The Adept - Day 1
He lived dark dreams. Dreams of water. Water. For him, it started with water. Like being born, sudden awareness, and all of that awareness was water. The darkness, water everywhere, light spearing down from above, beams coloring the water all around him. The erupting noise of bubbles, white and bright in the light from above, clouding him, blinding him. Everything was disorientation.
There was no self. No confusion of the world or how he came to be drowning. He was simply drowning and that was all his mind could comprehend.
He heard himself scream, that water-morphed sound, bubble exploding from him, arms reaching and scraping. He was in a tunnel of water, he could see it, feel the walls, neatly ordered bricks, and he was descending. He clawed at the water, at the walls, tried to drive himself up but he was weak and heavy and bound for death.
Then an impact, the light above disrupted by shadow, the smooth easy beams of light that speared the darkness shaken by the descent of something dark. The something dark torpedoed towards him. He had no space in his mind for thought, but his clawing hands found it and it held firm.
A bucket. A bucket on a rope.
Then upward pressure. The bucket was being drawn up. Ponderously slowly.
He held it with both hands. His lungs were burning. He had to fight the impulse to inhale. Every part of him wanted to breathe in. It was like the point of no return during sex; he felt like his body could not be stopped. He was rising in, the brightness getting closer, and yet it was impossible that he could repress this desperate need to inhale. To fill his lungs.
His vision darkened and his grip loosened.
He breathed in.
That inhale was the first clue that he’d breached the surface. Air flooded his lungs and he clung to the bucket, gasping and gasping, greedy for every molecule of oxygen the world had to spare.
It was a well. It must have been a well. The narrow tubular stone walls rose above him another twenty feet. The bucket on the rope.
A silhouette, square and angular, interrupted the circle of light above him. A voice, raspy and gravelly and mean: “Get a better grip than that, dipshit. I’m not pulling you up twice.”
It took a moment for the instruction to register, but then he was hoisting himself. It was awkward; there really wasn’t that much to grip. There was a rope and bucket and he felt so cold and so weak. In the end he arranged himself by sitting on the bucket and grasping the rope with his hands.
“We ready in three, Princess?”
“Uh… y-yes. Thank you. Yes.”
“Yipdy fucking doo.”
The silhouette disappeared and then there was the sound of metal on metal, winding, and the bucket was rising slowly once again.
The man whispered, “Who are you? Where are you?”
But he spoke too softly for the person above to possibly hear him.
“N-no. Not him. You. Where are you? How can I hear you?”
He turned his head nervously, still sparing the overwhelming majority of his attention for the task at hand, that being not letting go of the rope and returning to his previous state of imminent death.
“Please. Am I… Fuck, I’m going crazy… oh Jesus.”
Then he breached the light, out in the air. There was wind, so much air that it moved in currents of its own. His eyes squinted, blinded by the light.
Then the voice, behind him: “We getting off that fucking thing any time soon or you just want me to stay here holding this shit all day?”
“S-sorry.”
It was no easy feat to disengage his grip from the rope, find a foothold on the edge of the well, and escape his position. Especially when he felt so weak, his head was still spinning and his robes were soaking wet.
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“Robes? What the….”
“Thank fuck for that, twinkle toes. Thought for a second you were thinking about going back down. Not that it matters a fuck to me.”
He turned to the voice, already expressing his gratitude, “Thank you so much. I really thought I was a goner; I couldn’t-”
He stopped speaking abruptly when he laid eyes on his saviour.
Before him, one spindly arm still on the handle of the winch, stood a book. A damn big book, with thick leather binding. And spindly arms and spindly legs. And a face. Yellow teeth and yellow eyes. A mouth that was just too big. Pointed teeth. Savage, mean-looking eyes.
“What the fuck, buddy? Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
Then he passed out.
He sat in a chair, thinking, hungry, looking out the window at nothing but sky. Around him the towers of books, the packed shelves, the stone walls.
Two days. He’d spent two days already. It was beyond belief. Maybe what was more beyond belief was how believing he was becoming of the reality around him.
When he’d come to, and after an overly long period of hysteria, the book had explained his predicament.
The book, who roughly introduced himself as “Grimfolio, but that’s too fucking long, so if you’re gonna call me anything, call me Grim.”
The explanation of the challenges he faced had been too much. Later, he’d asked more, to clarify what his traumatized brain had failed to pick up. “So, we’re on my master’s floating rock. Yeah, that’s right, pal. Floating rock. We’re, I dunno, fuck it, let’s call it a thousand meters up in the fuckin sky. If you don’t do meters then fuck you, I’m not converting that to caveman units. So, we’re way the fuck up here. Nice little rock, room for this little courtyard here, and the library. You can see it yourself, it’s big enough for something that’s floating in the fucking sky.”
“Anyway, I don’t give a shit. Don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a fucking book. I don’t die. You though, you’re weird-looking shit… what are you anyway? An elf? Nah, not with those ears. Ah shit, I forgot that I don’t actually care. You’re problem is that you do die. You got water, which is great and all, but there is nothing to eat up here. I mean fucking nothing. So you got a problem. You gotta get off this rock before you starve to death. Heh heh, that’s gonna be funny to watch no matter what you do. I don’t know what’s gonna be funnier, watching you shrivel up and die or just go splat.”
The man said, “If you don’t care… then… why’d you save me?”
Grim shrugged, ambling about on his skinny legs. “Eh. I’m bored, I guess. Master’s been dead too fuckin long and I’m going crazy? Think that’s mostly it. Plus, I think you’re my new master, which fucking sucks obviously ’cause you’re weak as shit, but I got these stupid fucking rules I gotta follow.”
The man said, “Rules? Master? What?”
“Yeah, rules. You got your sigil there, the one with the fucking book. That makes you a fucking adept, and an adept gets a walking talking fucking book whose only purpose in life is to serve his studies. Not sweet, buddy, I can fucking tell you. I would, without hesitation, set myself on fire if not for the fucking rules.”
The man said, “Rules?”
Grim said, “Yeah… master’s rules. On my first page. Govern everything I fucking do. Rule 1a, don’t fucking kill myself. Don’t need to tell you what I did to get that sucker slapped in there. Lazy prick wouldn’t start the list again, he fucking 1A-1B’ed me. Prick. So what’s your fucking name, boss?”
The man stuttered, “Reader… no, that’s not my name, it’s… Reader. What? I… I…”
Grim chuckled, producing a lit cigarette from somewhere and dragging heavily. Blowing smoke he said, “Heh. Maybe you won’t be so fucking boring after all. You’re pretty fucked up, pal.”
He’d learned the basics quickly. He was a stone band, which wasn’t actually as useless as Grim first implied, but was apparently a far cry from his previous master. He was of the Adept path. This, Grim had explained, was a little complicated. It wasn’t as clear-cut as most paths. He could excel at most scholarly-based disciplines. This could be spellcrafting, it could be engineering…
“…Hell, you can be the best fucking linguist in the world if you want, but if you go that way you’ll be the best dead fucking linguist in the world, heh, heh…”
Grim explained that going forward, his choices of sigils would have a bearing. He could stay a jack of all as he was now, but the only way to greatness would be eventual choices and specialization. His other two sigils were a needle before an eye and a spanner. They were both ash, his book sigil being cinder. Grim explained, growing bored and clearly disinterested, that the first was a spell-weaving sigil, the other an engineering sigil. The book sigil was their connection, allowing him to absorb knowledge and store it in Grim.
He tested this one first, unsure and disbelieving. He picked a book, fairly randomly, and flicked through the pages as Grim instructed. As he did so, Grim’s eyes glowed with a faint light. The connection between them was instant, but not easy. He could feel a mental tug, like a painless migraine, scoring his skull as Grim’s eyes glowed and he started having thoughts. Names and dates started flooding into his mind. They felt like his own thoughts, as though they originated in him, but he couldn’t order them. It was too much.
“Ah, you’ll get the hang of it. It’ll help if you level up the Adept sigil. Hey, here’s a fucking idea. How about instead of pissing me off with all your stupid fucking questions, you just eat some books and then, you know, fucking know all this shit.”
“Is there a limit?”
“Is there a limit, he says. Of course there’s a fucking limit. Do I look fucking limitless to you, numbnuts? You’ve got a cinder Adept sigil so we can suck up ten books. If we fill up and want another it’s easy to just fuck one out to make room. Got it?”
Reader turned to take in the vastness of the library around him. The room rose up, narrowing towards the top. Almost every space of the cylindrical space was covered in bookshelves. Narrow railed balconies and ladders spiraled up and up.
Swallowing hard, he said, “Yeah. I got it. Where the hell do I start?”
