As it turned out, the huge intimidating building was rather cosy.

  From the outside view I’d expected a very serious establishment, a place that would be called a ‘Great Library’ or an ‘Archive’ of some sort. Walking inside however demonstrated to me that my first impression may not have been accurate.

  It was clear from the towering bookshelves and grand chandeliers that whoever it was that first built and ran the library had intended it to be grandiose, a storehouse of knowledge to be consulted in times most desperate. It was equally clear from the fact that the chandeliers weren’t lit, instead replaced by several floating lights I could only assume to be magical, that somebody since then had taken the place in a new direction.

  Each raised bookshelf dominated a selection of small, comfortable seating arrangements, many of which surrounded tables which were covered in books. A few of these seating areas were occupied with hushed conversations between groups or single occupants with papers splayed in front of them. One of these lone occupants had sequestered a floating light to himself, which hovered directly above his page to light it more directly.

  Something about the occupancy, combined with seating clearly intended to be comfortable over long periods and the soft, gentle glow of the floating lights that was not dissimilar to a dying heart gave the formerly imposing structure a comfortable atmosphere. I approved.

  “Excuse me, can I help you?” A voice came from my behind the cluttered desk near the entrance. After a moment a stack of books was moved to reveal the head of a young woman who was waiting expectantly. Only then did I realise that she was talking to me.

  “Oh… maybe?” The librarian simply continued to wait, presumably for me to elaborate. When it became clear that I wouldn’t, she took up the slack admirably.

  “What with?” She asked.

  “Could you point me to some books?”

  “Sure,” she said, before pointing in a random direction and laughing. Sure enough, there were books there. “Sorry, library joke. What kind of books?”

  This was what I’d been wondering myself. I wasn’t entirely sure how to describe my search. “Do you have any books on… medicine? Maybe biology?”

  She stood, revealing herself to be surprisingly short. “I’m afraid that we’re a bit… limited on that front. Purview of the Healer’s Guild and all that.” As she explained she briefly scowled like she’d spilt something on her most expensive clothing, before continuing. “We have some biology books though. Not the most popular subject, so they’re in the back.”

  Without a moment’s pause she began shuffling away from her desk, so I simply followed behind her. She seemed to know her way around the library, since she didn’t even check the small plaques on each shelf that named their subject and where they were alphabetically. Soon enough she had guided me to a small door out of the way of everyone else, which had the words ‘STAFF ONLY’ written on it.

  “Technically I’m not meant to bring you in here, but the guy who technically runs this place isn’t in nearly often enough to notice if something’s moved around, so don’t worry.” She gave a conspiratorial wink before opening the door and creeping inside, pausing to grab and light a candle that had been left just outside the door.

  The ‘back’ as she had called it was… under-managed, to say the least. Rather than the organised shelves and well-maintained stacks in the public area of the library, the back saw books piled just about wherever they would fit. Each stack was covered in enough dust to partially obscure the covers, and the only light was the candle the librarian had brought in with her.

  “Right, what precisely are you after then?” The librarian’s voice startled me from my analysis of the storage room.

  “Uh, really just anything on biology. Preferably human, but anything will do in a pinch.”

  She paused, before bustling over to an indistinct stack of old books. She trailed a single finger down the spine of each as she read them, before gently lifting up almost half the stack and removing one. She then stood, brushed off her dress and handed me the book.

  The book’s cover was simple, just dyed green leather emblazoned with the words ‘The Biology of Monsters and Men’ in golden text. Below the title was an image of a heart. I turned the book over in my hands to examine the author’s name: ‘Aia Adams’.

  I was surprised to see an elven first name accompanied by a typically human last name. Honestly, I was surprised to see an elven name at all. From what Laon had said it was rare indeed to find an elf who left their lands at all, let alone to come to one of the human kingdoms. Supposedly some of the more promising elven mages would go to study under successful mages across the lands, but most stayed put.

  I put the thought to one side and opened the book, flipping through the pages as I judged the kind of content the book held. It appeared to be largely text accompanied with a good number of labelled diagrams, with the first half dedicated to the overall biology of humans and elves while the rest was dedicated to the various ways that magic affected biology, using various well-known monsters and magical animals like Chimera and arachne to demonstrate.

  All in all, it was almost perfect for my needs. It would take a bit to get into, since I was almost definitely below the standard understanding needed for this book, but I felt like I could get it in time.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Do you mind if I read it out there?” I asked. “Only, it’s rather dark in here…”

  “Oh, no problem. Just so long as you don’t mention where you got it then we’re fine.”

  Oh yeah, study time.

  -----------------------------

  I was wrong. I was not merely ‘below’ the basic understanding needed to properly understand this book. This book was so far beyond me it may as well have been written in another language. I would absolutely keep a not of the book’s name, since I had a feeling that it could be exceptionally useful once I understood what in the hells it was saying, but right now I was at my limit.

  That’s not to say that I got nothing from the experience though. I learned a whole bunch of new terms for body parts, organs and other things. After all, even if 99 percent of the knowledge in that book had gone directly above my head, it was so dense in new information that it was inevitable that I would learn something.

  I learned that the strange threading throughout my body was called a ‘nervous system’, and that it involved the threads themselves – called ‘nerves’ by Aia – as well as my spine and brain. Supposedly, it’s the thing that connects my brain to my body, which is why pinching, dulling or removing them makes a weird white noise feeling.

  I couldn’t find anything about the strange information packets that I’d been seeing, although I wasn’t sure if that was because I could examine my body closer than most or because they were specific to me. Either way, that was something that I’d need to look into myself.

  I also learned a whole lot about the composition of muscles and bones, which were more complicated as I had thought. As it turned out, muscles were actually directly attached to bones by ‘ligaments’ and ‘tendons’, and basically just squeezed in different ways to accomplish different movements.

  Of course, muscles were also pretty similar in form and function all around. Unless a creature was really big or really small, most muscles tended to follow the compress-relax style. Bones on the other hand seemed heavily dependent on the kind of creature they belonged to.

  An example of this was the griffin. Aia had made a note that although they had once been common, they were far less so now after being hunted to near extinction by people who wanted to pass of their feathers as false phoenix feathers due to structural similarities. Griffin bones were fairly interesting, because they had to be both strong enough to support their huge size and light enough to allow them to fly.

  Even with natural magic to ease their airborne burden, the bones of a griffin had to hold small pockets of air to make the creatures more buoyant. However, the outer layer of a griffin’s bones was thick and dense, and was aided internally by a geometric pattern of support. It was this that allowed the creature to support it’s own weight.

  As well as light yet sturdy bones, the griffin also boasted powerful muscles in its hind legs, which would allow it to leap off the ground to gain enough height to properly rise. Without this, a griffin would need to find a high point to take to the air. However, even all of this was not enough.

  They had to be combined with a series of small air sacs in the griffin’s breast, which would inflate before take off to allow the griffin to actually get off the ground, which was the hardest part of flight for a large animal like a griffin. It was actually these air sacks, concealed by fur and plumage, which lead to the griffin’s signature pose – rearing back on two legs, chest puffed proudly and wings spread for launch.

  I found this fascinating, because it was to me a demonstration of multiple separate parts of a creature’s biology all coming together for a single purpose: flight. It wasn’t as simple as strapping a pair of wings on the back of an animal and calling it a day.

  No, you had to make sure that the various muscles required to power those wings connected properly to the spine, and that the wings themselves were large enough to hold the weight of the creature they were attached to, and that the creature had all of the proper nervous connections to control their two new limbs, and a half dozen other things.

  All of this biology was done in service of the griffin: a creature which already had enough natural magic to help it some of the way as well. It was a miracle that anything learned to fly. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be sprouting wings any time soon.

  Still, it did give me much greater insight into why some of my body’s reactive changes weren’t working properly, like that eye from the morning. My body and my magic both knew what an eye was, because I had two. My body and my magic both knew that an eye needed to connect to a brain.

  However, my magic was trying to connect a new eye somewhere my body thought there shouldn’t be one, and those two clashing sets of instructions caused my magic to fizzle and fail to properly institute any changes.

  I had come across this theory when reading about a monster, a species of monster called a Mimic Slime that automatically took on an approximation of whatever it consumed. Apparently this was a dysfunction found in some of these slimes when they had too many clashing sources of traits.

  The solution was basically just magic. The slimes that suffered from this tended to have a trickier time surviving than those that didn’t, for obvious reasons. However, if they made it to the point where their magic had more of a say in the shape of their bodies than their biology (or at least the closest thing to a biology they had) then the problem solved itself, since those conflicting orders simply got overruled.

  This appeared to apply to me as well, since I was definitely more reactive than I had been when we’d left Vernal. I could safely rule out a high quantity of vitae as the cause, since several days had passed since the Gloom Stalker and I’d levelled out a while ago from semi-constant shapeshifting practice. I still had far more than when we’d left, but I wasn’t exactly full either. Despite that I was still having trouble controlling my reactive changes.

  I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d been messing with my shapeshifting more recently or just something that happened over time, but it was something that I rather wanted to solve. While it was far from debilitating, it was still mildly uncomfortable when my body vetoed a shift mid-way through. Not quite a physical discomfort, more like the echo of a headache.

  By the time I finally gave up trying to glean any more knowledge from the information goldmine I had in front of me it was almost sunset. I made a mental note to find another copy when I understood everything better and brought it to the desk of the librarian, who just shot me a sly wink and slid it into a compartment under her desk.

  I stepped outside to a strange sight. The strange, slightly magical poles that lined each street had begun glowing in the dim light of the setting sun, a soft blue glow that was just enough to see by in the areas the sun no longer reached.

  Of all of the ideas I’d come up with for the strange poles, lighting the streets after dark was both obvious and something I’d failed to consider, which had me feeling rather foolish. Shaking my head slightly, I began the walk back to the front gate. At least I was unlikely to get lost on my way there, since I actually knew where I was going this time.

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