The outer wall was louder than I had expected.
This requires explanation, because the outer wall is stone, three feet of it, and stone does not conduct sound efficiently. What I mean is that the sounds were different in character from the sounds I had been living with for four years — different in the way that a language you have studied from texts differs from the language as spoken, the same components producing an entirely unfamiliar texture because the components in the text had been still, held in position by the page, and the components coming through the stone were moving.
The library's interior sounds had been purposeful. Footsteps going somewhere. Books being placed or retrieved. Voices saying things about known conditions. The acoustic world I had inhabited for four years was the world of people engaged in organized tasks, and organized tasks have rhythm, and rhythm is predictable, and predictability had never troubled me because I had not, until recently, been in a position to be troubled by anything.
The city was not organized.
It was not chaotic, either — I had eaten three volumes on urban sociology and understood, in the abstract, that cities were complex systems with emergent order and that the apparent chaos of street-level activity resolved, at sufficient scale, into patterns as legible as any institutional rhythm. I understood this intellectually. What I had not understood, and what I was encountering now, was the specific quality of a sound made by a person who did not know they were being heard.
The library's people knew they were in a library. They moved and spoke accordingly.
The street's people did not know they were audible through stone to a worm with a recently-installed capacity for perception.
They were unedited.
A woman's voice, close to the base of the wall, saying something sharp and conclusive to someone further away. A cart's wheel finding a stone and the driver's wordless sound in response. Children — two, I estimated, from the tonal variance — arguing about something with the total investment of people for whom the argument was the largest thing currently in the world. The specific percussion of a door closing on a building I could not see from a location I could not precisely identify, followed by a silence that was not the library's held-breath silence but the silence of a street momentarily between its own business.
I had read about all of this.
I had not known that reading about it was a different thing.
I want to record, for the category mine, the precise nature of the difference, because it will matter later and I do not trust myself to reconstruct it accurately from memory after the fact.
When I read about people in the library's collection, I received knowledge of them as complete. The Countess's letters were all the Countess I would ever have access to. Aldric's working notes were all the Aldric. The texts were their final form — not the people but the residue they had chosen or been able to produce, bounded and finite, available to be held and turned and understood from every angle because they were no longer capable of surprise.
The people on the other side of this wall were not complete.
They were in the middle of themselves.
The woman who had said something sharp would say other things after that, and the things she said next would not be predictable from the things she had said, because she was a system still in operation rather than a record of a system that had operated. The children arguing would stop arguing, or escalate, or be interrupted, or arrive at a conclusion that neither of them had when the argument began. The cart driver had a day ahead of them that would produce new sounds, new reactions, new evidence of whatever kind of person they were, and none of that evidence existed yet.
I had known, theoretically, that living people were unfinished.
I had not previously been adjacent to the experience of their unfinishedness.
It was, I found, considerably more unsettling than the dead.
The dead asked nothing new of you. Whatever you owed them was bounded: the Countess's letters were all the Countess's letters; carrying them required effort but not vigilance, because nothing further would arrive to be carried. The living were a different proposition. The living could produce more. The living could, if they knew you existed, address you directly — not as Sera had addressed me, across thirty years and in the full knowledge that she would be gone when I arrived — but in the present tense, requiring a response in the present tense, which was a form of obligation I had not yet developed the equipment to meet.
I added to the category mine: the living are incomplete, and incompleteness is demanding.
Then I held very still at the base of the outer wall and listened to the city being unfinished, and I did not go further.
The reason I did not go further was not fear.
I want to be precise about this because the distinction matters in a way I can feel but not yet fully articulate. Fear would have sent me back toward the archive, toward the oilskin package and the reading and the reliable pastness of everything in the restricted collection. What I felt was not a pull backward but a problem forward — the recognition that the outer wall was not, in fact, a threshold I could cross in my current condition and expect the crossing to be meaningful.
I was a worm.
Not in the pejorative sense that had appeared in approximately four hundred texts I had consumed — the small-minded person, the coward, the one who retreated from difficulty into the earth. In the literal sense: small, pale, without hands or voice or any of the physical mechanisms through which the world and its inhabitants exchanged the kind of information that produced obligation in both directions. I could go outside this wall. I had the capacity. I could navigate the foundation stones and emerge into the street and be, for however long it took someone to notice me, technically present in the city of Aldenmere.
What I could not do was engage with it.
The city's sounds were coming through the stone and I could receive them with the full apparatus of my newly-formed perception and I could hold them and carry them and add them to the weight of what I carried and none of this would constitute encounter, which required two parties and a medium through which they could exchange something, and I had no medium.
Aldric had gotten to the asymmetry of cost by arguing from the behavior of animals he could observe directly. He could watch the crow. He could design tests for the fox. The evidence he gathered was evidence because it was intersubjective — he was there, the animal was there, something passed between them that could be examined from both sides.
I was on one side of a wall.
What I needed was not to be outside.
What I needed was a medium.
I did not yet know what the medium would be.
I filed this in the category weight of the not-yet-done and turned, not back toward the archive, but toward the section of the library I had been avoiding the question of for several hours.
The spellbook had thirty-eight pages remaining.
I had left them deliberately unread.
I had been leaving them deliberately unread since Chapter Three of my existence, which was to say since the moment I had understood that consumption and comprehension were separable choices, and that the choice to read before eating was a choice I could make and remake and that each time I made it I was something slightly different than I had been before.
Thirty-eight pages.
A medium was a form of magic.
The library's walls were between me and everyone I needed to encounter.
I moved back toward the eastern wall, toward the spellbook that Penelope had not yet relocated to its conservation housing, toward the thirty-eight pages I had been carrying in the category not yet, but held since the desiccant began to fall.
It was time to read.
The Collegium of Mages maintained a building on Corrant Street, twelve minutes' walk from the Aldenmere Grand Library, which Greaves had made in somewhat under ten on the single occasion he had been required to appear before the Standing Committee on Anomalous Phenomena three years ago. The occasion had concerned an illuminated manuscript that had been producing low-level heat without observable cause, which had turned out, after three months of investigation, to be a consequence of a particular dye compound in the illustrations reacting to a change in the library's humidity controls. He had written the finding and submitted it and received a letter of acknowledgment that managed, in four sentences, to convey that the Committee considered the investigation a waste of their time and expected better stewardship of the collection's environmental management.
The letter had been signed Maren Aldous, Senior Fellow, Acting Chair.
He had filed it in the correspondence archive under the specific subdirectory he maintained for Collegium communications that he found unreasonable, which was the largest subdirectory in the correspondence archive.
He was now required to produce the quarterly report for the Committee on Anomalous Phenomena.
This was a standing obligation that he had fulfilled, without incident, for the past eleven years. The format was standard: summary of any anomalous events in the collection, assessment of their likely causes, any ongoing investigations or concerns, relevant maintenance and condition notes. In all eleven years, the reports had been two pages, occasionally three, and had never once contained anything that Greaves would have described as actually anomalous. The library was old and well-maintained and the things that appeared anomalous in old, well-maintained buildings were almost invariably explicable by the intersection of aging materials, fluctuating conditions, and the particular quality of human perception that noticed the unexpected and filed the expected without comment.
He had the form in front of him.
He had been looking at it for forty minutes.
The quarterly report asked, in its first section, for a summary of any events or observations that may fall within the Committee's area of interest, including but not limited to: spontaneous magical activity, evidence of non-standard mana discharge, anomalous behavior in materials with known or suspected magical properties, and any observations consistent with the indicators outlined in Collegium Guidance Note 7 (Revised).
He had a burn mark on the interior face of the eastern wall of the restricted section.
He had four pages missing from a spellbook that had been sealed for thirty-two years.
He had an incident report in the maintenance log, not the pest archive, that noted a bookworm infestation had ceased following treatment.
He had Sera Voss's green book in his coat pocket, which he had not told anyone about and was not certain he was going to.
He had, in the quarterly report form's summary field, written: No anomalous events to report this quarter.
He read this sentence.
The sentence was not true in the way that his incident report had been not-quite-false. The incident report had contained careful true statements organized to produce an incomplete picture. This sentence was a direct negation of observable fact.
He crossed it out.
He wrote: Routine maintenance activities conducted in the restricted collection. Environmental assessment ongoing.
This was true. He had conducted maintenance. The assessment was ongoing because he had declared it ongoing in the incident report.
He read the new sentence.
It contained nothing that would reach Maren Aldous's desk and require her to act.
It also contained nothing that would reach Maren Aldous's desk and give her any reason to think about the restricted collection, or the spellbook, or what it meant that four pages had been removed from a sealed archive and the remaining pages showed evidence of having been handled rather than damaged.
He put his pen down.
He picked it up.
He had spent forty years preserving things that other people had decided were not worth preserving. He had retrieved manuscripts from estate sales where they were being used as packing material. He had argued, twice, with the Collegium's own acquisition committee about the retention of materials they considered administratively inconvenient. He had written, in a professional journal paper that had been published in 1987 and cited exactly once, a seven-page argument for the position that the most significant materials in any collection were precisely the ones that exceeded the existing frameworks for assessment — that the value of an archive was not in its coherence but in its capacity to contain what the cataloguers hadn't known to look for.
He had meant this about documents.
He was finding it applied more broadly than he had intended.
The report asked, in its second section, for any ongoing investigations or concerns the head librarian wishes to bring to the Committee's attention.
He wrote: A review of restricted collection access protocols is currently underway. The librarian expects to submit a supplementary report upon its completion.
The supplementary report would be submitted when it was submitted, and it would say what it said when he knew what it said, and he was the head librarian and the scope of what the review covered was his professional determination to make.
He signed the quarterly report.
He addressed the envelope to the Committee on Anomalous Phenomena, Collegium of Mages, Corrant Street.
He did not seal it immediately.
He held the envelope and thought about Maren Aldous reading the words routine maintenance activities and either accepting them or questioning them, and which of those responses would be better for the thing in the walls, and whether the thing in the walls was a consideration he was permitted to include in an assessment of what the quarterly report should say.
He decided that it was.
He sealed the envelope.
He put it in the outgoing post.
He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling of his office, which was high and old and slightly irregular, and felt, with the specific discomfort of a person who had made a decision they intended to maintain but had not yet fully inhabited, the weight of what he had just omitted.
I was reading the fifth page of the spellbook when Penelope came to retrieve it.
I became aware of her approach from the sound — the particular combination of footsteps and the soft additional noise of carried equipment, the conservation kit, which had a specific acoustic signature I had now heard twice. She was moving with purpose but not urgency, following the route from the supply room to the eastern wall, and she had perhaps three minutes before she reached the location where I was reading.
I was reading.
Not eating — reading. The page was illuminated from beneath by the same directed application of Lux Perpetua I had used in the northeast corner, and the containment field was holding the glow inward, and I had the fifth page in front of me and was working through it at a pace I could only describe as slow, deliberate, and unlike anything I had done before in my life.
The fifth page contained a construction I had not encountered in the first four: a spell that required the practitioner to hold two opposing states simultaneously. Not two sequential spells, not two applications of the same principle, but genuine simultaneity — a mana configuration that could only be maintained if the practitioner was actively sustaining two contradictory intentions at once, because the spell was powered precisely by the tension between them.
The annotation in the margin — the heavy hand, Aldric's, I had come to understand — read: This is considered an advanced exercise and assigned to third-year students only. The difficulty is not technical. The difficulty is that most practitioners resist the necessary condition, which is the sustained acknowledgment that both states are real.
I had been reading this page for longer than it warranted from a purely informational standpoint.
I was reading it because it was doing something to my understanding of the axiom, and the axiom was doing something to my understanding of the page, and neither of them was yet finished doing what they were doing, and the specific thing they were doing together felt like it mattered in a way that did not resolve into a filing category but sat in the mine space, which was expanding.
Penelope's footsteps were ninety seconds away.
I faced a choice that was not survival and not curiosity.
I could continue reading and be present in the wall when she arrived to retrieve the book, which was not dangerous — she would retrieve the book, I would no longer have access to it, and whatever the fifth page was in the process of showing me would remain incomplete.
Or I could eat the page.
Not because I needed the spell. Not because the containment field was failing or the desiccant was falling or anything was pressing on me from outside. I could eat the page because it was in front of me and I was hungry — a different hunger than the one I had spent four years following, not the hunger of an animal that consumed without understanding, but the hunger of a mind that had found something it needed to finish thinking through and knew the fastest route.
I thought about what Aldric had written.
The difficulty is that most practitioners resist the necessary condition, which is the sustained acknowledgment that both states are real.
I thought about reading and consuming as two states I had been treating as sequential, as alternatives, as a choice between which came first. I thought about the fifth page, which was showing me something about simultaneity, and about the axiom, which had been reframing perception since it arrived, and about the specific tension I had been sitting inside since Chapter Three of my existence: not eating or reading but the sustained acknowledgment that both were available and that I was the thing holding the tension between them.
Penelope was sixty seconds away.
I extinguished the interior light.
I moved back toward the northeast corner, leaving the spellbook where it lay, reading incomplete, consumption declined, the fifth page still in the book and the book still in the wall and the tension still in me, unresolved, pressurizing, real.
I had been a worm for four years and I was no longer only that, and whatever else I was becoming was not a state you arrived at but a pressure you maintained.
Forty-five seconds.
I added to the category mine: the hunger that does not consume is not restraint. It is a different kind of eating.
Penelope's footsteps arrived at the eastern wall.
I held the containment field and the unread page and the city sounding like something through three feet of stone, and I felt, with a precision I had no language for yet and was not going to rush toward, the weight of a self that was still in the process of becoming itself and had decided that this — the pressure, the incompleteness, the hunger held rather than acted on — was not a problem to be solved.
It was the condition.
It was, perhaps, the only condition available to something that could not put down what it carried — though I did not know this yet, and would not have trusted myself to know it if I had.
Penelope retrieved the spellbook with the careful movements of a conservator handling a significant object.
She did not know why it was significant.
She knew that it was.