The old man led the way out of the small, book-filled room and into a room that featured a desk with a computer; it felt almost anachronistic after the previous room. The wall to the left was filled with books, but they were all modern. The wall to the right held a single recliner; the old man waved them towards it before turning the chair in front of the computer to face it and sitting down. “I’m not set up to have company. I don’t talk business here if I can avoid it, this is my place. There is no alternative now, not for this.”

The man settled into his chair and watched with a slight smile as they awkwardly tried to figure out how to sit. Serenity settled the matter by taking the seat, then tugging Rissa to tell her to sit on his lap. Once they were settled, Rissa looked up at the old man. “What is this place? I assumed it would be the University Library, but this doesn’t look like it is.”

The old man chuckled. “Call me the Librarian; it’s accurate enough, and is certainly what I do these days. This is indeed part of the University of London’s library; you could call it the restricted section, if you like. Books, papers, scrolls; if it stinks of magic or the hidden past, I try to bring it here. This is not the only collection in the world, but I like to believe it’s one of the better ones. The best, of course, are long lost.”

The Librarian didn’t have the weight of a true Name; Serenity thought there was a decent chance the man might have one. The longer he spent in the old man’s company, the more he realized there was a hidden strength there. He’d seen it from the beginning, and he was now confident it wasn’t an illusion. How strong the Librarian was was hard to tell; it seemed likely that much of his strength would lie in cleverness rather than pure power, but that could be even worse if he were hostile.

Serenity glanced at Rissa. This sounded all too much like what she did with the artifacts, but she and the old man didn’t recognize each other. “What happens to artifacts? Things that aren’t written, but may still be magical. Do you collect those?”

The Librarian smiled gently as he shook his head. “Those are kept by others. Most are in individual hands, though the Quiet Ones hold more than a few. There is a new buyer recently, as well. I have been approached to sell some of my books, but they are not for sale.”

Rissa jumped at the term “Quiet Ones”, but didn’t say anything.

The Librarian frowned. “He was quite persistent, and surprisingly persuasive. Were I one to sell, I might have, but I will not sell my last copy of anything and that is what he wanted.”

That sounded a lot like the story Serenity remembered getting from Frank; a new buyer paying top dollar was part of the reason he’d stolen everything of Rissa’s and not simply the one item Liam wanted. “Do you know who this was, or when he appeared?”

“Two months ago.” The Librarian stated the timeframe with certainty. “As for who he is, he’s a new player. Not associated with any of the existing groups, though it looks like he’s coopted several of them. He acts like an Ascendant, but a dying world has no place for that. It requires power to Ascend, and it’s simply not there. Not even if he were to take all the power left in this poor World would he manage to Ascend.”

There was something about that description that bothered Serenity. He hoped he was wrong, because, “taking all the power left in the World” sounded like it could have extreme consequences. Possibly even destruction of the world-type consequences. It was something he needed to consider, but first there was something else he wanted to ask about. “Dying world? You’ve said that twice now. What do you mean?”

The old librarian shrugged. “You are young; you were not around in the days before the Fall. You have not even seen the loss of splendor that has come with time. Yes, most of it was lost in the Cataclysm and what came after it, but more is lost all the time. The splendid and magical giving way to the mundane.”

“Splendor and squalor often go hand in hand. Magic doesn’t change that.” Serenity shook his head. He could remember all too many times where he’d seen high-Tier people with low-Tier servants in impressive settings with far from positive lives. “Magic is a power like any other, and because it’s held by an individual, it’s up to the individual to choose what impact it has. It can amplify differences as well as bring wonder.”

“Hmpf. Magic is not the same as any other power. It is the basis of reality, they key to manipulating everything. And it is lost. We can only go downwards as magic fades away, the world tainted with death and despair.” The librarian’s tone of voice was matter of fact, accepting what he said.

Serenity did not take those words as gently as they were said. This wasn’t simply philosophical now; the librarian was saying that his world, his friend, was lost. “Gaia is not dying! She is recovering. It will be a long road for her, but she is already taking steps to heal and grow once more. Didn’t you notice? She’s stepped back up to Tier One. She’s healing quickly.”

The librarian stared at him for a long moment. “You’re definitely no Quiet One. So. I ask again: Who do you work for? And don’t say yourself or simply repeat a title. D’Nehr’s name won you a conversation, but that’s all I will give for it. Why are you here?”

:Calm down, dear. He’s not trying to attack you. He mostly feels curious.: Rissa’s voice was welcome, and her advice was even more welcome than her voice.

Serenity took a deep breath, then let it out. He needed to not let his emotions get the better of him. He knew he’d overreacted, though he wasn’t certain why. “Why am I here? I told you that, I want to find out where the dungeon got its information on magic. What I want to do with it, well, that’s a bigger question. I’ve been trying to teach magic. It’s difficult to really teach magic when it’s so much easier to just use Skills, so that’s what people are teaching. Shortcuts…”

Serenity stopped talking as he suddenly realized what the problem he’d had with most of the magic teachers in the Tutorial was. They didn’t teach magic. They only taught magic as Path Skills with maybe the potential for a few entirely rote spells. No wonder they only looked at the basics of Affinity and didn’t try to push beyond it!

The people he’d taught runes to had complained at learning all the base forms; they’d wanted to learn complete runeworks without learning the pieces that went into them. If all they’d ever learned was “completed spells,” that made sense. They didn’t know there were smaller pieces that made up each spell and that spells were highly flexible. They treated them like the most simplistic Path Skills.

Even Path Skills could be molded and altered. That was well known at higher Tiers, but perhaps it simply wasn’t known at Tier Three? At least, not by the people chosen as magic instructors. He should have realized it earlier.

Serenity wondered if others in the Tutorial knew. Blaze did; that was clear from their conversations. Perhaps Blaze didn’t realize that his knowledge was unusual?

“He’s trained a lot of people in the basic use of magic,” Rissa told the librarian. “He’s an instructor in the Tutorial. Have you seen An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe?”

“That strange pamphlet that started popping up a few weeks ago? I’ve read it. Some of it’s very accurate, if lacking in detail, while some of it is ridiculously fantastic. A Voice that grants powers and prowess?” The Librarian shook his head. “That’s not how it works. It takes a lot of work to grow in power. Always has. Who would pay for such a thing?”

“Everyone.” Serenity looked up, he hadn’t even realized he’d looked down until that moment. “It benefits everyone and everyone pays. Some pay more than others, and there is more than one form of payment. Everyone pays energy to keep things running. That is one of the functions of dungeons, I think. I’m not sure, but it would explain why there are so many. Others pay because they gain a helping hand and never learn for themselves and become stuck at the level the help stops. I do not know if they would have grown so high without the help or not, but certainly they grow no higher.”

Serenity - no. Vengeance had seen it, time and again. Somehow, he’d never become stuck, not permanently. There was always something interesting, something he could work on in his free time. Even as the Final Reaper, even in the days after the death of everything, he’d tried to find things to do, things to improve.

Not everyone wanted to do that. Most people seemed to reach a point where either they were content or they did not want to put in the effort to become better.

It was both better and worse to be undead; somehow, he’d managed to become a type of undead that lived a very long time (if “lived” was even the right word). It wasn’t forever, not then, but it was long enough that he could take his time on his way up, when others couldn’t. He was also pushed by the people who wanted to kill him. If he hadn’t continued to improve and innovate, they would have caught him and likely killed him.

“That is why good early training is so important, and if you have books or papers on that, then they would be of great help to -”

The Librarian interrupted Serenity. “No one can use magic. Not on this dying world, not outside a ley line, other than innate abilities, and the people who can use ley lines or have innate abilities is a very small percent of the population. When the world was richer, perhaps it was possible, but today? It is simply a way for people to kill themselves or others trying things they cannot do.”

Serenity stared at the Librarian. “You don’t pay much attention to the outside world, do you?”

The Librarian waved a hand. “It doesn’t change, it simply grows worse. Why should I pay attention? My books are enough, now.”

“You have a computer. Look up … you know, just look up the news. I think there’s enough there to get your attention without you thinking I’m trying to fool you.” If that didn’t convince him, Serenity didn’t know what else to try. He wanted to convince the Librarian to release some information to the public, but at the end of the day it wasn’t vital.

What was vital was that he might have finally found the clue he was looking for. There was someone gathering magical items, and the Librarian had drawn a bleak picture of one reason he might be doing it: to gather power to Ascend.

It was a term Serenity hated. Ascend. Become a god. It was meaningless in the greater scheme of things, yet it was something that some people would bank everything on. If you were power-hungry, stealing the power of a World to achieve your goals might not seem beyond the pale, especially if you weren’t from Earth. The previous Necropolis City Lord, who Serenity refused to dignify with her name, had damaged the World Core of her own planet simply to gain a single Tier. What more might someone do for godhead?

Stealing all that power would be hard on a planet. If the planet were already weak from two prior incidents, it might well be enough to destroy the planet.

Anyone willing to damage a world to achieve their goals wouldn’t care.

Now if only he had a way to follow that clue farther. Perhaps the Librarian might know something?