The Last Library Ch. 05

He stroked her hair until she settled enough to interact with him once more. Her trembling had stopped and the panic had mostly faded from her expression. Finally, she shifted back onto the seat next to him and drew a long shuddering breath. Ashur kept one arm around her shoulders and took her hand in his.

"In the Auditorium, you wondered how I had been alone so long without losing my sanity. I didn't. About fifteen hundred years or so ago, my mind broke and I went insane for what I can only guess was around a century."

The hand he held tightened down on his fingers and she leaned into him once again.

"I only remember small pieces of that time, flashes of emotions and images. I remember being afraid and angry. Part of me knew I was out of control but couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it. It was easier to hide and let the bad stuff happen."

I can't remember if or when I ate or slept. It's all a big blur, but when I did eventually pull out of it, things were in shambles. There were creatures everywhere, the Well was almost out of control, and whole sections of manuscripts had been tossed everywhere."

She shuddered again. "I think that was me. I have vague impressions of climbing the Shelves and things kept getting in my way."

Ashur wasn't certain what "the Well" was, but now was definitely not the time to ask. He kept silent, allowing her to continue.

"It took me a long time to come out of it. I'm still not certain how I did and when I was rational again..." She gave a small shrug and shake of her head. "I think I cried for two days straight. I spent the next few years cleaning everything up and clearing everyone and everything out. I made so many trips through the Ether to get all of those animals home. To make matters worse, there were even more that had died of dehydration or starvation because they couldn't make it back while I was too "indisposed" to help them. I spent a lot of time feeling guilty about that."

Mera stood and meandered toward the statue. A few heartbeats later, the Guardian joined her. When she reached it, she laid a hand upon the marble woman's toe and turned to look at him.

"Did you know that when I saw that the tether was whole again, I started to feel it creeping back on me? I've been fighting so hard since then to keep myself here and now because the alternative scares me so badly that I can't function. Even now, knowing that you are staying and I won't be alone again, that fear still squeezes my heart and...well."

She waved back to where they had been sitting a few minutes before and her panicked reaction.

"So, when I saw the Staff on your dresser, I knew that the Library had chosen you and yet, for whatever reason, had hidden it from me. It made me suffer through that... that fear, that terror when it didn't have to. That pissed me off. I'm sorry that I scared you or worried you, but I was just so angry!"

Watching her skin take on a crimson hue again, he placed a hand on her arm in an attempt to soothe her. It worked and she settled enough to continue.

"Sorry," she said, breathing slowly to calm herself. "It's been a long time since I've been that mad."

"Oh, I don't know," he countered. "My first day here seemed to be pretty upsetting for you."

Lightly punching him in the shoulder for his terrible joke, she smiled up at him. "No," she replied, "I was definitely upset that day, but nowhere near as mad as I was this morning. At the time, I thought you were a thief or someone sent to attack me and the Library. When I found out that you weren't, that you had just stumbled..."

She trailed off and her skin flared scarlet once more. Her foot stomped and she pounded the sculpture. Ashur stepped back when Mera's breath came whistling from between her clenched teeth.

"IT WAS YOU, YOU STUPID STRUCTURE! You did it! You moved the tether end! And you didn't tell me! Again! I hate you! I hate you! You piece of magical shit!" Now both of her fists drummed out a staccato on the stone digit before her.

Deciding to head her tirade off before she bruised her hands, he stepped up and put both of his on her shoulders to draw her away from the offending effigy. Still ranting, she allowed herself to be directed toward the bookshelves and the house. They were almost halfway back before her muttering wound down.

"Another surprise, I take it?" the big man asked gently.

His companion harrumphed. "Sort of." She then explained about the nature of the tether, the oddity of it being near the surface, and her worries at its loss of strength. "I was worried that whatever caused the Cataclysm had somehow found us. It would take enormous power to shift the tether, especially from the outside. Now I know that it was the Library itself that did the moving and it put me through more unnecessary worry."

"Ah," was his only reply.

"Yeah," she chuckled. "Today has been a bit of an emotional day. I really need to get my head back together."

They strolled silently for a while.

"So, what now?" the new Guardian finally asked.

"I guess," she responded, "we'll get you started on history and training. The history part is easy. We can use old lectures from the viewer and, obviously, the materials around us for that part." She emphasized her point with a wave of her hand toward the shelves that surrounded them. "The training is going to be a bit harder. This is all new territory. Colphon, the others, and I were all of the Tibori so it was part of our upbringning. Since you aren't, I'm not certain where to start, what expectations to have, or even where your limits are going to be."

She placed her hand on his arm and squeezed a little.

"Keep in mind that I'm probably going to be winging it most of the way. I know for a fact that we'll both get frustrated from time to time, but we'll get there. Give me a day or so to think about it and we'll get started."

A sudden thought hit him and he focused on Mera.

"Does this mean that I'm actually the Chosen One you've been waiting for?" His heart started racing. If he was, then it meant an end to Mera's long watch and she would be able to travel the world again. His hopes were dashed, however, by her response.

"No, I'm afraid not," she said as she strolled back over to him. "As nice as that would be, you're not the one I'm waiting for. Sorry."

"How do you know?"

"The impression I got was that whoever it is will already have the power within them. You didn't. Until the Library chose you, you were the same as any other of the Following Races. Your only access to magic would have been the same as mages of your time. You're not the one."

Ashur wasn't certain how he felt about that. On one hand, he was happy that he would be able to stay and keep Mera company, but on the other, he had hoped her wait would be at an end. With a sigh, he started back to the house.

***

Ashur held the wooden rod up in front of him, mirroring the towering male statue. However, where the stone man gripped a weapon that was as tall as he was, the flesh and blood one still held onto something around a foot long. Sometime during that first night, it had reverted to its truncated size.

"What am I doing wrong," he muttered to himself darkly. It had been two weeks since the revelation that he was now a part of the Library and he had been working to train his mind in order to gain access to the abilities that the magical edifice had bestowed upon him.

Unfortunately, the progress wasn't going as fast as he had hoped.

Mera had started him out with mental training. His new routine involved ten minutes of concentration exercises every morning before breakfast. She had explained that almost no one could focus on one thing for more than about thirty seconds at a time without developing the skill. When he had argued that he could do it, she had laid down a challenge. She would watch his mind as he directed all of his attention on a candle flame. If that attention wandered, she would call an end to the exercise.

He had made it to seventeen seconds before his thoughts shifted from the flame to wondering if he really could make it the full time. Mera had immediately called him out on his lapse. Determined to prove her wrong, he had tried again. And again. And again. After the twelfth attempt, he had conceded her point. He hadn't made it any farther than a count of twenty-two.

That day, she had directed him to focus on the flame for ten seconds at a time. When his new teacher had finally announced that he had reached his goal five times in a row, she had ended the exercise and told him that his next objective was fifteen seconds. Once he had accomplished that, she had continuously increased the time by five second intervals and they had repeated the exercise daily ever since.

Now, Ashur stood in his room and had spent the last hour attempting to expand the baton into its full length. Mera kept on calling it "the Staff" with a capital "S", but until he was actually able to extend it to six feet again, he didn't quite feel right using the term.

She had explained that there were many abilities he would be able to unlock once he had even partially mastered it, but until he did...

"What the fuck am I doing wrong?"

"Probably trying too hard," came a wry voice from the doorway. Ashur jumped and dropped the Staff. He spun with fists raised until he saw her grinning unashamedly. "Dammit Mera!" His heart was going a mile a minute. It had been a long time since he had been that startled which was a testament to how hard he had been concentrating.

The Caretaker's sardonic smile devolved into gales of laughter, leaving her to brace herself on the door jamb. His red face held its grimace for almost five seconds before he let it go and chuckled sheepishly along with her.

Wiping her leaking eyes, Mera was finally able to talk again. "It's going to take time and practice, barbarian. Pushing it will only make it harder. Don't worry, you'll get there."

Several days later, as they sat quietly on the couch, Ashur looked up from the history book that Mera had given him as part of his lessons.

"Tell me again why I need to know this?" he complained. It was late in the evening and he was starting to go cross-eyed.

His azure teacher folded her own book closed and turned her attention to him. "The history of the Library is basically the history of my time and the people that lived there. Since we were the ones who created the Library in the first place, understanding how we lived is the key to understanding the intricacies of how and why it works."

"I understand that," he complained, "but this doesn't help me to understand what's going on with the Library now." Between the reading material and occasional recorded lectures that she had him watching on the viewer, he was gaining a fair grasp of what life before the Cataclysm had been like. He had been shocked by the wonders of that time. Many of the buildings had been tall, beautiful spires that held whole governments and other businesses. The homes of the general populace were equally as wonderful, being of stone and glass. Anyone from his own time who owned such a house would be considered vastly wealthy or a member of royalty.

And the crowds! In one of the lectures on general economics, the image had looked down on one of the shopping bazaars while the presenter made a point. The ever-shifting sea of humans and other races that filled the streets actually started to make him a bit motion sick as he tried to concentrate on one area after another. The only time he had seen a crowd even close to this had been the conglomeration of armies from four different countries and he still wasn't certain it came close to the masses he saw on the viewer above him. And that was just one street!

What had almost put him over the edge, however, was the mix of magic and technology that Mera's society had employed. While horses and oxen were used to pull carts full of goods, the carts themselves floated along with no obvious means of support. Platforms much like the one they had used to travel to other worlds floated along in lines above the walking people carrying anywhere from one to five travelers to and from their destinations.

And the magic was not only set aside for the rich and powerful. Individual citizens that only seemed to be moderately well-off were wearing glowing bracelets that apparently helped them communicate across species' language barriers. They carried satchels that would hold anything the person could get into the opening without filling up. A child played with a brightly colored toy lark that hovered over a flat hexagonal stone in her small hand; singing and dancing like a real bird.

All of this had emphasized the real meaning behind Mera's occasional mutters of "so much lost" when referring to the world he had grown up in. For the first time, the man who had arrived in the Library with rough spun clothes, leather pouches, and boiled hide armor truly felt like the barbarian that she had nicknamed him and often wondered what it would have been like to grow up in such a civilization.

None of it, however, explained how the Library now rested in an eternal void that just happened to allow unwanted guests in.

Placing her book on the table in front of the couch, Mera turned to give him her full attention. The confused Guardian raised both hands in a palm-up gesture of confusion and consternation.

"You've explained why the Library had to be hidden and kept separate from the world, and I kind of get the overlaps, but that's about it. After that I get a little lost."

The Caretaker gently took his hands in hers and smiled. "I can understand that," she commiserated. "When I didn't think you were staying, I left my explanations rather vague. Let's see if I can give you something a little more concrete now that you are here for good.

"Just like the Library is sectioned off in increasingly specific divisions, so too are the different realities, universes, dimensions, worlds, etc. that we interact with. The worlds are all within their respective universes, which are contained within the dimensions, which are, in turn, contained within realities. I guess you could say that it is a lot like what you would find in our world. Towns are in districts, districts are in counties, counties are in kingdoms or countries, countries are in continents, and continents are all in the world. Make sense so far?"

At his reluctant nod, she continued.

"To keep the Library safe from the Cataclysm, we finally figured out a way to take it out of our world by making it here and not here at the same time. I guess you could say that we put it in its own little bubble of reality that is tethered to our world like a kite on a string.

However, to keep the Library from being found, the edges of that bubble are always shifting which, as a side effect, makes it easier for the bubble to cross the boundaries between realities. Once we cross over into another reality, we start to intersect with its various dimensions, universes, and so on. Still with me?"

"No," he admitted, "but keep going. It might start making sense soon."

She shrugged and continued her lecture.

"You could think of us like a ball shaped ghost that slips in and out of different rooms in an infinitely large building. As we pass through a wall, we might end up touching a table or a bed or even a desk on the other side. Where our ghost intersects with an object, there is an overlap. That is where the animals and people slip into the Library, through that intersection."

He stood up and started to pace as his brain worked through her various analogies.

"Ok. I can see a bit of that. But if we are passing through these objects on some kind of pull string, why do you have to worry about worlds like the one with the cliff and those warriors? Shouldn't the overlap disappear once we've moved past the desk or table or whatever?"

"Unfortunately," she answered," it doesn't quite work like that. We aren't moving in a straight line or even in one general direction. Hell, even the realities, dimensions, and such are moving around at random around each other. We may pass through the same spot in a particular dimension several times. Some realities are almost infinite in length, but not in height and we'll zip through it several times a second. To make matters worse, we might pass through a universe in one dimension and another universe in another reality altogether...at the same time!"

Ashur wanted to beat his head against the wall.

"This makes no sense," he grumbled.

"I know," she told him. "It took me a long time to get my head wrapped around it too when Eshava and Mineed first explained the concept to me."

"Mineed?" he asked.

"He was one of the professors here for almost thirty years. He was excellent with "way out there" physics. In any case, it was all really a lot of speculation until we actually did it. To be honest, what we really thought would happen was that the Library would float along hidden from everything. I was shocked when I came across the first animal."

"So, what about the platform that looks like the lift? That takes us to the different places. How does that work?," he asked.

"I'm still working on that," she replied ruefully. "It used to bend space just a bit to take us to one of the other Libraries, but that was all it did. How it started being able to make its way across dimensions and realities is beyond me. Mineed might have been able to explain it, but I really can't."

"Hhmph," he finally grunted. "I'm never going to understand all this."

With a small laugh, she handed him his book and nodded to it. "Don't worry, barbarian. You will...eventually."

***

After another week of frustration and failure, Ashur had pretty much given up on the Staff and was starting to doubt the Library's choice. Maybe he wasn't cut out to be Mera's partner. After all, he was just a man and had never used magic of any kind before. Perhaps he really wasn't supposed to.

That thought made him wonder if the Library had decided to give him just enough power to be able to hold his own in fights so that Mera could do her job. Instead of being a true half of the duo needed, he was just supposed to watch her back. It was a mildly depressing conclusion to hold onto, but he decided that if, with more effort, he couldn't actually unlock anything more, he would have to live with it.

So, once they started patrolling again, he strapped on his familiar weapons and followed along beside her as they travelled. Unfortunately, he was still keeping his bearings by the use of his folded paper map. His partner had told him that he would, eventually, not need it and be able to know where in the Library he was by feel. Until then, however, he would continue to carry at least three of the ever-shifting charts with him.

As he walked, he felt the now odd sensation of something bumping on his thigh. He had grown used to the pockets that had been sewn into his clothes instead of myriad leather pouches tied to his belt. Now, the Staff hung on the side opposite from his sword by a cord braided around one end of it.

When he had asked Mera how her old partner had carried his, she shrugged. "He never really did," she had explained. "He liked the way it made him feel wise and sagacious, so he left it long unless he needed it to be otherwise." Rolling his eyes now at the memory, the current Guardian shifted the thing once again to the side of his hip to reduce the distraction of it.

Throughout the morning, they mostly found harmless animals that had stumbled through an overlap. Mera and her Sphere were all that was necessary to send them home. However, as part of his training, they followed each one back to where it had entered. Ashur was astonished when he saw the blend of realities. It was like seeing two pictures at once on the Auditorium viewer and it gave him a bit of a headache until he got used to it.