared at him and he nodded, then made for the door.
“Those better come back with A-pluses!” Roy called after him. “And have Johnson check your work! If you can handle this better than the Peterson job, maybe we’ll let you try being an accountant again!”
Roy chuckled to himself as the door closed and he picked up his brief case. He timed himself for the drive home and beat his record by half a second, losing out on the thrill of victory only when he made to turn into the driveway. The little flag on the mailbox was up, indicating that neither Ann nor Scarlet had yet been home.
After retrieving the evening post and pulling into the garage, Roy headed into the house. At the bottom of a stack of bills, he found an official looking envelope.
Still mulling about, Roy paused when the front door opened and Ann stepped in. She liked to park in the garage then come in through the front door. Roy suspected she did this for plausible deniability. If his wife never saw the disheveled state of the laundry room, it wasn’t her fault.
Ann glanced about the still darkened house. “Where is that stranger who sleeps in the back bedroom? You know, the one full of books?”
“I’ll try her at the lab,” Roy retrieved the cordless phone handset from the wall. “I’m starting to think we need to get that kid a cellphone.”
Ann fished around in the blue glass bowl on the table beside the door, then held up a pink and silver smartphone.
“Ah,” Roy nodded. “It’s coming back to me now.”
“She never had it on anyway and whenever she did need to use it, the battery was dead,” Ann quipped. “About a year ago she left it in the tray by the front door, and hasn’t inquired about it since.”
“The girl doesn’t like her electronics very much,” Roy shrugged, then hung up the land-line. “No answer at the lab.”
“We are going to have to set some boundaries with her!” Ann snapped. “I haven’t seen my own daughter in over a week!”
“I looked in on her last night,” Roy said. “Somehow between when we went to bed and when I awoke, she’d slipped in, eaten dinner, and fallen asleep.”
“And left this morning before we got up. Aren’t normal teenagers supposed to sleep until noon on Saturdays? Do you remember when we used to have to physically drag her kicking and screaming out of that bed?!”
“She does seem to have developed some self-discipline,” Roy nodded, scratching his chin.
“I’m just worried,” Ann opined.
“Is it because you think instead of spending time at the library, she’s out somewhere meeting boys?” Roy gestured.
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End:
Chapter Nineteen
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