A Thesis in Secrets

When made privy to a secret, it becomes a sordid affair, perverse in its intimacy. It nestles into the fabric of the mind, inspires us to fight tooth and nail to maintain its dark hold. Secrets, despite this darkness, do not live alone in the dredges of night and may be discovered, as this one was and will again be, in the quiet stillness of the depths of an ancient library, under a wash of warm daylight filtered through a half-fogged and half-mottled of ivy window mounted among the high-lofted rafters of the ceiling.

Sat at a table, lodged between pillars of books containing multitudes of archaic characters and unintelligible scribbling, somewhere beyond where common footfall ended just before the maw of labyrinthine halls of ancient texts yawned, a student of the arcane slept. The parade of the sun carried the light from the high window onto the student’s skin, pressing through the membrane of his eyelids, gentle as a kiss, drawing him from his sleep.

He yawned and shifted—nearing the brink of consciousness—but instead, his head slid back into the shadow, where the daylight could not quite dispel the hold of unexpected slumber. A graveyard of spent candles, wicks burned to nubs contained within lumps of malformed wax, watched over him; their light had carried him late into the night, and had been the only eyes on him when sleep had come from the deep shadows of books older than death and began to lay within his eyes. When sleep had lain across his eyelids like they were hammocks, breathing dryness beneath them until he had to blink to again see the words on the pages before him, and when each blink had been so heavy that he had at last given up resistance and slumped ungracefully onto the musty papers sprawled across the table.

A breeze sighed from within the stillness of the shadows, drifting through the aisles of books until it came upon the student. With some semblance of awareness, voraciously curious about the intruder on its library, the breeze probed, cautious to not disturb the loosening of sleep. It fluttered through the pages scattered on the table, catching on the ink and lifting the words before setting them back as they were originally. It pressed against the books on the table, investigating their covers and what words within it could discern.

The student stirred again, sensing the flurry of motion that had overtaken his table, and the breeze vanished. Dust motes settled again, and the eerie stillness of the library seeped back into the air, the must of old and neglected books amplified.

It was some minutes more until he awoke.

Sleep peeled back slowly, unawareness marred his surroundings in the bleary first blinks of morning. Then, a shot of memory like adrenaline flooded his brain, and he bolted upright. A paper stuck to his cheek, fluttering down a moment later. He groaned and rubbed his face; sleep, though easing the ache of tension that had pooled in his head and trickled down his shoulders and back the night before, had cost him time. And he was shorter on time than stress, his thesis demonstration the next morning.

Days spent delving deeper and deeper into the library, finding books more dust than paper, he had come in search of an impetus for his magical research. Undergraduate magic had come so easily, and the library had been pliant then; his youth combined with the naïve sections of young magic within the library had revealed ample arcane secrets. They had caught him in a whirlwind, enrapturing him and earning him top marks and a coveted graduate studies offer. But now that he had been released on his own, the library’s willingness to provide magic had withdrawn into the esoteric tomes of old magic—magic that had died from use long ago, soon after the birth of the library, which had stood since before civilization, the city and college erected around the arcane edifice.

Why, he cursed himself, why had he been so bold as to declare progress to his advisor. Old magic, as his advisor had warned him when he proposed his thesis, had long aged out of understanding. A year was all his advisor could grant him, to make progress before he would need to find a new subject, a modern subject, around which to construct his thesis. It was his own hubris, his refusal to admit defeat, that had, in a moment of foolhardy ardor, had him declaring, some days before as that year was coming to an inexorable end, that he had made progress. Now, he had less than a day to find something, else he would have to face an audience of graduate advisors and admit complete and utter failure.

He rubbed his face in hopes of feeling a bit rejuvenated, but the gritty feeling of days of stubble and unwashed grime had cemented to his skin. The still air was changed. Before like silt in a long-forgotten pond, rife with sediment of age and centuries removed from any disturbance, it had grown sharper, less stuffy, though no less stagnant. Among the long shadows cast by the shelves of books and the piles he had gathered, he felt, in the crawling of dust along the back of his neck, as though someone or something had joined his solitude and now witnessed his perturbation of the archaic halls.

A murmur of words, crossing and twisting the tongue in a raspy whisper, brought a scattering of the candles back to life—a few less than he had intended, at that. They dispelled the shadows of his towering collection of books back into the reaches of the shelves, and the subtle waxy scent of the burning candles permeated the must of the air, abating the peculiarity that had settled into it while he slept.

He leafed through the papers of his notes, hoping some miraculous inspiration would strike him. The sprawling papers, which entirely masked the wood of the table, were filled with small, scrawled notes; a network of references, notes, and ideas, stretching across the disordered ocean of information. Yet, none of it had amounted to even the slightest twitch of progress.

At random, he lifted papers from across the patchwork puzzle, his gaze wandering over the mass of words, which had begun to dissolve into just a writhing knot of scribbles as his eyes glazed over. The few snippets he read were as incomprehensible as the texts they came from.

“Dysin: ‘Magick is a pursuit of the inner soul,’ same year, Lienx: ‘Magix are the practise of the natural reality.’”

“From Beyrlic, ‘Magiks began in sources: northern and western.’ Northern magics practice on nature, bring forth phenomena? Western on the mind? Less sources. What phenomena? Beyrlic doesn’t elaborate, common knowledge of the time?”

As he read through the notes, one scribbled the wrong way on a paper askew from its pile within the confines of a shrinking margin, newer words fit in among old, caught his eye: “Reference: Maerlyn? ‘Pages of Magik’?”

Stupor evaporating like morning dew in the summer, excitement ran electric across his skin. He recalled, in fragments like a forgotten dream, scribbling the note down in a moment of enlightenment, snagged halfway between awake and asleep.

He had been trudging through one of the more intact manuscripts from the time and found a reference to Maerlyn’s ‘Pages of Magik.’ It had slipped his notice, the old books possessing a proclivity for referencing pages or entire books of magic that he had never heard of and never would hear of again—typically just notes written by or for an apprentice, he had decided. But the name had stuck in his mind, nagging at him as he moved on from the manuscript. Later, leafing through his notes as he was struggling to keep awake, the name had leapt at him from a page on a completely different time period of magic, leading to the forgotten note.

With renewed fervor, he scoured his notes, gathering more references that had previously escaped his notice. They were sparse and unpredictable, cropping up anywhere from the oldest scraps of notes, distilled through time, from some ancient text to a footnote in a more recent, but no more enlightening, manuscript on old-practice magic.

The most peculiar reference he noticed began with a near miss, just the name ‘Maeyl? Nearly? Merlyn?’ fit neatly into a mess of other notes, so densely packed he almost overlooked it among the bleeding ink that had begun to wriggle in his vision. He had written the note in amidst a reading of one of the most modern books on old magic he had found, written sometime soon after the library’s construction, a sort of capstone piece, within a section which discussed the author’s original learning of magic. The author had claimed that a book—whose name had been smudged into illegibility, perhaps censored for the rest of the book was in as pristine of condition as could be expected centuries on, and had been written by a nearly indiscernible name, which could only be Maerlyn—had been the key instrument in their understanding the magic. The greatest element of this discovery, however, was that the author had remarked on reading the copy of the book within the library.

Elation overtook the crumbling precipice of rational thought, hurling itself over the edge and gaining momentum in the surge of thoughts that erupted from the discovery: the library’s nigh-endless catalogue was ever-growing, never shrinking, so the book would still be here, deeper still within the oldest shelves; a book which had been woven into the history of old magic, which so many of the once-great sorcerers had referenced, a chance at a true breakthrough; he, then, stood on a frontier of discoveries, if only he found this book. A path to salvation from his impending thesis demonstration.

With hesitation less than the moment before dawn when the sun takes a breath before bursting through night, the student plucked a candle from the desk, jammed it into a lantern that had been deposited on the floor, and plunged into the hallowed shelves. Deeper toward the heart of the library, where the first shelves had been erected and the oldest, forgotten books lay. Deeper into the shadowed darkness where secrets lay in sediment, ancient and ominous, leviathans of the old, untamed halls of the library.

A shift occurred somewhere after the bastion of light that surrounded his table had vanished within the heavy shadows cast by the looming shelves. The omnipresent scent of wood and leather and old paper amplified with the accumulated age of the halls. The darkness took on a deep pearlescent quality, growing all the more opaque, consuming the feeble glow of the candle, leaving him in a slim bubble against the nigh abyss. Somewhere here, or perhaps a turn around the black shelves, was the deepest he had traversed, where age—in language and decay—caught up with the texts and further diluted the trickle of information he could distill.

He trailed his finger along the spines of the books. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, still potent in his veins, or the questing curiosity of books marinated in magic that sent them humming at his touch. Z’s trailed into A’s again, as the seam of an addition to the library melded into the previous age. Another, and the neglect of forgetting stirred in the darkness.

The first scent of change came in a dampness, rising through the absolute, rich, and humid darkness. The tenuous candlelight flickered, weaking, and shadows rose against its impotent illumination. Tremors of motion stirred in the peripheries of the student’s vision, but each time he looked, they solidified into the glint of old metal bindings about the books; he, however, couldn’t shake the unnerving sensation that the books had been blinking.

The student whispered a spell of ignition to allay the failing of the candle. The words sank into the darkness. Stillness. No magic rose to command. As he began the words again, the magic on call recoiled. The books on the shelves about him bucked wildly, pages flapping and fluttering about like a writhing mass of birds, and rat-like creatures, molten of the black material of shadows, scurried over the shelves. Stillness came again, with the sudden sigh of the shelves, extinguishing the candle into complete midnight.

Shock-frozen and vision-stripped, the student recognized a subtle new motion rolling over his skin. It came in waves. First, warm and dry and replete with scents like age and memory whirling against his face—an exhale escaping. A pause, then cold and humid and scented like curiosity and warning, drawing him ever inward: the inhalation.

As his eyes adjusted to a pale light, which had not been there before and leaked from the cracks in the shelves, originating deeper still, the darkness peeled away. Devoid of alternatives, he cautiously followed it, and the breath of the library, deeper. The shapes of shadows twisted in the pallid light, at once bending inward to collapse upon him and outward, widening and leaving behind the strangling hold of the dark. They undulated, in their undecided state, with each inhale and exhale.

Time flayed.

It rushed and trickled, meaninglessly drifting away as the student haltingly ventured onward. Each step a moment or an eternity apart—

Until the aisles of the shelves widened, curving away, and the student stepped into the open heart of the library. The oppressive veil of shelves, dark in oak and shadow, bent to form other, departing paths in a large ring. The light that had guided him cascaded down from a high ceiling, cold and made of something lurid, like mortality and eternity melded. A platform rose from the floor in a large ring and at its center, in the brightest of the falling light, stood a book, bound in fresh, unaged leather, and embossed with a single word: Maerlyn.

He’d found it. His heart leapt, but a sensation like needlework embroidery crept along the back of his skull, within it, decorating the surface of his brain. When he reached for it, with the same searching sensation of recalling a once-forgotten memory, he felt the bald nothing of the interior of his skull. Of the hard and sometimes sticky wood suddenly revealed where carpet had lain, a step before.

Favoring elation, he ignored the uncanny un-memory and broached the ring. The wind died down, a breath held: his own and the library’s. Silence fell over silence, suddenly deeper and bated, and the back of his neck prickled with the weight of eyes observing him. He ignored it too, stepping to the book, and lifting a latch that kept its pages bound—

Magic erupted from all around. The cold light blazed golden bright, the stilled winds roaring stronger than ever, battering against his skin and flinging open the pages of the book. Beneath it all, a sentience beneath the library’s simple wood awoke and turned on the student, with all the witness and weight of the untold cosmos watching. It judged him then, peering through his soul, crashing through his memories, before expelling him from the circle, crumpling, unconscious, against the bookshelves. The pages of the book shut, the wind evaporated again, and the light faded back to its pallor, cold and dormant.

“He must try again.” The command came from a voice amidst the fog of darkness within the shelves, firm in tone but with a lilting intangibility.

“Will he ever succeed?” a second person, from across the shelves, countered.

“He grows ever closer.”

“Yet, still he is not ready. Should we not start anew?”

“The magic is wearing thin.” A third voice, hesitant and quieter than the others interjected. “Can we even afford him another chance?”

“If we must, we can afford many more. He must succeed, the cost of preparing another would be too great.” The first of the voices. More hesitant, but still imperative.

“And to succeed he must try again.” The second, relenting.

The silencing of the voices was accompanied by the stirring of a breeze, different from the exhalations of the shelved aisles; it arose, laden with a green magic and the restrained vigor of youth. It called on the colossal and stirring presence of the awoken library, an echoing breeze conjured from the stillness of the air, a cold inhale; it began at the edge of the library—in the thicket of new growth, the edge of a forest seeded with time, where civilization brushed against its surface questing for artifacts of the past—and pulled inward toward the foreboding ring at its heart. Along its path, the marks of change dissolved: dust reclaimed the light footsteps that had interrupted the dunes of stillness, books which had been turned askew were lifted right again, and a small table in the leaking of light from an old window emptied—its papers slipping into the cracks of lost things, vanished between the floorboards, and the books sliding back into the molded maws left yawning in their absence.

A sound like threads shorn met the restoring inhale where it came upon the scene of its intruder. A snipping of the fabric, a borrowing of a secret, and a gentle hemming of the material lost. The final settling sigh of the library returning to rest ferried the again slumbering student back into the darkness beyond the breathing walls and blinking books, his secret undiscovered.

The loss of a secret is as keen a transformation as the discovery of one. When stripped of our secrets, so mottled into our being—whether released into the open consciousness or back into the murky and sometimes dark everything from whence they came—we are lain bare as newborns: the fragile part of our being, where we are formed and influenced and true, revealed for the darkness that the secret had succeeded in drawing from within us.