Marroo couldn’t leave his father’s apartment fast enough.

At first, it seemed like an impossible thing, like running away, when his father could always find him and drag him home again.

“Do as you wish.” His father told him. “You’re an adept now. No one can stop you except for me, and I was alone at your age. I have no wish to do so.”

He began to wander through the city, stopping at public message boards to peruse the fliers and notes tacked up in squares and bustling market places. There was no way for him to afford the places he found listed there, even the smallest and cheapest of the rooms, not on what little he’d saved of the Drachma his father gave him on his birthday.

During his meandering he found a cramped and dusty used-bookstore not far from their apartment and he spent the better part of a day just walking up and down the shelves, touching the spines of the books and pouring over pages limp from use.

“Been wondering when you were going to pick out a book.” The old man behind the counter said as Marroo stacked paperbacks onto the counter. The bones in his legs creaked as loudly as the chair he’d sat rocking in as he stood to survey Marroo’s selection of books. He tapped one. “This is a good book.”

“I know.” Marroo replied as he dug in his pockets for his money. “I’ve read it before.”

“Then you should be getting new books.” The old man told him. “There’s no adventure in reading a book you know you’ll enjoy.” He thumbed through the stack while Marroo pulled out his coins and weighed them in his palm.

“Is this enough?” Marroo asked as he handed the coins over.

The old man flipped the coins in his palm as he counted then eyed the stack of books. “It’d be enough if you left two or three behind.”

Marroo looked at the dozen battered books he’d stacked on the counter. He pulled two out of one stack and set them aside as the old man put the change away, then shuffled one back into the stack and set a different one aside, then two more so he could put the first two back into the stack.

The old man’s hand dropped on the book he’d told Marroo was a good one and slowly slid it away from the rest of Marroo’s selection, then one of the others Marroo had reluctantly set aside.

“Why not leave these with me.”, the old man said. He smiled when Marroo looked up at him. “And, if you don’t have cash, you can come back when you want to get them and I’ll see if I can’t find something for you to do to earn them.” He waved a hand at the narrow gauntlet of shelves that made up his store. “There’s always something that needs doing around here, and there's just me and my grandson to run the store. We could use an extra hand, if you find time.”

Marroo did find time, not immediately, but once he’d finished his first stack of books and reread the better ones among them. At first the old man set him to the simple menial task of dusting the shelves. When Marroo finished the books he earned that way and came back, he was put to reshelving the huge stack of books behind the counter pulled down by customers but never purchased, then to sweeping out the back room where boxes on boxes of even more books were tucked into shadowy corners.

Jansen who was the owner and grandfather of the fat boy Marroo’s age who sometimes took care of the store, pulled Marroo aside after he’d finished reshelving books and was debating between three different paperbacks he wanted to take up front as his pay for the chores done, and spoke to him in a low intimate voice.

“We’ve discussed it.” He told Marroo with an air of gravity. “And we’ve decided that if you’re looking for a job, we’d like to offer one here to you.” He held up a hand as Marroo looked up at him. “Now take a day to think on it. It don’t pay well, but it’ll be like getting a raise compared to working for books, and as long as the store is clean and there’s no one waiting on you, I don’t mind you reading while you’re sitting behind the counter. It’s a good job, for a kid like you. Why don’t you go home and talk it over with your folks, then be here bright and early in the morning if you want it.”

Marroo didn’t talk it over with his father, but he was in front of the store the next morning as the core peeked around the edge of the midnight plains and Jansen appeared along the sidewalk carrying his keys. Neither said a word as the old man unlocked the door and let them into the narrow store front, but when the lights came on and he’d put a battered kettle on a hot plate near the window Jansen clapped his hands and rubbed them together as he faced the shelves.

“Alright.” He said, “Time to show you the course.”

Marroo made a terrible clerk.

There was nothing complicated about running the store. Marroo did most of the things he’d done before. He swept, he reshelved books in alphabetical order and by genre, and every morning and evening when he was on shift he dusted the shelves, but there were aspects, as an employee, that he constantly struggled with.

After his first week of work, Marroo was never on time. He had his familiar set alarms and then ignored them until he had to sprint down the street in order to make it to the store no more than thirty minutes late. He resented the way Jansen’s son mocked him for it and left his books and old tea cup lying around amidst the crumbs of his lunch instead of cleaning up behind himself when he was done.

It irked Marroo to be chided as though he were Jansen’s grandson any time Marroo skipped a meal, showed up late while Jansen was there, or didn’t put a book back exactly where it belonged. Sometimes his actual grandson was the one who put the books back wrong and that made the chiding doubly irksome because Marroo couldn’t bring himself to tell the old man that it wasn’t his fault.

When customers came in Marroo had trouble looking them in the eye even when they spoke directly to him, and when he was supposed to be reshelving books he often got lost in the pages of one he only meant to peruse for a second in order to figure out which genre it belonged under.

“Can’t you just look at the cover?” Jansen asked after Marroo had spent an hour at the back of the store with his nose buried in one such book.

Marroo flushed crimson and Jansen sighed as he handed him another stack of books. “See if you can get these put away in half the time. Hmm?”

He always regretted hating Jansen when he treated him like this. He didn’t deserve his patience, and he knew it, and the whiplash from resentment to shame only drove him deeper into the books he was supposed to reshelve instead of read.

Of all his tasks at the store, however, handling money was the worst. He had zero experience with money. None whatsoever. When people handed over the Drachma or Zoti he felt his head spin as he tried to do the simple arithmetic required to count out the change due back to them. There was nothing difficult about it, but it was new, and when he screwed it up and they complained he experienced the same roller coaster of emotions that Jansen inspired with his patience. On busy days, when Jansen or his grandson finally relieved him, he often retreated to the roof with a new book instead of going straight home, too exhausted to do anything but escape into the troubles of some other character in some other world.

He hated working at the bookstore, all of it, the customers, the whiplash, the gentle kindness of the old man and his obnoxious brat of a grandson, it was all worth enduring for the books.

Heaven hid within those bookshelves. When he stood deep within the shadows between the shelves and breathed in the scent of dust and paper and glue, when he ran his fingers over battered spines creased by a hundred previous owners, when he knelt and fell into the printed page as though falling into a well, he was in heaven.

It was the kind of afterlife he liked to imagine his mother in. One marked, not by an unending plain of pleasant fields, but by an endless maze of shelves stacked with other worlds as strange and wondrous as the stars that stared down at her from the endless beyond. One where she perused shelves that whispered stories to her in the dark.

Sometimes he did his breathing exercises there between the shelves, early in the morning while Jansen puttered around his tea kettle, or later, after a scolding finally got Marroo, with some resentfulness, to start arriving on time, alone in the store he’d been given the responsibility of opening.

He sat in a corner where a shelf of wilderness romances and ghost invader stories blocked out the ceiling light and ran his breath across the exposed spines of all those books, careful to suppress the icon that wanted to turn his spiritual touch into a blade. They felt storied to his spiritual senses, like warm sunlight and dust, but also more, as though every soul that ever held them and cried, or raged, or laughed at the contents of the pages left some piece of their experience trapped between the covers, waiting to resonate with any other soul that lifted the book to be touched in turn by the story locked within.

There was little sharp in these old books, little to remind him of the sword, and what there was gave the impression of a thing meant to go into the mind, not the flesh. Sharp wits in contrast to the sharp blades that defined his own aura.

He could finally afford his own apartment with the money he made from the bookstore.

As the old man promised, the pay wasn’t much. He got three drachma a week. Sometimes Jansen would throw in a couple of Zoti as a tip or a reward for extra work he’d managed to complete between getting lost in books he was supposed to shelve and helping the two dozen regulars who showed up every week to buy sell or trade their old books. Marroo spent most of his first week’s pay on more books and felt like a king, then got the library pass his mother used to have so that his familiar could pull up more books whenever he wanted.

The pass cost him a third of what he earned. Too much, especially when he finally found an apartment he could almost afford.

It was little more than a box. Shabby and old, it sat at near the top of a tenement build that felt, when Marroo listened to the creaking floors and shivering struts before going to sleep on his first night, as though it would fall down any moment.

He had a water closet and a bed, a small chest of drawers and, when he muscled it into the twenty by twenty box that was his apartment, a single shelf that was quickly filled with books. His only window was one that looked out onto the fire escape outside and his only means of cooking food was a hot plate he found underneath the sink, left over from some previous tenant.

“It’ll feel like living in a coffin.” The building manager told him as he opened the door and handed Marroo his key. “But I’ve known worse places around the slums. It keeps out the weather, and if ye keep it clean, it will at least be a clean coffin.”

It was enough. When Marroo needed space he used the window to climb out onto the fire-escape and either climb to the roof or simply sit and use the steel stair-way as a make-shift balcony. He found some ragged curtains in a barrel outside a junk dealer’s store and strung them up across the window to block the reflected light from the horizon when he wanted to sleep. When it rained, or on windy days, he could sit on his mattress and read by the light of his familiar while the window pane rattled in its frame.

He spent his evenings reading on the roof as the light faded, and his mornings on his breathing exercises, alone, without his father pushing him to deepen his connection with the icon that still fought, daily, to imprint itself on his spirit. He thought about giving them up all together, but on the one occasion he skipped the exercises for a few days his spirit became cramped and unwieldy, and he had more trouble keeping the icon from manifesting whenever he touched the world with his breath. So he kept performing them, every morning and in the free hours between books when he just wanted to digest the stories he’d just finished reading.

There were other more oppressive challenges to pretending he was an adult. Cooking, for example. He realized, after tossing his first experiments on the hot-plate out the window, that he knew as little about cooking as he once knew about making change. Laundry was the same, and while his self control in combat could probably be called exception he found it entirely impossible to limit his book collection to what he could fit on his shelf. Saving up for rent made his other challenge pale in comparison and drove him deeper into the books he used to hide from the world.

His father only visited him once in the apartment. The visit was a surprise, and Marroo almost didn’t open the door when the knock came until he felt his father’s spirit like a blade standing on the other side. When he did open it his father looked around the little box of a room, at the bed, at the laundry on the floor and the dirty second-hand pan Marroo picked up from the same junk dealer who supplied his curtains, while Marroo waited for him to say hello.

“I’ve lived in worse.” His father grated. He glanced over the books without comment then asked if Marroo would like to join him for lunch at the noodle stand down the street.

They ate in a tense silence at a table outside the shop. Pigeons burbled underfoot while a drake watched from the head of a nearby monument. Outwardly Marroo’s father appeared as calm and impassive as he always did, but Marroo’s sharpened spiritual senses didn’t just feel his father’s breath where it brushed against his own anymore. He could sense his father’s breath, like a fog of knives that probed outwards to touch the spirits of every being around them. He felt it follow the drake as it dove lazily onto a pigeon and ripped off its head. His father turned to watch as the scaly little creature disemboweled its catch and hissed at pedestrians that passed too near its meal.

Marroo took the last bite from his box of noodles and sat absolutely still as he waited for his Father to turn to him and tell him what this was all about, but his father just watched the drake while they sat in

“Was there anything you wanted?” Marroo finally asked.

His father turned silver eyes from the drake to his son. “Am I not allowed to see that my boy gets a decent meal once in a while?” He grated.

Marroo looked at the grease pooling in his noodle box. “I just thought,” he said, “you might have… wanted to talk about something.”

His father grunted and fished in his own box with his chopsticks. “Is there something we should talk about?”

Marroo looked up at his father and studied him, then looked away. “I guess not.” He replied.

The drake ripped the wings off the dead pigeon and began to fight with the tail feathers as his father turned back to it. “Do you enjoy your work at the book store?” He asked as he watched. “I can get you a better job if you want. Even couriers in the family can afford nicer places than the one you’re in.”

Marroo watched the drake spit a few feathers into the wind, then lift the carcass in its snake like head and choke it down whole. “No.” Marroo replied. “I like it there.”

“And you are happy?” His father asked.

Their eyes met and held one another until the drake gave a satisfied scream and kicked into the air, it’s belly swollen by it’s meal. It glided, low to the ground until a thermal rising from a drain in the street pushed it higher.

Marroo nodded.

“Then that’s all I want.” His father replied. He stood. “You left your sword by the way. I found it under your bed. Would you like it back?”

Marroo braced himself, then shook his head but when he looked up at his father the man only nodded.

“You know where to find me if you need me.” He grated. He rapped his knuckles on the table. “We’ll do this again.” He nodded to Marroo in farewell, then he left.

They never did.