The academy's central library occupied what had once been a cathedral, its vaulted ceilings still bearing faded frescoes of celestial bodies that predated the institution by at least three centuries. During daylight hours, it bustled with students hunched over texts both mundane and mystical, but at half past midnight it stood silent as a tomb, illuminated only by the pale blue glow of preservation wards that pulsed through the stacks like a sluggish heartbeat.
Niko and Ayesha pressed themselves into the shadow of a buttress outside the library's eastern entrance, waiting for the faculty patrol to complete its circuit. Professor Chen passed within twenty feet of their position, his communication crystal held aloft like a lantern, its amber light sweeping across the courtyard in methodical arcs. They'd timed the patrols during their initial reconnaissance: seven minutes between passes, with a thirty-second window when the sight lines from adjacent patrol routes left the eastern entrance unwatched.
Not much margin for error, but they had spent the last few days preparing for this moment.
"He's never been this thorough before," Ayesha whispered, her breath warm against Niko's ear as they shared the narrow space behind the buttress. "Usually he's half-asleep by now, dreaming about whatever experimental cuisine he's planning for the weekend."
"Multiple disappearances tend to sharpen people's attention spans," Niko murmured back. He could feel the heat of her body pressed against his side, could smell the faint coconut scent of whatever she used in her hair, and forced himself to focus on counting seconds in his head instead. "Thirty seconds starting... now."
They moved in unison, years of sparring practice translating into synchronized motion as they crossed the exposed courtyard at a dead sprint. The eastern entrance was nominally locked, but like many things at Grimoire Academy, that was a relative term. The physical bolt was supplemented by a basic ward keyed to faculty signatures, designed to alert the administration if students attempted unauthorized entry.
Basic being the operative word.
"Hold still," Ayesha breathed, already pressing her palm flat against the door. Niko watched her eyes unfocus slightly, that tell-tale sign of intense concentration, as she extended filaments of her spirit energy into the ward's structure. What she was attempting required absurd precision: rather than breaking the ward, which would trigger alarms throughout the academy, she was carefully mimicking a valid faculty signature, essentially convincing the ward that Professor Morse herself was requesting entry.
Sweat beaded on her forehead despite the autumn chill. Niko remained motionless beside her, acutely aware that any disturbance in the ambient spirit energy could disrupt her work. Thirty seconds became forty-five, then sixty, and he could hear the next patrol approaching from the north.
"Ayesha," he said softly, not quite a question.
"Almost... got it... there." The ward's blue glow shifted to pale green for a heartbeat, and the bolt slid back with a soft click. "Inside, quickly."
They slipped through the gap and eased the door shut just as light from the northern patrol's crystal began illuminating the courtyard. In the sudden darkness of the library's interior, Niko's other senses sharpened compensatorily. The smell of old paper and preservation chemicals. The whisper of air moving through the vast space. The ever-present background hum of his own spirit energy, that ocean inside his soul that had made him simultaneously valuable and dangerous to the academy's instructors.
Ayesha conjured a small sphere of light in her palm, barely brighter than a candle but sufficient to navigate by. "The restricted section is on the third floor, east wing," she said quietly. Normal speaking volume felt like shouting in the library's cathedral silence. "Behind the reference desk, through the door marked Archives and Special Collections."
"You've been there before?" Niko asked, surprised. The restricted section was supposed to be completely off-limits to students without explicit faculty supervision.
"Define 'been'." That sharp smile again, the one that suggested far more mischief than she typically revealed to the faculty. "I may have accidentally-on-purpose gotten locked in the library after hours last year during finals week. One gets curious when one has time and access, though technically i couldn't get into the restricted area. Not from lack of trying."
Despite the tension coiling in his stomach, Niko felt himself smile in return. "You're a terrible influence."
"You're literally the one who suggested this particular crime spree, but sure, I'm the bad influence." She started toward the central staircase, her light sphere drifting ahead like a tame wisp. "Come on. Let's go break some more rules."
They ascended through the library's levels, past darkened reading rooms and shelf-lined corridors that seemed to stretch into infinity. Niko had spent countless hours in this building, but experiencing it at night transformed the familiar into something uncanny, as if the absence of human presence allowed the library's true nature to emerge. The books themselves seemed watchful, their collective weight of accumulated knowledge pressing down from all sides.
The third floor was darker than the lower levels, its preservation wards dimmed to minimal output. They navigated by Ayesha's light until they reached the reference desk, an imposing structure of dark wood that looked like it had been carved from a single massive tree. Beyond it stood a door of iron-bound oak, marked with a brass plaque whose letters had been worn nearly smooth by time: Archives and Special Collections.
This ward was significantly more sophisticated than the one on the eastern entrance.
Niko could see the spirit energy woven through the door's structure in complex geometric patterns, each layer interlocking with the others in a configuration that would require simultaneously disrupting multiple nodes to bypass. Breaking it was impossible without triggering alarms. Mimicking a faculty signature would take hours, if it was even possible at all.
"Well," Ayesha said after a moment's examination, "that's significantly more problematic than you anticipated?"
Niko studied the ward structure, his mind automatically mapping its configuration, tracking the flow of energy through each component. There had to be a vulnerability, some point where the design's complexity became a weakness rather than a strength. His professors had hammered this principle into him repeatedly: no ward was perfect, because perfection required infinite energy to maintain, and even the most powerful awakened had limits.
Then he saw it. Not a weakness, exactly, but an assumption built into the design. The ward was configured to detect and repel external attempts at manipulation, operating on the principle that any threat would come from someone trying to force their way in.
But what if the threat was already inside?
"I have an idea," he said slowly, still working through the implications. "But it's going to require trusting me to do something incredibly stupid."
Ayesha turned to look at him fully, grey eyes searching his face in the dim light. "I feel like that's becoming a recurring theme with us. What incredibly stupid thing are we doing this time?"
"The ward is designed to keep people out," Niko explained, gesturing at the energy patterns visible to his spirit-sensitive perception. "It's monitoring for external manipulation. But my spirit pool is... not exactly normal-sized."
"That's perhaps the understatement of the century, but continue."
"If I release a controlled burst of spirit energy on this side of the door, enough to temporarily oversaturate the ward's detection threshold, there'll be a moment where it's essentially blinded by excess input. During that moment, you could slip a precise thread of your own energy through and manipulate the lock mechanism directly."
"During that moment, you'd also be announcing your presence to everything sensitive to spirit energy within a quarter-mile radius," Ayesha countered. "Including potentially that thing you touched during the scrying. The thing that specifically has us doing this ."
"I know." Niko met her eyes steadily. "But we need information, and it's on the other side of this door. I can limit the burst, keep it as brief as possible. Thirty seconds, maybe less."
Ayesha bit her lower lip again. "If something comes for us, we run. No heroics, no investigation, we get out and accept whatever punishment the faculty decides to levy for unauthorized library access. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
"Okay." She positioned herself beside the door, hands raised and ready, her light sphere extinguished to maintain focus. "On your mark."
Niko placed his palm against the door and took a slow breath, centering himself the way Professor Morse had taught him during their private training sessions. His spirit pool was an ocean, vast and deep, and normally he kept it carefully contained. Now he allowed a fraction of that ocean to rise, a wave building toward shore, and released it in a controlled surge that flooded the ward's detection mechanisms with more input than they were designed to process.
The ward's blue glow intensified to near-white, and Niko felt Ayesha's energy slip past his own like a surgeon's knife, precise and impossibly controlled. There was a moment of resistance, then a soft click as ancient tumblers disengaged.
The door swung open.
Niko immediately pulled his energy back, clamping down on his spirit pool with the mental equivalent of slamming a door. The ward's glow faded back to blue, apparently undamaged but hopefully too overwhelmed to have registered what had actually occurred.
"Inside," Ayesha whispered urgently, and they slipped through into the restricted section.
The space beyond was smaller than Niko had imagined, more reliquary than library. Glass cases lined the walls, each containing texts that radiated faint traces of residual spirit energy. Some were bound in leather that looked disturbingly organic. Others appeared to be carved from stone or inscribed on metal sheets that had corroded to the edge of illegibility. In the center of the room stood a reading table and a card catalogue, blissfully mundane amid the esoteric surroundings.
Ayesha rekindled her light sphere and moved to the card catalogue while Niko approached the nearest case. The text inside appeared to be a journal, its pages covered in cramped handwriting that shifted between languages mid-sentence. He could make out fragments: warnings about entities that existed between dimensions, accounts of investigations gone wrong, sketches of geometric patterns that hurt to look at directly.
"Niko," Ayesha called softly next to a large crystal display. "I've got something. Cross-referencing 'eldritch,' 'disappearances,' and 'academy.' There are... actually quite a few entries. More than there should be."
He joined her at the catalogue, scanning the entries as she pulled them. Dates going back decades, some more than a century old. Incident reports, investigation records, theoretical treatises on entities that violated natural law. But one entry in particular caught his attention: Case File 1847-A: The Devouring Year.
"Pull that one," he said, pointing.
The file was stored in a case near the back wall, thick with yellowed papers bound in faded red cloth. Ayesha retrieved it carefully, and they spread the contents across the reading table. What emerged was a story that made Niko's blood run cold.
Seventy-three years ago, Grimoire Academy had experienced a series of disappearances nearly identical to what was happening now. Students vanishing into shadows. Faculty investigations finding nothing. The incidents escalating over the course of three months until a total of seventeen students had been taken.
Then, something labeled only as an 'eldritch entity' had manifested physically on academy grounds. The report was fragmented, clearly compiled from multiple traumatized witnesses, but the basics were clear: a battle had occurred. Eight faculty members and twelve students had participated. Only three faculty and two students had survived.
The entity had been defeated, sealed rather than destroyed, its anchor point buried beneath the academy's foundations.
Niko and Ayesha looked at each other across the table, the same terrible realization dawning in both their expressions.
"If it was sealed, not destroyed—" Ayesha began.
"Then seals can fail," Niko finished. "Or be broken. We need to find where they buried the anchor point."
That's when they heard footsteps on the stairs below, and a voice calling out in sharp command: "Identity yourselves! This section is under lockdown!"
Professor Morse's voice.