Gilded Ashes-Chapter 46: The Grind

They started with optimism, which is to say, they didn’t know better yet.

Day one, the Hall of Petals looked more like a cathedral. Sun laid itself over the mosaic spiral, students run through like stream you couldn’t shut off, and the eight of them built a fortress of chairs, 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. Feris claimed anything the margins had scribbled, saying that fate brought all of those small notes together. Ichiro simply set down a book no one else had found and then another and then another, like silence was a language he spoke. Raizen ran a finger down the list like checking a pulse and nodded once when he saw that most things were in order.

"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, hah" Arashi intoned, quoting Kori, whilst 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 nobody wanted to have anything to do anything with it. Weight the Moment, not the Muscle cracked its spine like a joke you had to earn. "What to Do When the Air Starts To Hum" stared back at him, trying to pretend like Eon isn’t scary. Raizen was reading a few lines, wondering how a whole room can be incinerated in seconds...

Hikari read like stitching - small, precise passes that held the page together. She made neat stacks of notes she’d never call flashcards, and then hid them under her sleeve. 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 word 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.

Esen discovered "Margins that Correct the Author" and after a few minutes of reading, he apologized out loud to the margins and then immediately argued with them. He lost. But he also laughed at himself once too loudly, got shushed by a librarian, then got shushed by everyone else around.

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.

Ichiro had two states: here reading a book, not here and returning with a book. When he sat, he turned pages with extreme care, but the speed at which he was reading was honestly impressive. When he stood, he vanished down an aisle and returned holding exactly the thing Arashi had just said out loud.

By sunset, their fortress had grown shorter towers. Kori still 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.

By day three, most students that loved spending a lot of time in the Tree Library learned their names. The chandeliers blinked from bright to amber as if they were candles. The walls were all shelves - the shelves were all books - and the eight royal scholars were trying not to get pissed when one book recommended five others.

"Don’t look down" Esen warned Feris as she climbed.

"I won’t" she promised and looked down anyway. The ladder slid two aisles left.

Keahi pressed a palm against a spine before taking it, 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 were scribbled by what looked like at least ten generations; the tenth had softened the lines so much they barely fluctuated anymore. He turned the pages, old first, new second, and felt the difference move through his hands. The newer book went down in his own "later" pile, the one with books he figured he’d read after he finished with the important ones.

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 she didn’t want to hear about it again. 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 nothing really happened. Someone had fallen asleep, too, under the lowest shelf. In a few hours, seven sticky notes whispered "not a pillow" in seven different languages on his forehead.

By the end of week one, they started having a rhythm. Kind of.

Morning: Hall of Petals for the ugly and very annoying basics. 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 slow collapse into laughter from the dumbest discussions possible.

They also started knowing each other better, and figured out that close to a hundred books were almost impossible if they didn’t work together, and teach each other. 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 to herself. Esen wiggled his pen before writing a joke in a margin and then crossed it out like he wasn’t so sure if being funny was the right thing anymore. Lynea’s pencil made tinier, more rushed letters when she was mad. Feris hummed when a sentence matched a thought she’d had yesterday. Raizen went very still when the hum in the floor woke up from time to time. 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 stop Lynea from calling them breakfast.

"Hydration" she announced, holding up a bottle of something that looked like plant juice, then swapped it for tea because Hikari frowned at the bottle. "Progress?"

"Forty-two and a few arguments" 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 almost midnight week two, when the Tree Library’s lamps had gone dim, but the eight were still studying, because the night was the only time of day where students didn’t throw them weird looks. She set a small box on the’s table and, without preamble, said, "Quiz."

Groans. Kori ignored them with grace. "Tell me three things you learned this week that weren’t in the pretty editions" she said, pointing a wooden spoon at each as if the spoon had tenure.

"Old diagrams lie less" Hikari said immediately. "They show the true risk."

"Margins are arguments you’re invited to join" Esen said, not hiding a cheeky grin.

"Conduction routes can be braided" Keahi murmured, eyes on a page with a picture where someone had drawn fire from thin air, using Eon and annotated it with "don’t be greedy".

"Maps that refuse north are better in a storm" Feris added.

Ichiro: "Authors repeat themselves. The repeats sometimes matter."

"Logistics can be poetry. We won’t say that out loud to the professor." Arashi said proudly.

Raizen hesitated, then: "We forget too much. We act like the new things are an apology for the old. Sometimes it’s just... Less."

Kori closed the box. "You bunch are not awful" she pronounced. "Continue."

"What was in the box?" Esen asked as she tucked it away.

"Guess" Kori said, smiling innocently.

"Obviously, pastries" Arashi sighed, and watched Kori, but she didn’t really want to share.

By day fifteen, they had a crisis. It was quiet and involved paper.

Hikari had been working through Basic Nyx Anatomy - Pre-Velarion. 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 But Will Absolutely Cook You". She did not like that the harmless variants existed, so 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.

Behind her back, Kori shouted "Yo, Hikari. Remember, there are no such things as harmless Nyxes."

They stopped pretending the new manuals were their friends. They used them sometimes for clarity. Most times, though, 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 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 has in store. Hikari, when asked where "Listening for Cracks in Stone" lived, looked at the girl for a few seconds, spent half an hour actually finding it, then made sure the girl knew that some books in the library are jokes. Arashi appeared from behind a corner and started arguing that poetry is NOT a joke.

They discovered that "reading all day" hurts like any training. Shoulder blades learned to ache in new ways. Necks negotiated treaties with the pillows at home. Fingers dried out from turning thousands of stubborn pages. Hikari developed a tiny blister where her pencil rested. Arashi’s voice went hoarse from so much reciting 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 Lynea caught him once, and traumatized him. Speaking of Lynea, she drafted a busy 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, and kept the other half for later.

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". He swore that the titles were getting weirder and weirder. But at least they were on point.

Half the letters were crossed out, redacted, names replaced with initials, places omitted until the sentences just looked like a few pauses in the black lines. He stared at the blanks. It made him think of the chained book’s white. It made him think that silence comes in types and purposes - protection, punishment, shame, mercy - and he could not tell which kind this was. He closed the book and opened another.

They finished on schedule by cheating the schedule: reading through lunch, reading on the steps, at home, reading on the floor when the couch looked dangerous, reading aloud to each other when some were still trying to do pushups to maintain some of their physical form, letting Ichiro read when no one else could, letting Feris translate omens into instructions, Esen making a joke and making the next page feel easier.

On the twenty-first night, the Tree Library’s electric lamps were down to a small amber. They stacked the last of the ugly, heavy, wrong (in charming ways) books onto the big table and stood there like people who had just finished crossing something wider than an ocean.

Kori was already at the table. Nobody had seen her arrive. She looked annoyingly awake.

"Well, you lived" she said. "You learned. Now pretend like you 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

"Arguments worth losing." Lynea sighed.

"Names for things that usually don’t have names." Feris continued.

"Interesting new points of view" Ichiro mumbled.

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 real students. Classes, professors, schedules that don’t care about your dramatic souls. I will visit from time to time, and 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. Everyone in the room rolled their eyes, but forgave Kori, because they were starving.

They ate like people who’d discovered sugar is a cult. Hikari leaned her shoulder onto Raizen’s arm without meaning to as she chewed. Esen swallowed so loudly, it made Lynea slap his back. Ichiro ate half a pastry and then, breaking tradition, ate the other half.

When all finished, Kori pointed at everything around them. All the rooms they never visited. Come to think of it, the only rooms they actually spent time in were the libraries.

"Well... Don’t come running at me, crying, when classes will feel harder than reading a hundred books!"