Nobody on that ridge had an answer for the arc in the sky, and by the time I'd sent Zereth to double the watch and Vesha to keep her sketches under lock rather than let panic spread from hand to hand, I'd already decided where I needed to be instead. If the mortal world had no language for what was forming up there, there was exactly one place in my domain built to hold the kind of knowledge that predated mortal language altogether.
The Abyss Library didn't have a door so much as a threshold that decided, each time, whether it recognized you. Mine had stopped questioning me somewhere around my second visit, the shelves parting their gloom into a narrow path the moment I crossed in, though the deeper stacks still held sections that flickered and resisted, unwilling to be found by anyone who hadn't yet earned the right to read them. I'd learned enough about that particular unwillingness to stop taking it personally.
