The Demon Queen Wants To Live.

Ren led me past the librarian and into the main atrium. Since first waking up in this new world, this was perhaps the only time I had felt something akin to excitement. The hunger burned in me. The first thing I noticed was the smell…or rather, the lack of one. The Athenaeum smelled no different from the grounds outside. Nothing like a place with this many books should have. This place was also, from what I could see, largely empty. Fools. To have such knowledge and not seek it.

"So," Ren said, turning on her heel to face me. "We're here. Now what the hell do you want to read?"

"Everything."

Ren stared at me. "That doesn't explain anything!"

I did not elaborate. After all, my answer was true. Ren groaned, threw her hands up, and started walking. I followed. She would know this place better than I. So for now, I would follow.

She led me toward one of the spiral staircases. As we stepped onto it, the lower steps held firm beneath our weight while the upper flight detached from the wall entirely. I watched it swing through the open air, expand and then reconnect to a different balcony, two floors above. "How does this contraption know where you are going?" I asked.

"You just think of the floor you want before you step on. It does the rest. Takes a bit of getting used to, I guess." Ren was already climbing, not looking back.

"This is a strange place. Are all of these Academies like this?"

"Just this one, I think. This place was built even before the Academy itself. Maybe the Academy was built around it? I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention when Inker Mayen was droning on and on about this." Ren shrugged. Not for the first time, did I wonder just whose bright idea it was to have this girl be our guide in this place.

We walked up. It was smooth and stable, even as something inside me was not. There was a pulse from my core, sharp enough that my hand went to the railing before I could stop it. I dropped my hand immediately. The girl had not noticed. I kept climbing.

Ren led me to a quiet section on the second balcony, where the shelves stretched in rows that were clearly longer than the building should have allowed from the outside. She pulled out her small wooden card and held it up. "So…what the hell do you want to actually read?"

I stared at her. Then at the wood she was holding up. "What do you think you are going to do with that thing?"

“Right. Maybe I should have brought you here first,” Ren muttered. She shook her head. "Anyway, you’re just supposed to…think of what you want and channel into the card. The book comes to you." She said this as if explaining something to a child.

“And what if I do not know what I want?”

“You think of like…a subject. Or a kind of book.” Ren said. “Usually you’d know the title, but this place is pretty good at figuring out what you want to know even if you don’t.”

This…Athenaeum was now the most strange place I had seen since waking up. Not the strangest I had ever seen in general -that list was long and stranger still. "That is rather convenient," I muttered. Why had the Black Archive not had such a system? It would have saved me years of wasted time.

"So?" Ren tapped the card against her palm. "What'll it be?"

"This world's current structure would be a start," I said, arms folded.

Ren paused. "So...like...history or…geography?" She groaned. "Damn that's so boring. I expected something at least a little fun at least."

"That will come in time."

Ren sighed and channeled Essence into the card. I watched the process. There was a brief pulse from the small device, and then there was nothing. "Where is it?" I asked.

"It takes a bit depending on where it's shelved. Be patient. What, you think it’s gonna fly to you?"

“Yes.”

Ren paused. “Err…yeah I guess it is.” I tried not to sigh. We both looked at each other and waited. A book drifted down from somewhere far above us a few seconds later, settling into the air at arm's reach. Ren caught it and handed it to me. "See?"

So it really had come. I took the volume, checked the title. It was a general history of the last three hundred years. There was no author listed. It seemed this strange place really could read intent. I looked from the book to Ren. "Why do you not simply give me your card then? I can find something more suitable on my own."

Ren shook her head. "You're not supposed to let other people use your card. It becomes a pain in the ass if they find out."

“You should be willing to endure pain for your Queen.”

Ren shoved a finger out at me. “Hey, I already brought you here!”

I did not dignify this petty outburst with a response. There was a single empty table to our side. We sat down. I opened the book and began to read.

---

The world had changed in ways both larger and smaller than I had expected.

The continent today was divided between three factions. The first was the Covenant -the small coalition of kingdoms I now found myself within. The Kingdom of Arianeth, where Koralis sat, was one of several bound together by shared faith in someone called the Divine. Then, there were the Kingdoms of Solvenne to the South, and Trestie to the North.

The Covenant was a religious faction. It was technically one of several, but it was by far the largest, to the point where the others only had the briefest of mentions. The Inker had not been lying about this, at least.

The Divine, to my considerable surprise, was a living being. One who resided in the Kingdom of Trestie. I found this deeply suspicious. In my time, a God might have backed a Kingdom, but never openly. Some of them used figureheads, but none would walk about freely. Was this ‘Divine’ one such figurehead then? They had been alive for hundreds of years, which was not impossible for several races, but still.

The second power on this continent was the Mandate -a militaristic empire led by a woman called the Godqueen Seraphelion. I counted the syllables of her name. There were five of them, one more than my own name. I found this both amusing and offensive. To think that a mere human would claim to a name that fine.

The Mandate's philosophy appeared to be unity through conquest. I understood this intimately, and therefore distrusted it intimately. Whatever else had changed, it seemed the shape of ambition had not. This was the place Isabelle had spoken of. The one that would ‘work me to the bone, but would not sneer behind my back’.

Lastly, and the least of the three, were the Freeholds. These were majority elvish, beastkin, and lizardfolk lands, though all three races existed within the other two powers as well.

I set the book down for a moment and turned this over. In my era, there had been petty feuds between the races but the larger shape of the world had been simple. The demons against everyone else. Humans led this era, as they controlled majority power in both the Covenant and the Mandate. In my time, they had been just one of the lesser races.

I shifted position, and the core flared without warning. It was a grinding sensation behind my ribs. A dull hum. I set the book down. breathed, and picked it back up. I read on.

---

I finished the volume and looked at Ren. The girl was half-asleep. Her chin had drooped to her chest, and her eyelids were at half-mast. I could not imagine what kind of fool would be sleepy in a place like this. "Give me a book on Ancient history," I said.

Ren stirred. She blinked and groggily touched her card, which was out on the table in front of us. Then, she fell forward, her head resting on the table. During all of this, she said nothing. Was this girl allergic to knowledge? How had someone like her advanced past the Spark?

It took a minute, so long that I almost shook Ren awake. A book drifted down. It was older than the one I had read. Its pages were worn and weathered, its spine was cracked. I opened it, and I searched. I searched for the Demon Realm. For the wars and the battles I remembered. For the events that had shaped the world. For things I might recognize. I found almost nothing.

There were scattered references to a "Demon Realm" here or there, but they read like fairy tales. A land of crimson sky and black water, where beasts walked as men. There was no mention of the System. No mention of Classes. No mention of the Dwarves, or what I had done to them. No mention of the Elves of Osyrus. No mention of the World Tree, or the burning I had brought to it.

There was mention of a "shadowed island," one where nobody had dared to go in centuries. That had to be Ashia. It was, still, in forever darkness. My hands clenched when I read that part.

There was too little here. A thousand years, and the world had simply moved on. It had forgotten the wars that had shaped it. It had forgotten the Gods themselves. I did not find a single mention of any God I knew, though the Divine was referenced often. It made no sense. Surely a thousand years was not long enough to forget this much? Indeed, it seemed that the oldest this book’s history stretched was to nine hundred years ago. There was an eighty-four year sized gap.

I was about to close the book entirely when something caught my eye. It was tucked at the end of a chapter on pre-historical legends. A poem, attributed to no one, dated to no era. A footnote called it "a fragment of uncertain origin."

It was four lines. I read the first.

Silver-horned, she held dominion over the dark,

This was the first reference to me I had seen. It had to be. Over the dark? I had held dominion over everything related to destruction. If one was going to write about me, the least one could do was get the scope right.

And wept black tears for worlds she'd set aflame,

My eye twitched. I did not weep. I had not wept once during my entire reign. Not once. And my tears were not black. They were perfectly ordinary, on the rare occasions they existed at all, which was never, because I did not weep. This line was a fabrication and an insult.

Who loved nothing, and so destroyed everything,

I stopped. Read the line again. Loved nothing? That was not -I had not destroyed things because I loved nothing. My hands clenched on the paper before I forced them to loosen.

I had destroyed things because my Role demanded it, and because I was exceptional at it, and because- Had I loved anything? To love something, in my understanding now, was to be willing to sacrifice for it. No. Perhaps I had not. The egg pulsed against my hip. I moved on. Or I tried to. There was that ache again, from the deepest part of me. From the part where my power now resided. I ignored it, and read the last line.

Till silence was the only sound she knew.

This was wrong again. At the end, there had not been silence. A silence could be broken. Some of the things I had done never might be. I closed the book harder than was necessary. Whoever had written this had gotten nearly every detail wrong. They had gotten the horns right. That was one thing.

Was it better or worse, to be remembered wrong? To exist as four lines of mediocre verse? I, who had killed two Gods, now lived as a footnote nobody would likely ever read. It should have made me furious. I waited for the fury.

It did not come. What came instead was smaller and stranger. Someone had thought me worth four lines. They had gotten everything wrong, but they had tried. It was, in its own way, a kind of vase. I chose to think about it in those terms. I set the book aside.

I looked at Ren. The girl was fully asleep now. She had slumped sideways in her chair, her mouth slightly open. Her red hair fell across her face.

I stared at her. I rose. This had been a suitable distraction. Perhaps Ash would be back in our room by now. I almost rose to leave the library entirely. "...fire...s'okay...mother, I did good t’day..."

I stared at the girl. The words were so stupid. I sighed and sat back down. I looked at the sleeping girl. At the card on the table between us. I looked around the Athenaeum. I did not dislike this place, its strangeness and lack of scent included. I was alone in a way I had not been for some time. It had never bothered me before. It still didn’t. I wondered if Ash was equally unbothered.

My gaze returned to the card. If I was doing this girl the honor of sitting with her, surely I deserved this much. I reached for it.

I held the small wooden thing in my fingers and channeled Essence. The girl had said you had to think about what you wanted. I did not know what I wanted…but I wanted something. The card trembled in my hand and went still. Nothing happened. For a long time, I thought it had not worked at all. A book fell into my lap.

It was ancient. The leather cover was cracked and flaking. The binding had nearly disintegrated. Pages were coming apart at the edges, and the text on them had faded past the point of reading. I could barely make out the title. They were just fragments of letters, half-eaten by time.

I caught something. There was a symbol on the cover, faded nearly to nothing, but I knew its shape. It was a warhammer crossed over a horn. I had seen it carved into one of the halls of my own fortress. On banners that had flown above columns of thousands. I reached for the first page.

The text was ruined. I turned more pages, and could not make out anything at all. My hands were shaking. I did not permit them to shake. I forced them into stillness. “Could…could I?” I whispered.

I reached out with my left hand and channeled Bloom. With Bloom, came the impression. One I was both looking for, and trying not to see. The feeling of something that had been waiting, stubbornly. For what, even it did not know. Only that it waited, and its longing grew with the waiting.

The book restored itself beneath my hands. I felt it happen through my palms before I saw it. The leather warmed, firmed and then darkened. The binding straightened. The pages whitened and the ink returned, letter by letter, word by word, in handwriting I would have known anywhere, with flourishes on every letter, because of course there were.

The cover cleared last. Musings of a Fool: The Collected Writings of General Zarvok, Keeper of the Lower Halls.

And for the first time since I had entered this scentless place, there was a scent. Something I could not name, but recognized anyway. The trembling came again. This time, I let it.