Jay had never been much of one for being on the ocean. It had mostly been a money thing in his last life; boats, beaches, and oceans had been things for people in a higher tax bracket than he had ever been close to. He’d been half expecting to get seasick from not being used to the motion of the boat, but once they’d built up some speed, it didn’t feel like they were moving at all.

  The old man – who had turned out to be the captain after all, vindicating Jay’s guess – had said they’d make it to the island in just over a day. Jay hadn’t really believed him until now.

  Though he’d been right about the old man’s role, he didn’t seem to have been right about any of the others. The ill-looking man had spent the majority of the time scrambling around the rigging, spending what looked like an uncomfortable amount of time completely upside down. Where he found the strength to do that while looking like the next best thing to a skeleton, Jay didn’t know, but it made it even more impressive.

  The older woman was apparently the captain’s wife and the face of their trading endeavors. Good for him, as far as Jay was concerned. They had the only actual cabin on the clipper, with the rope-climber apparently relegated to a hammock in his preferred environment.

  The woman closer to his own age was also a passenger, heading the same place he was. She spent all of her time staring off the front of the boat, wrapped in that knick-knack-laden cloak of hers. Jay hadn’t seen her move an inch since she’d sat there; it was kind of astonishing how still she’d been.

  “I’m going to ask her what’s kept her so focused. It’s killing me. I have to know.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Jay?” Agensyx asked, his voice a vibrating rumble from where Jay was leaning on him.

  “I could ask her for you, if you want.” The second voice was smooth and androgynous, more of a buzz than an actual human voice.

  “No, I don’t –” Jay froze between words. He didn’t know that second voice. Was there someone else on the ship?

  “I should probably introduce myself,” the voice said. It was coming from somewhere to the side of him, low to the deck.

  Jay slid his gaze down to where it sounded like it was coming from, expecting some horrific talking bug with how light Halea had been on anything truly disturbing so far. But he didn’t see anything. Not just nothing disturbing, literally nothing.

  Then it spoke again, and this time he saw the deck warp out of shape to form the mouth. “I am the Wanderer, one half of the spirit of this vessel. The sane half. And also the cook.”

  “Did you know the boat could talk?” Jay asked his familiar.

  “I did not.”

  “Byrim doesn’t like telling people,” the Wanderer said. “He doesn’t like me talking much at all, not to those of you who are impermanently here. But I am very bored. So I will offer again: I can ask her, if you want me to.”

  “No,” Jay said. “No need for that. She’s apparently going to the same place I am. I can always just ask her there.”

  He felt Agensyx’s attention focus more closely on her; a mental narrowing of his eyes. “Spirit of the ship, how long has she been traveling with your crew?”

  “Oh. Oh! My crew. That’s a nice thought,” the Wanderer buzzed. “She hasn’t been here long. A few weeks. And she’s just going in a circle, it seems, since we’re dropping her right back off where we picked her up from.” The boards tutted. “You corporeants are so odd sometimes.”

  “Corporeants?” Jay asked.

  “Corporeants. Those of you born in a physical body. Elementals, mortals, corruptions. It’s all one helpful label.”

  “It sounds like that’s the majority of people and things, then,” Jay said.

  “You wish,” the ship chirped. “I know you can’t see into any other planes – can you? You don’t look like you can – but there are a lot more of us than there are of you.”

  “That’s a terrifying image. Thanks for that, Wanderer.”

  “You’re very welcome!” The ship’s soul sniffed. “I think dinner is burning. I need to go attend to that.”

  The deck’s planks retreated back into their normal shape.

  “Are there really that many incorporeal beings hanging around?”

  “Yes. And I would know,” Agensyx replied. “I was one of them for a long, long time.”

  Jay shuddered and did his best not to think about that for the remainder of the boat ride.

  *

  The entire population of the Madcap Wanderer was ushered off the clipper when they arrived at the Island. Captain’s orders; apparently they did that at every stop, no matter how recent the last one was.

  Jay didn’t have much of a reason to care. He was where he needed to be, there were next to no obstacles present, and all he needed to do was spend a lot of time in a library. It was perfect.

  He’d also never seen a library quite like this one before. It looked more like a recreation of something out of ancient Greece or Rome than anything else, all white marble and channeled columns. The docks and singular road were made of the same material, looking freshly placed everywhere, as if no one ever walked on it.

  “How much do you think they pay their street sweepers?” Jay asked, not really expecting a response. He got one anyway.

  “It’s enchanted,” Agensyx said. “All of it. If they’ve followed common practice, it should be inscribed on the underside of the slabs. Supposedly that makes it last longer.”

  “Huh. Magic is cool.”

  The other magic-library seeking passenger walked past him just as he said that and he was fairly confident she sneered at him for it. Probably anyone else would have too. After all, everyone in this world had grown up with magic. It wasn’t special to them. He was going to milk that feeling for as long as he could.

  Just like he was milking the walk-up to the library itself. Maybe it didn’t count as milking it if he was legitimately admiring the whole thing, but it felt the same. It couldn’t last forever, though, and it wasn’t very long before he came to the entrance. The space between each of the five columns that made up the front of the building were filled in with archways. The bases of the three middle columns had been hollowed out, with the tops floating through what was probably another enchantment.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Each of them were labeled with what seemed like black stones embedded in the gleaming marble to form words: Exit Only above the two entryways on the outside edges, First Time Entries above the middle-left, and Returning Entries above the middle-right. Their columns had people sitting in them.

  Jay walked up to the man sitting under the First Time Entries sign. The man’s head rose as he came close, face pointed directly at Jay, but to say that they were looking at each other would have implied that the working man had eyes. He looked like he might have had eyes at one point, but now his eye sockets, cheeks, and forehead were all a giant mass of scarred-over flesh.

  Once Jay was close enough for whatever arbitrary standard he’d been using, the man spoke, his voice the kind of rough that fit someone with those injuries. “Your snake can’t come in.”

  “What?” Jay glanced back at Agensyx, who just nodded like he’d been expecting it. “He’s not a snake. He’s –”

  The man cut him off. “Don’t lie to me, son. It is a snake. Do you know how serpents treat knowledge? They hoard it. They go as far as to destroy it if it looks like someone else may get a look at it. They are banned.”

  Jay just stood there. That was such a specific rule. And he’d said it with such conviction. How many times had something like that happened for this place to have a specific rule in place to prevent it?

  Apparently the man behind the desk seemed to take his silence as him gearing up to object more. “Don’t bother arguing, boy. It’s the one rule that has never been bent. No snakes. Nothing serpentine. I’ll deny your entry here and now if you try to press the issue, hear me?”

  “I wasn’t objecting. Just shocked.” Jay put his hands up in surrender, then realized the gesture was useless. “No snakes means no snakes.” Behind him, Agensyx moved just out of the way of the entrance and laid out on the grass.

  “Good. Now, fill out this form.” The man dropped a stack of papers that must have been fifty pages on the rim of the column, a small stick of leather-wrapped black material on top.

  Jay scanned through the first couple pages quickly. It looked like mostly checkboxes. Type of magic. Necromancy wasn’t an option – and wouldn’t have been a good idea to put in anyway – so Jay checked “Taming.” Magical focus type. What did that even mean? Jay ticked “None.” Purpose of visit. He filled in the very general “magical research” box.

  On and on it went, with a lot of boxes that Jay ended up checking “none” or “not known” for. Why would they ever need to know someone’s “last magical ancestor,” “planar ancestry,” or “known histological malformations?” He didn’t even know what that last one meant.

  After about fifteen minutes, he finished and straightened the pages of formwork back into one stack. “Done.”

  “We’ll see,” the man said. He rifled through the papers, pausing conspicuously at several points. “You’re the first in your family with magic?”

  Jay nodded.

  “Just come into your magical potential?”

  Jay nodded again.

  “Then you had best hope some of these oddities smooth themselves out.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you might explode. Or maybe found an entire new branch of magic. Even odds for you humans,” the man said. That was worrying, but before Jay could put much thought into it – or into the fact that the man had said “you humans” as if he wasn’t one – the other man spoke again. “Welcome in. Pick your symbol up by the end of the day at the Kinstock Thavain stall inside. Give it an hour for them to forge it but make sure you get it so you can avoid filling out the form again.”

  The man waved Jay forward through the columns. There hadn’t been doors on the wall before he’d stepped through, but as he did so, they began tracing their outlines on the wall. The outlines deepened into true doors, doors many times larger than Jay could possibly have ever ever needed, which then opened.

  Jay stepped through them and entered his own personal slice of heaven.

  *

  His eyes hurt. He’d been reading books for hours with only a quick break to pick up his pin – a small metal thing in the shape of an animal skull that was explained to be the symbol for Tamer-style magic – and despite how much he had learned, he needed to do something else. There was a reason he had taken years to get his degrees and not spent a single afternoon in a library to do it.

  Even if this library put Thompson to shame.

  He’d already explored the seventeen levels he was told he had access to, trying to adjust to the strange organization system they used while plucking any book that looked halfway interesting from its shelf. He’d skimmed through books on the various categories of magic, two instruction manuals for creating magical foci, three atlases, six bestiaries, and four histories. Jay could remember every word of them, every feeling of the pages under his fingers, from the lingering effects of the Mushkhushshu’s breaking of the mind control.

  Unfortunately, he still didn’t feel like he had answers. It didn’t even feel like he was close to answers. From the way Agensyx had talked about this place, he’d been expecting a fully functional search engine powered by some magical super-brain. Something he could ask questions directly to and have it direct him to a specific book that would have everything he could have possibly wanted to know.

  The more he stared at the desk laden with piles of books he’d built up, the deeper the idea that he might not actually be capable of solving the Class Curse issue at all. It was as depressing a thought as he’d ever had. Jay’s health ticked down right as he stood up, four points this time, as if to reinforce that hopelessness.

  It worked for a second, too. He seriously considered, for just a few seconds, just spending the rest of his dwindling lifespan in this library. Or jumping into the ocean. Either one would be better than the slow dwindling that the Curse promised. How long would it be before he woke up and found it hadn’t refilled fully? How long before it stopped filling entirely?

  He tried to reason it out as he walked, going deeper into the halls of shelves than he had before for the sake of fresh scenery. So far, every couple of days had seen the amount of drain increase. It was ticking down every couple of hours as long as he didn’t actually use any of his necromantic spells. He should have…

  Was that a voice?

  It jarred him out of his thoughts before he could actually come up with an answer. If it had been in louder surroundings, the muffled noise would have been lost, but the rest of the library had been silent except for the occasional other patron flipping pages. Jay looked around at where he was more than just ambiently observing the subject labels whenever they changed and found that between every shelf he could see, there was a door.

  They were study areas of some sort, he was very sure about that just from the layout of the library, but who would be talking in one of them? They didn’t look large enough for multiple people without being cramped unless the rooms were unnaturally long and thin. And the more he listened, the more he thought that there was only one person actually in the room, never mind the fact that they were talking, pausing, and responding like it was a conversation.

  Jay paced back and forth, trying to narrow down the door the voice was coming from. It didn’t take him long to find the right one. There really was only one person talking that he could hear, but for every pause they – she, by the pitch – took, there was a slight buzzing noise at the edge of his hearing. Did they have radios? That would be an interesting bit of technology for them to have this close to a place that looked like the site of a 24/7 Renaissance faire.

  He hadn’t intended to listen in when he’d first heard the voice. Really, he hadn’t, he was just wandering. But by the time Jay had found the right door, he’d already overheard enough that eavesdropping on the rest felt like the thing to do.

  “– and no one has had anywhere near the skills necessary to do what we need. I am this close to coming back and doing it myself.”

  The buzzing noise came and went.

  “Yes, I know that would end badly. It cannot possibly be worse than needlessly delaying my return.”

  Buzz.

  “Three days. I’ll return the same way I left, of course, but only if there is no one at this last stop.”

  Buzz.

  “I know. I’ll see you then. Be ready, because even if I don’t find someone, it has to happen soon.”

  Buzz.

  “Of course.”

  The last words were accompanied by a rustling and slight clanking noise. Jay moved away from the door, backing towards the matching door across the hall. He slipped inside, leaving his door barely open enough to see out of, just as the door he’d been listening at opened.

  The dark-haired woman from the boat stepped out, fixing one of her cloak decorations back into place as she stalked off. Was that what had been buzzing? Some magical radio or phone equivalent?

  And she had some kind of task. Something elsewhere on Halea, something important to her and at least one other person. Something she needed help with.

  There was only so much good the books could do for him. Maybe he should try to see if wherever she was going, he could tag along. Who knew? He might even be able to help.

  please feel free to let me know.