Library

Sage’s laughter, like silver bells entwined with fox-noises came from the collar of my shirt.

“FINE!” Silver eyes flashed at my shirt, then at the door, teeth-shark mouth opening wide to release a violet-pink tongue. “You want tongue? I’ll give you all tongue. Behold, the most LEGENDARY claim this dimension has EVAH witnessed! Wattica can EAT MY ENTIRE ASS!”

“Such language.” I chortled.

“Rrrrrrrrrr. Doorknob first,” she stated, examining the spherical knob. “Standard brass. Probably has a secondary ward layer under the celesteel integration. Easy peasy. Child’s play. Way BENEATH me.”

Shady’s tongue unfurled toward the brass doorknob.

Contact.

“BZZZT!”

“MOTHERFUCKAH!” Shady recoiled, mouth sparking silver and blue. “IT BITES BACK!”

“Ward’s quite active,” I observed.

“I KNOW THE WARD’S STILL ACTIVE, THANK YOU, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!” She flapped her tongue in the air, shaking off sparks. “Ffffhhhgh. Ugh. Maybe… longer contact will work.”

She tried again. A crack of blue-white energy arced from the metal to her tongue. Shady’s entire body seized up, fur standing on end from ankles to antler-tips. A sound like a capacitor discharging echoed across the hallway.

“MMGGHHHHHHGFFFF!” she squealed through a clenched jaw, tongue firmly pressed to the brass.

“You okay?” I asked, pulling out my tablet to record her suffering.

“DUNT FLIM ME!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I filmed her.

“YOU STRLL FILMNG ME!” She hissed out.

“Less talking, more door tongue-claiming.”

The ward pulsed again, another arc jumping from the doorknob into the wet surface of her tongue. Shady’s left foot kicked the baseboard involuntarily. Her tail corkscrewed into a wild, pretzel-style shape. On the tablet screen she flickered between a spooky, huge red-eyed dog and a Wendigo.

“Frhghhh.” She pulled back, gasping. Blue-green-tinted smoke blossomed from the tip of her tongue. The doorknob now had a faint, dark smear on its surface.

“Give up?”

“Waht?! Nevaaaar!” She snarled, panting.” Okay. Okay okay okay. Round three. Gotta go slower. Ease into it. Convince the ward I’m a friendly user.”

She approached the doorknob again with exaggerated delicacy. Her tongue extended, barely brushing the brass surface. A faint crackle. She held contact, wincing, let her saliva coat the knob.

“Mmmmghh.”

The brass flickered. Silver sparks danced where her saliva met the metal, fighting the ward’s resonance. She pulled back, examined the results, and a savage grin spread across her skull-face.

“Yass. It’s totally yielding,” she announced triumphantly. “The ward’s keyed to reject magic intrusion through the LOCK specifically. The knob’s a secondary anchor. If I claim the knob first, the lock loses half its power grid.”

“Sounds like you’re making this up,” I teased her.

“Nu-huh. I had, like, mega-goodly grades in Skyfall Academy’s Artificery deconstruction class, thank you very much.”

“You told me you slept through most of your classes.”

“I slept through the BORING, lame-ass ones. Artificery decon was taught by Professor Advani, a gargoyle with a voice so thick his explanations sounded like someone gargling gravel inside a washing machine. VERY hard to sleep though that.” She kept on with the knob assault.

“I see. How’s it taste?”

“Bleh. Like licking a car battery filled with angry bees. Shut up and let me concentrate.”

I made a mouth-sipping motion.

She increased pressure and lick intensity. The ward crackled and sputtered, tiny arcs of blue lightning dancing between tongue and brass. Shady’s eyes slid-half shut with the effort, antler-stars flickering in silver-violet-blue auroras above her skull-head.

“Hrrrrnnngh,” she made an extremely dignified sound for an interdimensional Princess.

More angry licking followed.

The ward fought back, each discharge making her flinch. She adjusted her angle, attacking from the underside of the knob, then the top, then wrapping her tongue entirely around the brass sphere in a creative move.

“This is deeply undignified,” she muttered between licks, glancing at my tablet-holding self.

“Hilarious though. You look like you’re french kissing a doorknob.”

“I AM french kissing a doorknob, you freaking knob. For YOU. Remember this brave SACRIFICE!”

The ward’s crackles began to weaken, blue light dimming as Shady’s claim asserted itself. The faded red-gold brass started to shift color, silver-violet threads spreading through the metal from where her tongue made contact.

“Ha!” She pulled back, triumphant spit-strand connecting her to the now-Shady-colored doorknob. “Knob: CLAIMED! Princess one, door zero. Wattica could NEVER!”

“Sure, sure. Now do the lock.”

Shady stared at the keyhole. The keyhole stared back. It was dark and deep, featuring gothic flowery patterns in the brass frame and roughly the diameter of a thick marker or two, made to fit a large, medieval-style key.

“You really want me to put my tongue in that?” She ground out.

“The claw didn’t work. Your tongue apparently does. An elegant engineering solution.”

“Rrrrrrr.” She breathed on the keyhole.

The lock was definitely a different beast. The heavy, rectangular mechanism was recessed into the celesteel doorplate, warded with concentric rune-circles which became visible when Shady’s breath fogged up the metal. Tiny script in a pictoram-rune-style language I couldn’t read spiraled inward toward the keyhole.

“These wards are deffo hekking old,” Shady muttered, face inches from the lock. “Installed back when the mansion was built.”

“Grandpa never mentioned alien door locks.”

“Your grandpa totally had secret deals with the local Omnids, Ashy.”

“Hmm. Perhaps. His funeral cake was baked by a Skinwalker,” I agreed.

She squared up against the keyhole, one eye squeezed shut, the other locked on target. Her tongue extended, narrowing to a very thin point, and began threading itself into the mechanism.

“BZZZZZT!”

“LEVIATHAN’S TITS-JUGGLING THUNDERCUNT! Achk!”

“New one. I’m impressed.”

“SHUT!” She shook her head violently, silver sparks flying from her mouth like a shorted fuse. “This lock is a MENACE. There’s like FIVE fucking ward layers in here! Nested! Effinggg nesting wards! Each one more potent than the last!”

“Sounds like Grandpa Archie didn’t mess around with his library security.”

“Mefhhh. Sheeeytt. Gotta redirect the…”

Blue-white lightning coruscated up her tongue, danced across her face, through her antlers, and blasted itself into the ceiling via her left antler-tip with a thunderclap, blowing a small chunk of plaster loose. Shady’s eyes went completely white. Her body went rigid as a plank. One foot hovered ten inches off the ground, claws opening and closing.

“BWAAAAAGHHHFFF!” she announced, wiggling back and forward, swollen tongue stuck inside the keyhole. She looked like a horrified child whose tongue was stuck to an ice-covered lamp-pole.

“Shady?! Are you stuck? Want me to help pull you off? Call Kawhy to save, cut you out with a gun unit?”

“Rrrrrrrr. You better freaking not! I’m… fine. Just… redirecting the zappyness. Rrrrr.”

She attacked the keyhole again, tongue working inside the mechanism with a series of increasingly disturbing clicking, scraping, and slurping sounds. Her face contorted through every possible emotion, from concentration to agony to approaching religious ecstasy as each ward layer crumbled with a colorful flash.

“Third layer… cracked. Fourth layer… you sneaky little… Ffff… THERE! Fourth down.”

“One more to go, yes?”

“Rgughhh.” Shady let out bubbling noises of a boiling pot.

Her whole body tensed. Tail rigid. Ears flat. Antlers flickered with bright, dancing stars. She pushed her tongue deeper into the lock, silver light pouring from the keyhole in thin beams.

The final ward detonated with a POP and a puff of blue smoke, another flash of magic current dancing across her body and out of her antler into the ceiling. The entire ward structure collapsed with a sound like a chandelier hitting a marble floor. Silver light flooded the keyhole, consuming the last traces of blue. The entire doorframe thrummed. Shady’s body relaxed.

The Wendigo wrenched her tongue free and stumbled backward into a squat, clutching her mouth, eyes watering. She spat a mouthful of silver sparks onto the hardwood floor.

“Congratulations. You’ve conquered a door.” I said encouragingly. It came out somewhat sarcastic though.

“I didn’t simp-ley conquer a door, Mistah Cliffard. I DOMINATED a five-layer celesteel-integrated legacy ward with mah indomitable will!” She wiped her mouth. “Wattica licked a candy gun. I out-claimed a HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD ESTATE SECURITY SYSTEM. Tell me again she’s better than me. TELL ME.”

“She was… faster.” I teased.

Shady’s feathers exploded into an indignant crown of black wreathed in violet-blue reflections at the edges. “SHE HAD A BIGGER SURFACE AREA TO WORK WITH!”

I was laughing too hard to respond. Shady punched my arm, which hurt slightly, then spun back to the door and slid her claw into the keyhole.

Click. Click. Click-click-click.

The tumblers fell like dominoes. 

“HA!” she roared at the door, grabbing and turning the handle. “HA HA HA!”

The skull-head turned my way, tongue hanging out sideways like a victory flag.

“DAS RIGHT! DID YOUR LITTLE TONGUE-FRIEND WATTICA CLAIM A CELESTEEL WARDLOCK? NO? DIDN’T THINK SO! BECAUSE SHE HAD A STUPID CANDY GUN AND I HAD A DOOR MADE OF ALIEN SUPER-METAL FORGED IN THE ARCANE FIRES OF WHEREVER THE SLAYA DIS CELESTEEL CAME FROM!”

“You’ve got smoke coming out of your ears.”

“THAT’S THE SMOKE OF VICTORY, BABY!” She thumped her ample chest. “UNDEFEATED TONGUE CHAMPION OF EARTH! PUT THAT ON THE SCOREBOARD! WATTICA: ZERO! SHADY: EVERYTHING!”

“Your tongue is bright azure and glowing like it’s radioactive.”

Shady paused, stuck her further tongue out, went cross-eyed trying to examine it. It was, in fact, luminously green-blue.

“Temporary side effect,” she said dismissively. “Bow down and observe my amazingly claimed temple of readershipery!”

A deep, resonant CHUNK echoed from inside the celesteel plate as the handle turned all the way.

The double doors swung inward on groaning, old hinges.

“After you, my smol, cheeky knight,” Shady bowed with exaggerated flourish, gesturing grandly into the darkness beyond with her smoking, glowing blue-green tongue stuck out in triumph.

I stepped through.

Cold, papery air rolled over me, smelling of old wood, forsaken books and mold. Shady’s claws clicked on the marble behind me.

The Clifford estate library presented itself to us. Two stories of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were arranged in a dark, column-bound square around a grand central atrium. 

Four spiral iron stairwells stood at the edges, connecting the ground level to the mezzanine gallery above, featuring more books upstairs. Every surface was dark wood and brass. Piles of books sat on old wooden desks and in random piles on the floor. The roof was a half-cylinder of victorian-train-station style metal and glass, the glass grimy from time.

And in the center of it all, dominating the atrium like a monument to decades of neglect, stood an old tree. 

Dead.Colossally, spectacularly dead.

It reached from the ground floor we were on, framed by a circle of gray benches, branches spreading across the glass ceiling. The trunk was at least four feet in diameter, bark gray-black and flaking, every limb bare and skeletal. Dead, dry leaves littered the marble floor and circle of gray earth.

Two glass terrariums flanked the tree from front and back, square, tipped with a triangular roof and chest-high. Inside each, the desiccated remains of plants lay curled and brown. Ferns, mosses, tiny flowering things reduced to brittle skeletons. The glass was foggy with age, mold and mineral deposits.

Shady let out a cute amused noise, padding beside me and looked around.

“Jeez. Looks like nobody watered anything here for ten years,” I said, circling the nearest terrarium and brushing dust off the glass. The soil inside was cracked into a desert mosaic. “Guess gramps didn’t want mundanes to witness his magic-sealed library.”

“Yeh,” Shady agreed, advancing towards the dead tree to paw and sniff at it. “The tree is mostly dead. Ah! It’s a tad magical in the deepest layer. That’s what’s been powering the freaking door lock! Sheet. This is a tree from Novazem… A Mystic Willow-Oak! These are pretty popular in Omnithornia Highborn gardens, since they collect crystallized mana in the hollow part of the trunk. It didn’t perish from lack of water. It ossified, suffocated slowly from lack of magic in the air. Same for the plants in the glass terrariums. Magic plants that were fed by the tree.”

“Teya could probably fix the dead magic garden,” I mused, recalling that the tree and the terrariums looked quite alive a decade ago. “Make this place less spoopy, more like it used to be.”

Shady’s tail whipped across my butt.

“Ouhg.” I glanced at her. “Why?”

“No thinking about sexy dragons when you’re on a date with ME.”

“What? I’m making… relevant horticultural observations!”

“Horticultural observations about your OTHER girlfriend’s skills. On OUR date. In OUR awesome library.”

“It’s a dead magic tree, Shady. I’m just being pragmatic. I don’t think that Wendigos are experts at terraformery.”

“Sure, sure.” She playfully swatted me again, lighter this time.

We circled the atrium, necks craned, taking in the sheer volume of books. Thousands upon thousands of tomes lined every wall, packed into every shelf, stacked in precarious towers on the mezzanine gallery. The collection was staggering and seemingly utterly random. Fiction, nonfiction, leather-bound first editions sitting next to water-damaged paperbacks. Encyclopedia sets from the 1960s. Medical textbooks. Star charts. Folklore. A book labeled “WARDS & PROTECTIONS” sat beside another tome labeled “FRENCH PASTRY TECHNIQUES.”

Grandpa Archie had been many things. Organised, clearly wasn’t one of them.

“Is that a real or a fake magic book?” I pointed at the thick, dark leather “Wards” tome.

Shady pawed the corner of the book with a claw. “Real. Most likely sent by my Auntie from some other dimension. Probably explains the library ward functions and such.”

“Cool. I should definitely read it and…” I began.

“There!” Shady pointed with her tail swatting through the air with a whoosh and an excited expression. “Look, LOOK!”

The corner! I stared at the northeast corner of the ground floor, framed by a dark bookcase nook, barely able to believe my eyes.

My chest thrummed wildly at the sight of it.

“It’s… still here, holy shit,” I uttered.

“Yass!” Shady laughed, squeezing my hand hard. “It’s still here! After all this time! Slayer!”