The Hall of Petals looked like it had inhaled a storm of sun and decided to keep it. Morning light slid down the chandeliers, and puddled on the mosaic spiral at everyone's feet. Shelves had been rolled out along the walls overnight - tall, fussy things with brass rails and steps that squeaked when you blinked at them. The air smelled like paper that had survived three wars and a very polite dust.
Seven Royal Scholars stood under the central lotus crest.
"Where is Lynea?" Kori asked the ceiling, "And she was talking about us yesterday…"
The doors swung. Lynea strode in with her braid too neat to have been rushed. She was exactly eight minutes late.
Kori put both hands to her chest and bowed like a court jester greeting a queen. "Your Lateness. The Academy thanks you for gracing us with the lost eighth minute."
Lynea did not look at the bow. "The bell schedule is poorly designed."
"Absolutely," Kori said, delighted. "Fight the bell. You'll lose, but I love an underdog."
Arashi's mouth almost smiled. Keahi tried not to. Esen made the face of a man taking notes for future mockery. Hikari, who had lined the spines of the nearest shelf by height out of nervous hands, stopped doing it.
"Alright, you little dramas," Kori said, springing upright. "Change of plans. I am absolutely not abandoning you on your very first day to do mysterious adult things that definitely don't involve scaring a councilman into a better idea. Whaat? I would never. Instead, I'm giving you a wholesome, simple, time-tested assignment."
She reached into her coat and got out something that had once been a piece of paper now a crumpled topographical map of her pocket. She flicked it open with magician's flair. It unspooled down to her knee.
Hikari's eyes widened. "That's the list?"
Kori cleared her throat and read with the solemnity of a priest divvying blessings: "Principles of Luminite Conduction, third edition if it's not sulking, the gray one. Field Repairs for Broken Blades, first pressing. Ethics Under Pressure, the old blue volume not the new one. Letters from the Front - Excerpts for Students who Think They're Immortal. Basic Nyx Anatomy. Not too much to be learned, the shortest, dustiest variant - and so on."
She flipped the page. There were, somehow, more.
Esen leaned in, counting with a finger. "That's… what, forty? Fifty?"
Arashi peered. "Fifty-seven."
Ichiro looked once and said, "Sixty-one."
Keahi took the end of the list and unrolled it the rest of the way. It ticked on the tile. "Kori. There are like another one hundred here."
"Numbers are a social construct," Kori said. "So is time. Also, shelves. You'll be fine."
"We're fetching books," Raizen said, because the obvious sometimes needed saying to make it real.
"Books," Kori confirmed. "The boring kind. The heavy kind. The kind nobody uses because the new ones are shiny and smell like glue. Or they just use their tablets that they name Slates. Stack them here. Don't die under a dictionary. No starting fights with covers. If a book growls when you pull it, apologize to it and try another. If a staircase moves, ride it. If you see a professor named Osamu - big guy, shield-face - look humble. Any questions?"
Feris raised a hand. "Do we get a prize."
"Yes," Kori said. "The prize of a spine made of knowledge. Also possibly a pastry. We'll see."
"Why do you sound almost… serious?" Hikari asked.
Kori grinned. "Because even I have layers. It's quite a serious situation. Alright. Hall of Petals shelves, Grand Library, Tree Library, and anything in between. Drop what you find on this table every hour so we don't lose count." She slapped the nearest table. It wobbled threateningly and then decided not to. She tossed the list to Arashi. He caught it like it was actually very light. "Go forth," she said. "I'll be back before the bells forget themselves. Maybe."
And with that, she tucked her hands into her pockets, whistled something, and was gone.
Silence balanced on the beam overhead. Someone coughed into it.
Arashi unfolded the list to a length that should've embarrassed parchment. "We should split."
"Ichiro and I," Lynea said immediately.
Ichiro nodded once. Agreement accomplished.
"I want tree room," Keahi said, voice small but firm.
"I'll go with Keahi," Hikari offered. "We can build two stacks and leapfrog books."
"Grand Library needs charm," Arashi said. "I will do charm. Esen, or Raizen, you carry charm."
"Thrilled," Esen deadpanned. "Feris?"
"Destiny says I go where someone will fall off a ladder," Feris said, eyes bright. "So - Arashi."
Raizen looked at the Hall shelves. They had been slotted into every spare run of wall: under the balcony, flanking doorways, tucked along the stair. Nothing glamorous. Everything necessary. "I'll start here," he said. "We'll rotate."
"Don't die under a dictionary," Esen repeated, cheerful now that he had someone to annoy. "We'd have to carve your name into it."
They scattered.
The Hall of Petals had more books than its elegant bones liked to admit. They hid in plain sight - old spines sun-faded to the color of thoughtful rocks, titles stamped on covers that had decided to retire. Raizen pulled one and a sigh of dust went up like a small weather system. "Manual of Form - Footwork through Geometry." Inside, the first page had a spidery note: "if you can't do it slow, you can't do it fast." The ink had bled in places like the author was angrier than his pen. A second note in a different hand below it added, you're angry because you're slow.
Raizen's mouth tugged. It was on the list. The handwriting was a decade or more old. The idea was not. He set the book on the table and went hunting again.
Students flowed through the hall, all uniforms and glances tilted sideways at the star on his lapel. A pair of second years halted near the staircase and tried to figure out how to get past him without making it a sound. Raizen lifted three books and offered them the gap. They slipped by, muttered thanks. One whispered, "He's the fast one." The other hissed "Don't call him that, he might hear you!" and both of them grinned like they couldn't help themselves.
After twenty minutes he had a stack like a small fort and a spine that was starting to think he'd wronged it in another life. Hikari and Keahi breezed in from the south door with their arms full and cheeks red by running.
"Tree library is… a personality," Hikari said, depositing her pile with the care of a jeweler setting stones.
"It creaks when you take the wrong book," Keahi added, low. "Like it knows."
"Does it bite," Esen asked, arriving with Feris and Arashi carrying more than their fair share of charm and weight. He thumped a volume down - Basic Nyx Anatomy, Pre-Reform. It puffed a single annoyed dust ring in his face.
Arashi fanned himself with the list as if already bored. He wasn't. "Grand Library has ladders with opinions. If you stand on one they don't respect, they roll you off politely."
"Politely," Feris agreed. "I nearly met destiny via a balustrade."
"Better meet fate via index," Raizen said, handing Arashi the list back. "Next wing."
The Grand Library was a cathedral that had gotten drunk on its own height. Brass railings curled in halos along galleries that spiraled up into shadow. The floor was dark planks that didn't want to make a sound. The air tasted like someone had brewed tea with eucalyptus.
A librarian watched them from behind a desk the size of a boat. He had the ancient patience of a rock that has outlived three rivers. Arashi glided over and deployed the practiced ease of a man who had never been turned away from a door in his life.
"We need "Ethics Under Pressure" - the old blue one," Arashi said. "Please."
The librarian lifted an eyebrow that deserved its own desk. "Why the old one?"
"Because the new one is very reasonable and very wrong," Arashi said without missing a beat. "The old one was written by someone who had seen a person bleed and didn't look away. Also it's blue and we like blue."
The eyebrow lowered half a degree in what might have been amusement. "Stacks three, gallery two, column twelve. It sulks behind "Wartime Logistics" because authors are petty."
"Thank you," Arashi said, with the gratitude of a man grateful on principle. He pivoted, handed the direction to Hikari with a little bow as if he had fetched it for her, and went chasing the next impossible title with Esen, who was already halfway up a ladder arguing with gravity.
Keahi stood under a shelf labeled Conduction - Practical and stared like the words were a window. She reached for a book, hesitated, changed her mind, and took the one beside it instead. Later, when she opened it at a table and a diagram unfurled like a flower - heat routes sketched as rivers, notes in the margin that said fire is a decision - she didn't say anything, but her shoulders set differently.
Raizen ran the list with his finger like a medic checking a pulse. Field Repairs for Broken Blades - First Pressing. He found it where first pressings go - lower shelf, hiding under its fourth pressing grandchildren like a grandparent who had outlived their patience. Inside were hand-sketches of pins and makeshift pegs and the phrase if it breaks again you did it wrong underlined three times.
Hikari returned with the blue Ethics and a look that said she'd skimmed a sentence that had knocked an opinion out of place. Esen descended his ladder with a book under his arm and triumph on his tongue. "I found "Margins that Correct the Author"! The margins told me I was holding it wrong. I respect that."
"The margins are often right," murmured a girl at a nearby table without looking up. She had three pencils stuck in her hair and ink on her knuckles. "Also you're holding it wrong."
Feris plucked a slender atlas that was missing north. "Oh good," she said, gleeful. "A map that refuses to be told who it is."
"Put it with the others," Arashi said, not paying much attention, and searching the endless rows
They worked. They ran. They got shushed by two librarians. They made a pile near the door and promised they would be back to carry it because they could no longer carry anything at all. Then they were out again, like knifed fish surfacing for air.
The Tree Library breathed greener than the rest of the building. The books were the walls and the walls were books. The chandelier-tree rose from the center, its branches threaded with tiny glass lamps that caught every motion and turned it into promise. The ladders here rolled without asking permission and stopped if you looked down, like a friend judging your life choices.
"Basics, basics," Hikari said under her breath, scanning spines with the efficient panic of a person solving a puzzle inside a clock. "Principles, primers, practicals - where are you…?? "
"Here," Raizen said, lifting Principles of Luminite Conduction - Second Edition. It had a gray cover and an attitude that survived weather. Next to it was the tenth edition, somehow two times thinner. Someone had pressed a flower between pages twelve and thirteen. It made a ghost of a stain on the diagram. He didn't remove it.
Keahi's fingers hovered over Heat Ethics - A Small Guide for Large Fires. When she opened it, the first line read: if you're reading this after a mistake, start on page fifty. Keahi started on page fifty and breathed out.
Esen climbed. Feris spotted him with one hand and argued with him with the other. "If the ladder moves, it's fate."
"If the ladder moves, it's physics," Esen said. "Respect physics."
"The ladder just decided to be somewhere else," Feris said as the ladder promptly decided to be somewhere else, sliding him sideways along a rail to a shelf of Old Words for New Things.
Ichiro didn't climb ladders. He simply appeared at the end of aisles like a thought you should've had earlier, a book already in his hand. He collected without fanfare and stacked without comment. He nodded when Hikari thanked him every third title. He vanished again.
Lynea corrected a catalog card that had been filed under V - Valor instead of E - Evasion and then found three volumes that had been hiding behind a wooden panel as if ashamed of their age. One had a first page signed in a sharp hand. The signature was a name she recognized. The year made her mouth press thin. She didn't mention it.
A boy sleeping under the lowest shelf snored and a stack of sticky notes on his forehead fluttered. Someone had written, not a pillow in seven different languages. Kori wasn't there to laugh. They laughed for her.
By the time the tree's lamps shifted from bright to amber, they had hauled three carts to the Hall and three back again and had started using the last of their jokes like rations.
"Petal shelves," Arashi said, voice almost sober. "Then we're done."
"Then we're done," Hikari echoed, as if saying it twice could make it true.
The Hall of Petals had learned to look dignified with bookshelves. They hid in alcoves and pretended to be architecture. They lurked under the stairs like shy stair gnomes. The lotus mosaic watched their feet and said nothing at all.
Raizen found a book again, this time a different edition with different underlines. He found a slim booklet titled What to Do When the Room Hums. The first line said: don't pretend you didn't hear it. The second said: don't tell anyone who thinks they're in charge. The third said: tell someone who knows what it feels like. He slid it into the stack, feeling suddenly seen by paper.
Students walked around them, the current of the Academy in full day. A girl in ink-stained cuffs hovered near Hikari and then blurted "Is it true you can wear whatever you want…?" and Hikari blinked and said, "Apparently…" and the girl grinned like that was the thing that would get her through the week.
Esen marched past with Letters from the Front hugged to his chest like it might rebel. "Half the letters are crossed out," he said, outraged. "Who crosses out letters!?"
"People who don't want to break their students before they can carry anything," Lynea said, taking the book from him and sliding it onto the table at the top of the pile, like crowning a day.
They stood around the table then, each of them doing the math of their own bones. Hikari had dust on her cheek like war paint. Keahi had a smudge of graphite on her wrist. Arashi's hair had finally given up being perfect and was now gorgeous instead. Esen's grin had been replaced by the grim satisfaction of a thief who had successfully robbed a museum of its gift shop. Feris looked like she had found five omens and made friends with all of them. Lynea breathed like a metronome. Ichiro set down a last thin volume without a word.
"That's not all," Raizen said quietly, because he had counted the list and their pile and the gap. "There's one more."
As if summoned, footsteps approached. Not Kori's - Kori walked with percussion. This step was nearly silent, measured, respectful of the room. Ichiro appeared from the southern arch carrying a book that looked like it made other books nervous.
It was large without being ridiculous, bound in leather dark enough to drink light. The spine had been stamped once in silver and the letters had worn to ghosts. Chains girdled it - mean, practical ones, the kind made to be all hinge and no drama. A small lock sat like an eye.
Ichiro set it very gently on the table.
None of them spoke for a heartbeat.
"What," Esen said finally, reverent despite himself, "is that."
Ichiro angled the spine so they all could see the ghost-letters. The words shook a little as the chandelier breathed.
THE ORIGIN OF NYXES
The air around the book felt wrong. Or right, depends on who you are. The sound of the hall thinned. The hum under the floor that Raizen had been pretending was his imagination came up like a fish in dark water and touched the bottom of his shoes.
Hikari reached out and stopped with her hand a span away, as if there were glass between her fingers and the cover. "We should wait for Kori."
"Obviously," Arashi said, not moving, imitating Kori.
Lynea's fingers twitched in the air like she might catch a thought before it fled. "Who put chains on knowledge??"
"Someone who survived it," Esen said, unexpectedly serious.
Raizen let his palm rest flat on the table near the book, not touching, just close enough to feel the cool that poured off it. The title sank its hooks into a place behind his sternum he hadn't known could be hooked. The word origin did something to his breath. The word Nyxes made every story he'd heard sit up and show its teeth.
Kori wasn't back.
Students moved past at the edges of their vision, silhouettes in a painting, voices washing in and out. No one approached the table. It had a bubble around it now, a circle of space that wasn't in the rules but everyone obeyed.
Hikari looked at Raizen. Raizen looked at Hikari. Keahi looked at the lock. Arashi looked at the ceiling as if it might have an opinion. Lynea looked at the list as if there might be one more line below the bottom that would tell her what to do. Feris smiled a very small smile, the kind that admits to being afraid and keeps smiling anyway. Esen reached toward the chain and then put his hand back in his pocket like a person who has chosen, for once, not to be a lesson.
"Now we wait," Raizen said.