Chapter 232: The River of Oblivion
Siobhan
Month 9, Day 4, Saturday 2:00 a.m.
After their end-of-term celebratory dinner, Sebastien herded and packed her drunk companions into carriages headed for their respective homes, then took a couple of hours to safely switch to her other body. As Siobhan, she returned to the University in the dead of night.
She stopped at the base of the cliffs and tested to see if the fake version of Archmage Zard’s token would work to activate the transport tubes. It did, which meant that she could enter and exit the grounds without implicating her Sebastien identity.
However, rather than taking the transport tubes, Siobhan moved into the open base of the cliffs where the water from the northern lake flowed through, past the small docks there and into the white cliff. She found the meeting spot from the last time she was here, when Thaddeus had led her and Grandmaster Kiernan up through the stone tunnels and caves to the small room where they kept Myrddin’s journals.
With a bit of concentration, she could remember the path that Thaddeus had led them on. ‘This is safer than leaving a record of my passing, and leaves me much less likely to be caught in some theoretical ambush.’ Even though the long climb made her legs burn, it was nothing compared to some of the things Professor Fekten put them through.
When she finally reached the restricted archives underneath the library building, she stopped to breathe in the smell. Like the wind before a storm, the air felt charged with the promise of knowledge and power that lay within the iron-doored rooms. And it was all just waiting for her to absorb it. This made Siobhan a bit giddy, and since she was alone with no one to judge her for childishness, she grinned to herself and skipped up to the main floor of the library.
She used one of the indexing artifacts to search for restricted books on several different topics. Some might not be indexed, but she had found that they were often shelved by category. Once she found a room with a heavy concentration of texts about shamanry, for instance, she could go there and do a keyword search along all the shelves to find extra relevant material.
After compiling enough texts that she would have trouble reading them over the next week or two, she sat down eagerly at one of the small tables in an out-of-the-way room in the restricted archives. Before she left, she would mis-shelve the texts she still wanted to read so that they would be waiting and ready for her return.