They started with optimism, which is to say, they didn't know better yet.
Day one, the Hall of Petals looked like a cathedral that had agreed to be a library out of politeness. Sun laid itself over the mosaic spiral, students hummed through like current, and the eight of them built a fortress of chairs and carts and stubbornness around an enormous table. Hikari stacked by subject. Lynea stacked by source. Arashi stacked by aesthetic, which he swore was secretly a system. Esen stacked by how funny the title sounded said out loud. Keahi took the thin, mean-looking manuals that felt like they'd cut you if you shelved them wrong. Feris claimed anything the margins had scribbled back at. Ichiro simply set down a book no one else had found and then another and then another, like that was a language he spoke. Raizen ran a finger down the list like checking a pulse and nodded once when it came back beating.
"Two weeks," Esen announced, heroic. "Three, if we want vacations."
"Three," Hikari corrected, already parceling out the first pile. "And no vacations."
"Numbers are a social construct," Arashi intoned, and Hikari handed him two dictionaries and a treatise on the ethics of punching.
They began.
The old books had their own weather. When Raizen slid Manual of Form – Footwork through Geometry free, dust sighed like memory. Weight the Moment, not the Muscle cracked like a joke you had to earn. What to Do When the Room Hums stared back at him with three lines that felt like advice and a dare: don't pretend, don't tell the wrong person, tell the right one. He tucked that one beside his knee.
Hikari read like stitching - small, precise passes that held the page together. She made neat stacks of flash-notes she'd never call flashcards and then hid them under her sleeve like secrets she'd share if asked nicely. Keahi copied diagrams in a patient hand that drew fire routes like riverbeds; on page fifty of The Little Book of Burnless Burns she paused, breathed out, and kept going.
Lynea did not read so much as duel. She crossed out a wrong figure in pencil, then wrote a tiny respectful "no" in the margin and moved on. She corrected three catalog cards on the way to the Tree Library and did not break pace.
Arashi read out loud when the sentences were beautiful, which was treason in a library and also why three nearby scholars pretended not to lean closer. He turned even the notes of Wartime Logistics into something a theater would pay for. The marble bust above their aisle glowered and dropped a tiny plaster fleck on his shoulder as critique.
Esen discovered Margins that Correct the Author and apologized out loud to the margins and then immediately argued with them. He lost, then made a friend of the loss. He laughed once too loudly, got shushed by a librarian, then got shushed by the bust, then got shushed by a ladder that developed opinions and rolled away from him to make the point.
Feris sat with the Scholar's Atlas and smiled like a map with no north made perfect sense to her. She wrote omens in small neat letters at the bottoms of pages - not a prophecy, a reminder - and signed nothing.
Ichiro had two states: here with a book, not here and returning with a book. When he sat, he turned pages like knives turning in air. When he stood, he vanished down an aisle and returned holding exactly the thing Arashi had just said out loud as if the shelves were listening to him and obeyed Ichiro instead.
By sunset, their fortress had grown short towers and a mood. Kori did not appear. A librarian drifted past and placed a single cup of water at the edge of their table without breaking eye contact with Arashi, as if daring him to narrate hydration. He didn't. He would later.
By day three, the Tree Library had learned their names. The chandeliers nested in its branches blinked from bright to amber as if they were candles that had read too much. The walls were all shelves - the shelves were all books - and the ladders rolled on rails like cats deciding whether to let you pet them.
"Don't look down," Esen warned Feris as he climbed.
"I won't," she promised and looked down anyway. The ladder slid two aisles left as if the rails had opinions about honesty.
Keahi pressed a palm against a spine before taking it, listening the way you do before touching something hot. Hikari triaged: Principles, primers, practicals - the ones with arguments in the margins first, the ones with diagrams second
Raizen found two editions of Principles of Luminite Conduction - the gray second and the thinner tenth. The diagrams in the second marched like soldiers; the tenth had softened the lines so much the river didn't know where to go. He turned the pages, old first, new second, and felt the difference move through his hands the way a floor hum travels through boots. The newer book went down in the "later" pile and tried not to sulk. The older one came with him.
Lynea discovered a slim volume tucked behind a panel, first page signed in a sharp hand and a year that made her mouth press thin. She closed it like a secret and placed it on the "share" stack with perfect neutrality. Ichiro fell asleep once, sitting upright with a book open at perfect angles to his face, then woke without moving and continued reading as if his eyes had just rested and the rest of him hadn't noticed.
Someone had fallen asleep under the lowest shelf. By morning, seven sticky notes whispered not a pillow in seven languages on his forehead. Kori, absent, laughed later when they told her and pretended she'd been there, because of course she had in spirit.
By the end of week one, they had a rhythm and a ruin.
Morning: Hall of Petals for the ugly basics that bite. Noon: Grand Library for the heavy theory that made wrists ache from holding up. Afternoon: Tree Library for the practicals and the opinions. Evening: Kori's living room for late reading, tea, and the slow collapse into laughter that sounded like surrender but wasn't.
They learned each other's tells. Arashi tapped a finger against the page when a line begged to be read out loud and only did it now if Keahi nodded. Hikari liked to explain out of the side of her mouth, as if talking straight on felt like bragging. Esen wiggled his pen before writing a joke in a margin and then crossed it out if the margin glared. Lynea's pencil made tinier letters when she was mad. Feris hummed when a sentence matched a thought she'd had yesterday. Ichiro was a ghost that moved books like chess. Raizen went very still when the hum in the floor woke. He didn't speak then. He just listened, the way you do when a door you didn't open creaks somewhere else in the house.
Kori appeared twice. Once midweek, carrying a bag of pastries and a profound refusal to call them breakfast.
"Hydration," she announced, holding up a bottle of something suspiciously clear, then swapped it for tea because Hikari winced at the bottle. "Progress?"
"Forty-two and an argument," Arashi pointed at a stack.
"Forty-eight," Lynea said.
Kori pulled out a bun and flipped through Ethics Under Pressure. She smirked. "This one hurts". To Raizen: "You reading or brooding?"
"Both," he said.
"Excellent," she said. "Brooding counts as cardio."
The second time she arrived was midnight week two, when the Tree Library's lamps had gone to embers and the leaves threw fake wind across the tables. She set a small box on the's table and, without preamble, said, "Quiz."
Groans. Reflex. She ignored them with grace.
"Tell me three things you learned this week that weren't in the pretty editions," Kori said, pointing a wooden spoon at each as if the spoon had tenure.
"Old diagrams lie less," Hikari said immediately. "They show risk."
"Margins are arguments you're invited to join," Esen said, to general nodding.
"Conduction routes can be braided," Keahi murmured, eyes on a page where someone had drawn fire like a braid and annotated it with don't be greedy.
"Ethics that assume clean floors are useless," Lynea said, and Kori's mouth went soft for a fraction of a second.
"Maps that refuse north are truer in a storm," Feris added, earning her the spoon as a scepter for one solemn second.
Ichiro: "Authors repeat themselves. The repeats matter."
Arashi: "Logistics can be poetry. We won't say that out loud to the professor."
Raizen hesitated, then: "We forget too much. We act like the new is an apology for the old. Sometimes it's just… smaller."
Kori closed the box. "You're not awful," she pronounced. "Continue."
"What was in the box?" Esen asked as she tucked it away.
"Obviously, pastries" Kori said, and didn't share.
By day fifteen, they had a crisis. It was quiet and involved paper.
Hikari had been working through Basic Nyx Anatomy - Pre-Reform. The later edition on a second table had a big chapter called Harmless Variants. The old one had an even bigger chapter called Things That Only Look Harmless if You Haven't Tried to Bury a Body Yet. She did not like that the harmless variants existed. She went to Kori's office knocked once, and when Kori said "Enteer!" from behind a tower of papers, Hikari held up both books and said: "Which one lies less."
Kori didn't even pretend to think. "The one that remembers funerals," she said. "Next question."
"That wasn't a question," Hikari said, but she relaxed anyway.
They stopped pretending the new manuals were their friends. They used them sometimes for clarity. They didn't trust them for truth.
By the last week, the academy had started to recognize the eight as a moving problem. Librarians made a small space when they passed. The marble bust resigned itself to Arashi. The ladders in the Tree Library sharpened their sense of humor and slid Esen exactly where he swore he didn't need to be.
The regular students stopped looking at their badges first and started asking for help finding things, the way you ask the person who lives in a museum what the museum thinks. Hikari, when asked where On Listening for Cracks in Stone lived, walked the girl to it and showed her the margin that said listen with your knees, then made sure the girl knew that was a joke that wasn't a joke.
One afternoon, a professor with a coat the color of oxidized copper drifted past their table, took Arashi's badge, flipped it, frowned at the back like it owed him an apology, and set it down again without a word. He will matter later. For now he was only a gust.
They discovered that "reading all day" hurts like any training. Shoulder blades learned to ache in new languages. Necks negotiated treaties with pillows. Fingers dried out from turning a thousand stubborn pages. Hikari developed a tiny blister where her pencil rested. Arashi's voice went hoarse and he pretended not to mind. Keahi learned to flex her hands between diagrams the way she did between stances. Esen stopped drawing tiny mustaches in the frontispieces because the bust caught him once and that was enough. Lynea drafted a schedule on the back of the list that allocated hours like rations. Ichiro ate exactly half of whatever pastry Kori handed him, always, without comment.
At the close of the nineteenth day, Raizen sat with Letters from the Front - Excerpts for Students who Think They're Immortal and didn't read them. Half the letters were crossed out, names replaced with initials, places omitted until the sentences walked on stilts. He stared at the blanks. It made him think of the chained book's white. It made him think that silence comes in types - protection, punishment, shame, mercy - and he could not tell which kind this was. He closed the book and opened another because that was the job in front of him.
They finished on schedule by cheating the schedule: reading through lunch, reading on the steps, reading on the floor when the couch looked dangerous, reading aloud to each other when words blurred into soup, letting Ichiro read when no one else could, letting Feris translate omens into instructions, Esen making a joke and letting it make the next page easier.
On the twenty-first night, the Tree Library's lamps were down to amber coins and the Grand Library's brass rails held the last bit of day like a secret. They stacked the last of the ugly, heavy, wrong (in charming ways) books onto the Hall of Petals table and stood there like people who had just finished crossing something wider than a river.
Kori was already at the table. Nobody had seen her arrive. She looked annoyingly awake.
"We lived," she said. "We learned. Now we'll pretend like we actually enjoyed it."
"We suffered" Esen said. "Does that count?"
"It's the same word in my language" Kori said. "What did the ugly ones give you?"
Hikari: "Fewer illusions."
"Caution that isn't fear." Keahi answered
Lynea: "Arguments worth losing."
"Names for things that pretend they don't have names." continued Feris
Ichiro: "Weights."
Raizen: "Edges to hold on to."
Kori nodded like someone had brought her her favorite drink. "Good," she said. "Now you've got foundations. Or scoliosis. Probably both. Tomorrow you start behaving like students. Classes. Professors. Schedules that don't care about your dramatic souls. I will visit, heckle, and occasionally teach"
"Do we get a reward," Esen asked, on principle.
"You get this," Kori said, and set a paper bag on the table like a declaration of independence. It steamed. The room forgave her everything.
They ate with the stunned gratitude of people who'd discovered sugar is a cult. Hikari leaned her shoulder onto Raizen's arm without meaning to as she chewed. He didn't move away. Feris smiled at the ceiling like destiny had sent carbohydrates. Arashi toasted the marble bust with a flaky edge. Lynea allowed herself the smallest, fiercest grin over a custard. Ichiro ate half a pastry and then, breaking tradition, ate the other half.
When they'd licked their fingers and pretended they hadn't, Kori pointed at the staircase.
"Now rest" she ordered. "You'll need it. From today on, the real deal starts."