the brand on her throbbing cheek.
“And never, ever forget.”
The athenaeum opened at the touch of Mia’s finger, the colossal stone doors swinging wide as if they were carved of feathers. And taking a deep breath, clutching her tome to her breast, she limped out into her favorite place in the entire world.
Looking out over the mezzanine to the endless shelves below, the girl couldn’t help but smile. She’d grown up inside books. No matter how dark life became, shutting out the hurt was as easy as opening a cover. A child of murdered parents and a failed rebellion, she’d still walked in the boots of scholars and warriors, queens and conquerors.
The heavens grant us only one life, but through books, we live a thousand.
“A girl with a story to tell,” came a voice from behind her.
Smiling, Mia turned to see an old man standing beside a trolley piled high with books. He wore a scruffy waistcoat, two shocks of white hair trying to flee his balding scalp. Thick spectacles sat on a hooked nose, his back bent like a sickle. The word “ancient” did him as much justice as the word “beautiful” did Shahiid Aalea.
“Good turn to you, Chronicler,” Mia bowed.
Without asking, Chronicler Aelius plucked his ever-present spare cigarillo from behind his ear, lit it on his own and offered it to Mia. Leaning against the wall with a wince as her stitches pulled, she puffed and sighed a shade of contented gray.
Aelius leaned beside her, his own cigarillo bobbing on his lips as he spoke.
“All right?”
“All right,” she nodded.
“How was Galante?”
Mia winced again, the pain of her sutures twinging in her backside.
“A pain in the arse,” she muttered.
The old man grinned around his smoke. “So what brings you down here?”
Mia held up the tome she’ d brought with her across the blood walk. It was bound in stained leather, tattered and beaten. The strange symbols embossed in the cover hurt her eyes to look at and its pages were yellowed with age.
“I supposed I should return this. I’ve had it eight months.”
“I was starting to think I’ d have to send out a search party.”
“That’d be unpleasant for all concerned, I’ d bet.”
The old man smiled. “The late fees are rather exorbitant in a library like this.”
The chronicler had left the book in Mia’s room, right before she was posted to Galante. In the intervening months, she’ d pored over the pages more times than she could count. The pity of it was, she still didn’t understand the half of it, and truth told, in recent turns, she’ d become more than a little disillusioned about it. But her encounter in the Galante necropolis had renewed her interest tenfold.
The book was written by a woman named Cleo—a darkin like Mia, who spoke to the shadows just as she did. Cleo lived in a time before the Republic, and the book was a diary of sorts, detailing her journey through Itreya and beyond. It spoke of meetings between her and other darkin—meetings that ended with Cleo apparently eating her fellows. The strange thing was, from Cleo’s writing, she’ d encountered dozens of other darkin in her travels. And from the look of the woman’s scribbled self-portraits, she was accompanied by dozens of passengers, wearing a multitude of different shapes—foxes, birds, serpents, and the like. An entire shadow menagerie at her command.
In all her life, the only darkin Mia had met was Lord Cassius. And the only two daemons were Mister Kindly and Eclipse.
So where the ’byss were the rest of them?
Amid nonsense scrawl and pictograms that spoke of her ever-growing madness, the latter half of the book concerned Cleo’s search for something she called “the Crown of the Moon”—just as that shadowthing in the Galante necropolis had told Mia to do. And flipping through the illustrations after her encounter, Mia had seen several that bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had saved her life.
Sadly, Cleo made no mention of who or what this “Moon” might be.
The book was written in an arcane language Mia had never seen, but Mister Kindly and Eclipse were both able to read it. Strangest of all, it contained a map of the world in the time before the Republic, but the bay of Godsgrave was missing entirely. Instead, a landmass filled the sea where the Itreyan capital now stood. This peninsula was marked with an X, and an unsettling declaration:
Here he fell.
“Did you read this before you gave it to me?” Mia asked.
The old man shook his head. “Couldn’t make out a bloody word. Only thing that made me think of you was the pictures. Make any sense to you?”
“… Not half as much as I’ d like.”
Aelius shrugged. “You asked me to look for books on darkin, and so I did. Didn’t promise you’d be any more enlightened when you were done.”
“No need to rub it in, good Chronicler.”
Aelius smirked. “I’m always on the lookout for more. If I find anything else of interest down here, I’ ll send it to your chambers. But I’ d not hold my breath.”
Mia nodded, dragging on her smoke. Niah’s athenaeum was actually a library of the dead. It contained a copy of every book that had ever been destroyed in the history of the written language. Moreover, it also held other tomes that had never been written in the first place. Memoirs of murdered tyrants. Theorems of crucified heretics. Masterpieces of geniuses who ended before their time.
Chronicler Aelius had told her new books were appearing constantly, that the shelves were always shifting. And though Niah’s athenaeum was a wondrous place as a result, the downside was plain: finding a particular book in here was like trying to find a particular louse in a dockside sweetboy’s crotch.
“Chronicler, have you heard of the Moon? Or any crowns said Moon might be partial to?”
Aelius’s stare turned wary.
“Why?”
