Arthur, already three shelves deep into the library's eastern wing, glanced back at him without slowing his pace.
BRR: So what are we looking for exactly?
ART: I don't entirely know.
BRR: That's not a promising start to a research project.
ART: It's the honest start, though.
Briar fell into step beside him, notebook already in hand, the particular readiness of someone who found any excuse for methodical inquiry difficult to resist regardless of how vague the actual parameters were.
BRR: Give me something. Anything. A word. A category.
Arthur considered this as they moved deeper into the stacks, the library's central hall giving way to narrower, quieter aisles where the shelving rose taller than either of them, packed dense with volumes whose spines had faded past legibility in places.
ART: Souls. Where abilities come from. Whether there's any record of someone who didn't have one.
BRR: Didn't have one at all, or hasn't manifested yet?
ART: Didn't have one at all. Permanently. And still-
He stopped, uncertain how much to say even to Briar, who had never once pushed for the details behind Arthur's careful silences on the subject, content, it seemed, to simply be present for whatever Arthur was willing to offer.
ART: -still managed something. Anyway.
Briar studied him for a moment, and Arthur half expected a follow-up question, but instead Briar simply nodded, filing the request away with the particular efficiency of someone treating it as a puzzle rather than a confession.
BRR: Alright. Soulcraft's usually catalogued near the history section, given how tangled the two subjects tend to get. This way.
They worked for the better part of two hours, Briar pulling volumes with genuine, focused enthusiasm and Arthur reading through page after page of dense, often contradictory theory, most of it circling the same territory Instructor Pratt had already covered in lecture, souls as fragments, abilities as resonance, origin unknown, inheritance unreliable. Nothing new emerged for a long while.
BRR: Here's something.
Arthur looked up. Briar had a slim, water-damaged volume open on the table between them, its pages brittle and yellowed, the handwriting inside cramped and difficult to parse.
BRR: It's mostly folklore. Collected stories, the kind scholars gather to study rather than to believe. But there's a section here about anomalous cases. People whose souls didn't follow the expected pattern.
He turned the book toward Arthur, and Arthur leaned in, reading slowly through the faded script.
Of the soulless, most tales agree on little save the shape of the sorrow. A soul without expression, the old telling goes, is not empty, only silent, waiting for a language it was never given at birth. Where this silence breaks, it breaks strangely, and no two tellings agree on how. One account, older than most, speaks of a soul that took its voice not from itself, but from those around it, borrowing what it could not produce alone. The tale calls this borrowing a mercy rather than a theft, though it does not explain why, and ends, as such tales often do, without resolution, the soul in question passing from the record entirely, its fate unknown.
Arthur read the passage twice, something in his chest tightening at words he could not have said, even to himself, why they landed the way they did.
ART: Borrowing what it could not produce alone.
BRR: Interesting phrase.
ART: What does it mean, do you think?
BRR: Honestly? Probably nothing concrete. This is folklore, Arthur, not scholarship. Half these stories exist because someone needed an explanation for something they didn't understand and invented one that felt satisfying. The other half are just good stories that got repeated until people forgot they were inventions at all.
ART: But it's not nothing.
BRR: No. It's not nothing. It's just not much, either.
He said it kindly, without dismissal, the particular honest assessment of someone who respected Arthur too much to oversell a fragment as more than it was, and Arthur, sitting with the old, brittle page open between them, found himself grateful for the honesty even as some smaller, hungrier part of him wished for more.
BRR: Want me to copy it out? For your own notes?
ART: Please.
Briar began transcribing the passage with careful, methodical handwriting, and Arthur, restless, rose and wandered further down the aisle, scanning titles without any particular destination in mind, the particular aimless drift of someone whose mind had not yet settled from what he'd just read. He stopped at a shelf near the aisle's end, a section marked, in faded gilt lettering.
Provincial Histories: Eastern Territories.
A single volume near the shelf's edge caught his eye, its spine considerably newer than most of its neighbors, and Arthur, curious, pulled it free.
A Brief Accounting of Valdrun's Fall, the title read, and beneath it, in smaller script, Being A Collection Of Verified And Unverified Reports From The Last Two Centuries.
He opened it to a random page, and found, beneath a woodcut illustration of a barren, blasted landscape he did not recognize, a passage that made something cold settle low in his stomach.
The corruption did not arrive as conquest. It arrived, by every surviving account, as accident, a single soldier, name lost to the record, who disturbed something in an old ruin that had been better left undisturbed. What emerged from that disturbance has been called many things across the two centuries since. The Ruined God is the name that has endured, though scholars caution against treating the title as confirmation of anything divine. It may simply be the name a frightened populace reached for when no better word presented itself.
Arthur stood very still, reading the passage a second time.
BRR: Find something?
He looked up. Briar had finished his transcription and joined him at the end of the aisle, glancing at the open volume with mild curiosity.
ART: Something about Valdrun.
BRR: Ah. Cheerful reading.
ART: Have you heard much about it? Properly, I mean. Not just schoolyard stories.
Briar considered the question, his usual easy confidence dimming slightly into something more careful.
BRR: A little. Not much more than what's probably in that book. Nobody knows very much for certain. It's mostly rumor built on rumor, at this point.
He closed the volume slowly, and returned it to its shelf, and found, standing there in the quiet, dust-scented aisle with two entirely separate fragments of mystery now settled uneasily alongside each other in his mind, a soul that borrowed what it could not produce alone, and a corruption born from accident that the world had not yet found better words for, that his afternoon of research had answered nothing at all. It had simply given him more to carry while he waited.
BRR: You alright?
ART: I think so. Just a lot to think about.
BRR: Welcome to research. It's mostly that. A lot to think about, and precious little to actually conclude.
He said it with a small, wry smile, and Arthur, despite everything, found himself smiling back, the particular relief of ordinary company after an afternoon spent circling questions with no clean edges to hold onto. They gathered their notes and left the library as the light outside began its long slow fade toward evening, and Arthur, walking beside Briar through the quieting courtyards, carried both fragments home with him, unresolved, patient, the same particular stubbornness that had carried him through every other unanswered question of his life settling in now to simply wait this one out too.