Chapter VII: Adelia (Cont.)

~~The crash of hooves, they are nearing~~

“Hello,” she said. He had smiled and rose from his chair and stared at her for a moment.

“What is your name?” His voice crackled with the deep tones of one who has drank from the very stream of raw power and lived. She could hear the the crackling of magic running out the tips of his finger, but she wasn’t afraid.

“Adelia,” she had replied. He had given her a smile, not a reassuring smile, a smile that seemed not to hold a single bit of good within it. But she wasn’t afraid, “What is this room?”

“This room is Forgotten Lore,” he said with a smile. He looked past her to the room she had come from, “And yours?”

~~Who are they? There is a bond……..not to me…..but to…….who~~

She had told him and he had nodded with a devilish nod and eyed her for a moment, “Then you must be very gifted. None are allowed young into that room, for if they can devour the knowledge within, they may never die.” His voice sounded with a tone of envy and disdain.

“Then why have the room if none who enter are to come out alive?”

He eyed her with a sense of superiority and grinned, “They told you you may leave when you like, yes?” His voice seemed to scratch across every instinct in her, but she wasn’t afraid.

“Yes.”

“Then if you wish to live your life, you will leave before you know the secrets. If you think you are wise enough to drag the secrets from their pages before you die, then you will stay,” he had said. “You won’t be able to, however. You have been brought here for some great reason, you have been ordered here by some very powerful man….and I believe he has some use of you,” he said with a knowing smile.

~~Are they His? No. They seek……..nothing~~

“Who are you?” It was burning in her, the desire to know what this man was, who he was, what he was.

“You may call me what you like, for whatever you’d like me to be, I am. For this is not the first room I have studied in,” his voice boomed with a sudden darkness and the other creatures within the room looked up.

She looked back to the elf who sat within her room, an elderly little man who could still remember the many goings on and rules of Maximure University’s “Chosen” Wing. “But he,” she pointed to the elf, “He said there was only one who had finished reading all the books within a room within the “Chosen” Wing.” She turned and gazed into eyes which now burned like raging fire…..

“And I am him,” the man had said with a grid-iron tone. “From ‘Physical Manifestations and Manipulations,’ to here,” he added. “And none have ever learned as much as I have, no one knows more than me,” he said, an arrogant smile growing upon his face. “Now go back and read, young Seph girl, before someone sees you here.” The tone scared her, it was filled with death and sorrow and pain, it was more than haunting, it was primal. She had began to rush back across when he called her once more, “We will see each other again, do not worry.”

~~They seek our identity…….they want us gone~~

Nights and nights had passed and she had busied herself to nothing but her reading. She couldn’t let herself look up from the books which now made her head burn with the pain of secret knowledge. The pain was nothing she reminded herself, compared to looking up and seeing those burning eyes across the way. And she grew wiser, not in the ways of the world, but in the ways of the Stream of Time: its flow, its secrets, its powers. And one day, she had felt the shift. She had felt it and saw something. There was supposed to be the light of raging fire there. But there wasn’t….there was nothing but darkness.

~~There’s…..there’s something else…..on the tip of the mind~~

She had looked up from her book in panic and found the burning orange eyes were gone. And the room across the way was empty. No, not empty she had thought, there was nothing there to see. She rose quickly from her table and raced out into the hallway now pooling with unreal shadows and stepped into the room. There were no creatures here, only shadows. Shadows of twisted corpses, not the corpses themselves, just the shadows they had left behind. And her hands were clinched in fists at the outrage…there had been so many here, so many innocent and amazing creatures here…..and they were all dead now. And she had closed her eyes……