My eyes had caught something half-hidden in the undergrowth to the left of the gap, a massive slab of stone, tilted at an angle, its surface covered in markings that caught the dim light. I moved toward it without thinking, my feet carrying me through the rubble and root.

  Caelwyn followed, her soft footsteps barely audible behind me.

  The tablet was enormous, taller than me by several feet, and wider than my arms could span. It had once stood upright, I thought, but centuries of wind and weather had toppled it, leaving it leaning against an outcropping of stone like a wounded soldier against a wall. Its surface was pitted and scarred, patches of lichen clinging to the lower edge, but the carvings were still visible. Just barely.

  I crouched, studying the characters. They were unlike any script I had seen in my life, angular in some places, flowing in others, as if two different writing systems had been merged into one. I traced a finger just above the surface, not touching, following the lines. Nothing resolved itself. No meaning surfaced.

  "I can't read it," I admitted. "It's like nothing I've learned."

  Caelwyn stepped forward, her earlier nervousness momentarily forgotten in the presence of something ancient and written. She knelt beside me, her pale eyes moving across the stone with the focused attention of someone who had spent centuries reading things no one else could.

  For a long moment, she was silent. Her lips moved occasionally, forming shapes without sound. Her hand lifted, fingers tracing the air above the characters the way mine had, searching for meaning in the curves and angles.

  "Ancient script," she murmured finally. "Very old. Older than most surviving texts. But this dialect…" She shook her head. "It's been eroded too much. The characters are incomplete."

  "Can you read any of it?"

  She didn't answer immediately. Her tracing grew more deliberate, moving from one cluster of characters to another, piecing together fragments like a puzzle missing most of its pieces.

  Then she stopped. Her hand hovered over a section near the top of the tablet, where the characters were slightly more preserved, sheltered from the worst of the weather by an overhang of stone.

  "Here," she breathed. "This word. Atalinthus. And this one…" Her finger traced a longer sequence. "The place of... or perhaps the dwelling of... and then..." She paused, working through it. "Library."

  I stared at her. "Library. As in…"

  "This place." She looked up at me, and for the first time since we'd left the Spire, her pale eyes held something other than nervousness or scholarly precision. They held wonder. "This place used to be the library of Atalinthus. We are standing at the threshold of the lost Library."

  The words hung in the air between us, heavy with implication. Seven thousand years of silence. Three mentions in surviving texts. Mages and scholars who had sought it and failed. And here we were, crouched before a fallen stone that confirmed what we had hoped and feared.

  Caelwyn straightened, brushing dust from her robes with a motion that was almost reverent. "The rest is too damaged. I can make out isolated words, but not enough to understand their context. Whatever this tablet once said, most of it is lost."

  I looked from the ancient script to the dark entrance behind us. The Library that had swallowed its own creator. The place that had claimed mages who sought its secrets.

  "We're in the right place," I said quietly.

  "We are." Caelwyn's voice was steadier now, as if confirmation had given her something solid to hold onto. "The right place."

  I touched the river stone at my chest, felt its familiar warmth. Roric's face flashed through my mind — awkward, earnest, holding out that simple gift. It's solid. It doesn't change.

  Whatever waited inside, I would carry that solidness with me.

  "Okay," I said, standing. "Let's go."

  Caelwyn nodded, and together we turned from the ancient tablet toward the waiting dark.

  The entrance wasn't where it should have been.

  We circled the perimeter once, then twice, picking our way through rubble and root. The Library's outer wall was a jagged, crumbling thing — stone blocks the size of carts, stacked and fallen and stacked again by centuries of collapse. In some places, we could walk right up to the wall and touch it. In others, the earth had risen to meet it, burying whole sections under soil and stone.

  "It should be here," Caelwyn murmured, consulting a memory that existed only in her head. "The texts described a grand entrance facing east, toward the rising sun. Three pillars. A carved lintel."

  I looked east. There were no pillars. Just a slope of rubble and the skeletal remains of trees that had grown and died and fallen against the wall.

  "Seven thousand years," I said. "Maybe the entrance is buried."

  We kept searching.

  The work was slow, frustrating. Every step required careful footing — loose stones that shifted without warning, roots that coiled like hidden snakes, patches of what looked like solid ground that gave way to hollows beneath. I caught myself reaching for the G-Pen more than once, ready to clear a path, but something held me back. This place deserved respect. Maybe also caution. If the Library had defenses, I didn't want to trigger them by blasting through its walls.

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  Caelwyn was methodical, tracing the base of the wall with her eyes, occasionally stopping to examine a carved fragment half-buried in the dirt. Once, she called me over to look at something — a symbol, worn almost smooth, that might have been the same wheel I'd learned in my training. Or might have been something else entirely.

  "Is it important?" I asked.

  "Everything here was important once." She straightened, brushing dirt from her hands. "Whether it still is, I cannot say."

  We pushed on.

  The silence was the strangest part. In the fairy realm, there was always sound — the distant chime of leaves, the murmur of rivers flowing upward, the soft hum of ambient magic. Here, there was nothing. Not even wind. The air itself felt heavy, still, as if the Library had wrapped itself in a bubble of quiet and dared the world to break it.

  I found myself whispering without meaning to. "It's like the place is holding its breath."

  Caelwyn nodded. She didn't whisper, but her voice was softer than usual. "Perhaps it is. Waiting for something. Someone."

  Me, I thought, and the weight of it settled on my shoulders again.

  We climbed over a section of collapsed wall, picking our way through stones that had fallen so long ago they'd grown moss and tiny ferns. On the other side, the ground dipped into a shallow depression — a courtyard once, now a tangle of roots and wild growth. At its center, a massive root system had pushed up through the earth, thick as my body, winding around something I couldn't see.

  Caelwyn stopped. Her pale eyes narrowed.

  "There," she said, pointing.

  I followed her gaze. At first, I saw nothing but root and stone. Then, slowly, the shape resolved itself — enormous, carved from a single slab of stone so dark it seemed to drink the light around it. The roots had grown around it, not through it, as if even they respected the boundary. It rose easily three times my height, its surface covered in faded patterns — geometric designs that might have been writing once, or art, or something else entirely. Now they were just shadows of meaning, too worn to read, too old to care.

  "This is it," Caelwyn breathed. "The entrance."

  I reached out and touched the stone. It was cold — not the cold of winter or deep water, but something older. The cold of a place that had never known warmth, never needed it. Beneath my fingers, I felt the faintest vibration — not magic, not quite. More like a memory of magic. A hum so deep and slow it barely registered.

  Seven thousand years. And it was still here. Still waiting.

  I pressed both palms flat against the stone and pushed.

  Nothing.

  I set my feet, braced my shoulders, and pushed harder. Muscles strained. Breath came short. The door did not even tremble.

  "It's not moving," I said, stating the obvious because I needed to hear something.

  Caelwyn stepped up beside me. For a moment, she simply looked at the door, her pale eyes tracing its faded patterns. Then she placed her own hands against the stone, positioned carefully as if pressing a book back into place on a shelf, and added her strength to mine.

  Together, we pushed.

  The door remained utterly indifferent. It might as well have been the mountain itself — immovable, eternal, completely unimpressed by the efforts of two small beings at its base.

  We stepped back, breathing hard. My palms tingled from the cold.

  "Alright," I said. "Physical force isn't the answer."

  Caelwyn nodded, already shifting into scholar mode. She stepped forward and began to work. Her hands moved in precise gestures, tracing patterns in the air that left faint trails of silver light. Her lips moved, forming words I couldn't hear — incantations, old and formal and carefully memorized.

  The light touched the door and simply... stopped. Not repelled, not absorbed. Just stopped, as if the door had decided the magic wasn't worth noticing.

  She tried again. A different gesture, a different sequence. Then another. Each spell slid off the stone like water off oil, leaving no mark, no response, no acknowledgment.

  "I don't understand," she murmured. "These are foundational unlocking charms. They should work on any sealed surface."

  "Let me try."

  I summoned the G-Pen. I thought of light first — the pure, clarifying force I had learned to channel — and directed it toward the door. The sigil touched the stone and vanished. Not absorbed. Not rejected. Just gone, like pouring water into empty space.

  I tried shadow next. Then fire, water, earth, wind. I tried combinations, the wheel turning in my mind as I cycled through every affinity I possessed.

  The door did not care.

  I stepped back, frustration building in my chest. "Nothing is working."

  Caelwyn was quiet for a moment. "It's as if the door exists on a different frequency than our magic. We're knocking, but it can't hear us."

  "Or won't."

  "Perhaps."

  I stared at the door. At its faded patterns, its patient silence, its absolute refusal to yield.

  "What would a locksmith do?" I muttered.

  Caelwyn looked at me. "There is no visible mechanism. The door is solid stone."

  "Then the mechanism is hidden. Or it's not a mechanism at all. Not in the way we're thinking." I stepped closer again — this time not pushing, not casting. Just looking. Studying the faded patterns, the way they curved and connected. "You tried everything. Standard spells, advanced spells, every affinity I have. Nothing worked. Which means magic isn't the key."

  "Then what is?"

  I didn't have an answer. Not yet. But I kept looking. Kept tracing. Kept thinking.

  I worked my way across the door methodically, section by section. Higher up, the patterns were almost completely smooth — just ghosts of what they'd once been. Lower down, where the door met the earth, the soil had partially buried it, protecting the carvings from the worst of the erosion.

  I crouched. Brushed away loose dirt with my hand. And there, inches above the ground line, I saw something different.

  Not a pattern. Not a geometric design. Letters. Deliberate, carefully carved letters, distinct from the decorative carvings above them. An inscription.

  "Caelwyn."

  She was at my side in an instant. I moved aside, giving her room, and watched as her expression shifted from curiosity to concentration to something I couldn't quite name.

  She reached out, her slender fingers tracing the letters without quite touching them. Her lips moved in silence. Then she sat back on her heels and read aloud:

  "To open this door, you must possess the first spark of magic."

  The words hung in the air between us, heavy with implication.

  I stared at the inscription. At the door. At Caelwyn's pale, wondering face.

  "The first spark," I repeated.

  "Not an element. Not an affinity. Not power in the sense that mages understand it." She nodded slowly. "The first spark. The source itself."

  I thought of the Fairy King's words, years ago now, in the Spire's practice chamber. You were not born with nothing, Elsbeth. You were born with everything.

  I thought of the G-Pen. The way it appeared not from anywhere, but from me. The way it hummed with potential that wasn't fire or water or light or shadow, but something older. Something underneath.

  The first spark.

  I drew in a slow breath. Behind me, Caelwyn did not speak. The Library of Atalinthus had waited seven thousand years for someone to stand here.

  Someone who carried the beginning.