Chapter 27: 27. Pages of Memory

Excerpt from Suil of Yul Fami’s ‘On Magical Beasts.’

“Much thought, and surprisingly little research, has been given to the nature of the elemental in relation to its tangible and spirit-like components. It was long believed that all of elementalkind were in fact a kind of debased spirit—a spirit who gave up its purely magical form to possess a certain category of material object. The prevailing theory now is that the actions, behaviours, motives, and intentions of elementals are inscrutable even to spirits. All living things, no matter how loosely you define life, have a tendency towards desiring their continued existence. Mundane creatures eat food, defend themselves with tooth and claw, and avoid danger—as do spirits and elementals, though in their own unique ways. It is the mixture of physical and magical material that makes elementals so unusual—what does a living rock eat? What does a sentient river consider a threat? How do we understand what they want and need?”

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Diving into the elemental core, Yenna’s new avatar body tingled with unusual sensations. A kaleidoscope of colour assaulted her eyes while her body shivered with the feeling of being tickled all over. An incredible cacophony seemed to ring in her new ears—countless voices and whispers that seemed to fill her world all at once, only to vanish moments later.

When Yenna finally managed to bring herself to look around, the place she saw was unlike any she had ever seen or even read about. She found herself in some impossibly large cavern, huge pillars of water flowing down from above to form an oddly solid floor of flowing liquid. Some of the pillars flowed in the opposite direction—water flowing from the floor up into a ceiling that mirrored the waters below. Taking a few experimental steps to test the surface, Yenna realised she was beginning to sink.

It was slow at first, as though she had stepped in soft earth, but as soon as her hooves were enveloped in water it pulled at her harder. Yenna began to panic, trying to cast some kind of spell to help her out—only to realise that her magic wasn’t responding. Her heart pounded in her chest—though it felt like a distant echo, being within a different body—and she desperately tried to tread water.

“Mortal, why dost thou flounder so? Take my hand, and be saved.”

A smooth, calming voice came down to Yenna along with a slender hand. Without the presence of mind to even check who it belonged to, the mage threw both hands up and grabbed it. The arm was impossibly strong, lifting her straight out of the water and back onto solid… water, again. Yenna looked down and saw a pair of hooves standing on the water, and she realized that this water must be solid somehow—and so it was. Tapping the surface of the water with her own hooves, she made a couple of echoing splashes but failed to sink once more.

Now looking up at her saviour, Yenna was struck with an unbelievably beautiful figure. They were a fine kesh, with an ethereal, regal beauty. Long, silver-white hair threaded with white flowers cascaded down their dramatically curved body, doing little to hide smooth, dark skin. Her lower half was coated in a thin layer of white hair, though Yenna could see odd, petal-like patterns of wheat-gold hair coursing along her side. Eyes the colour of molten gold regarded Yenna with a curious expression, as though unsure what to make of her. After a moment, the mage realised she was still holding her saviour’s hand—letting go, Yenna was thankful her avatar couldn’t blush.

“Are you… Demvya?” Yenna turned her eyes away from the kesh’s uncovered form, inspecting the white flowers—she had seen these before.

“Yea, I am. Unfettered by unfamiliar flesh in this realm, I am made manifest. Thine own form is… unusual.”

Yenna suddenly became self-conscious as the spirit looked her up and down. “W-Well, you told me to follow you and only gave me a brief time to conjure up a form that could do so.”

“I gave thee no such limit of time. Thy mortal mind limits thee.” Demvya’s true voice was no longer booming, but it was just as haughty as usual. “Now, come. Thou wouldst ask the elemental about its fears, no?”

The spirit turned, walking away towards a seemingly random point. Yenna shook off her worries and followed alongside her—she was certain that Demvya was leading her somewhere important. Yenna split her focus, devoting part of her mind to solving the problem of her inability to use magic. Her ability to sense the magic in the air was slightly dulled by the avatar body, but she could still tell that the air was saturated with water-aspected magic¹. The ability to sense that magic was typically inseparable from the ability to manipulate it, but something was stopping her. It was like the magic was part of someone else’s spell, protected by their will—Yenna gasped.

“The magic in the air… it is the elemental!” 

The mage hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it was enough of a shock that she did so anyway. Yenna looked around, feeling a bit daft—of course this entire place is the elemental, I’m inside its core! 

The fact that it had taken a few minutes of walking to figure that all out felt somewhat shameful. Bringing her attention more cleanly back to the present, Yenna looked around—it looked like they hadn’t moved at all.

“Um, Demvya? Where exactly are you taking me?”

The spirit looked over at Yenna, her stoic expression inscrutable. 

“I am taking thee nowhere. Thou wishest to walk, so I walk alongside thee.”

“But you started walking before I– agh. The magic around us is the elemental, right? If so, why do we need to walk anywhere? We’re already inside its mind—that’s what the core is, as far as I understand it—why can’t we just talk to it here, or find its thoughts, or… however this works?”

Demvya gave her that same unreadable look, as though uncertain how to respond. Yenna wondered if the spirit was frustrated at her lack of understanding, or if Demvya truly didn’t know how to explain it.

After a long, somewhat awkward pause, the spirit carefully chose her words. “Thou must seek memory as thou normally seekest memory.” 

Yenna sighed—or, at least instinctively made the motions with her avatar body—and crossed her arms. She wondered if perhaps she was overthinking this, that there was some simple way of just willing the memories into being. Concentrating as hard as she could, Yenna focused on the idea of memories. After a full minute of this, the mage managed to earn herself a headache and the feeling that she had looked very silly in front of someone very beautiful².

Simply willing the elemental’s memories to manifest didn’t work, leaving Yenna scratching her head. Normally, the mage would have resorted to her magic—now, without real access to it, she realised how frustrating it must be to be truly mundane. Looking around and walking hadn’t helped either, as the terrain of this place was just water as far as the eye could see. The thought crossed her mind about how thankful she was to not have brought her books into somewhere so miserably damp, bringing with it a surprising moment of clarity.

How could one recall information? A mage had an enhanced memory, but it certainly wasn’t perfect—one could only remember information as it had been experienced, and generally discarded recollections considered ‘unnecessary’ to avoid overloading the mind. When one wanted to remember something, but one’s own memory couldn’t be relied on… one could always record their thoughts in a book. Yenna was writing a book right now, about her journeys—recording even the little conversations and small events, the kinds of things that she wouldn’t bother mentally retaining. So, if she wanted to ‘seek a memory,’ as Demvya had put it, Yenna would find it in a book.

“Well!” Yenna threw her arms up, exasperated. “I don’t suppose the elemental just wrote it all down, did it?”

“Thou’rt shouting. Thou’rt…” Demvya thought for a moment. “Thou hast considered a form by which to recall a memory, then?”

“Why, yes, it would be quite helpful if the elemental had just made a nice book of their experiences. Just neat rows of books, like a library or some such– woah!”

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As Yenna rambled, Demvya raised her hands and effected some change in this strange world. The water began to churn and splash, and all around the pair rose row after row of shelves, covered in neatly labelled books. It looked at first like a crude illusion—an image made by someone who had only heard a second-hand description of what a library involved. Whenever Yenna noticed something wrong with the image, it grew in clarity. For the third time that day, the mage had a sudden realisation.

Demvya likely knew how to access the thoughts and memories of the elemental, but not in a way that would be useful to either of them—spirits and elementals were similar in many ways, but still as alien to one another as spirits and mortals. Yenna’s introduction of a basic conceptual framework with which to perceive those memories allowed Demvya to influence the way the unusual reality of this place displayed itself. Then, where Demvya’s knowledge of the inner workings of a library rapidly faded, Yenna’s own mind was taking control—in fact, she could feel the reins of a spell she hadn’t cast being slowly handed over.

It was a complicated spell, moving in ways that Yenna had no words or understanding to properly describe, but the how of its working didn’t matter—Yenna tried her best to store the unusual spell in her mind for later study. For now, it was simply drawing upon her idea of a library, not so much altering the world but changing the way it was perceived. Those bookshelves began to sort themselves into rows, the books themselves ordered in just the way Yenna would find most useful. There was even a soft—albeit, slightly soggy—carpet and the not-quite-real insinuation of stone walls and brilliant coloured glass windows. Reading desks and return trolleys, magic lights and magnifying glasses, everything coalesced into a form that Yenna knew well—it had taken on the form of the Aulprean National Library.

Located in the heart of Sumadre, the library had been Yenna’s second home while studying arcane magic in the capital. The mage couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of wonder as the world flowed into such a nostalgic shape—every detail was, somewhat predictably, exactly as she remembered it. In fact, it had even replicated the one person Yenna didn’t mind seeing there: the librarian, a fair kesh by the name of Shulva. One little voice in the back of her mind reminded her that this place wasn’t real, that the kesh over there wasn’t really Shulva, and that she had come with one goal in mind—to discover what caused the elemental to attack. Thinking that, the library seemed to fade just slightly, books and shelves dripping with water in a way that rather displeased the mage’s sensibilities. Even if this was a construct, Yenna wasn’t going to let it go to waste.

Yenna approached the librarian. Despite looking like she had run through the rain, this Shulva still managed to be an uncannily well-made copy of the real thing. Slightly plump and wrinkled from a long life of joyful laughter, the librarian wore a modest patchwork dress in all sorts of vibrant colours, her smiling blue eyes twinkling behind a small pair of glasses.

“Oh! Little Yen, good to see you!” Shulva’s voice was quiet, but warmly welcoming. Yenna quietly pushed down her disdain for the nickname as the librarian pulled her into a warm hug—though the fact that she appeared to be made of water rather ruined the effect. “Now, how can I help you?”

“I’m… looking for a book.” It felt weird to say it—Yenna knew how to search for books just fine on her own, but these books were not what she was used to. “A book about, erm, memories.”

“Memories! Ah, Yen, forgetting your training already? Memory-related books should be over in section 112, under mental discipline and techniques… Hm, but that’s not quite right, is it?”

Yenna frowned. It wasn’t like Shulva to second-guess herself. Could her constructed memory of the librarian have clued into the nature of this place?

“N-No. I want to access a specific memory. I want to understand, erm… Why did the elemental attack the town? What was it afraid of?”

Shulva’s form wobbled, as though she was about to dissolve into liquid once more, and her face took on a blank, lifeless expression like the possessed townsfolk—Yenna involuntarily took a step back and away.

“Memory. Fear. Attack. Why?” Shulva’s voice sounded far away, like she was shouting down a tunnel. “The memory is not whole. Not all of it exists. The mind is not whole. Not all of it exists.”

A worrying rumble passed through the library, and Yenna could have sworn the floor had started to flood—though it looked the same as always to her.

“Where is the book with that memory? With whatever’s left of it?”

Shulva’s form began to solidify, and Yenna forced herself to calm down. With a pleasant smile, the librarian tutted.

“Really! I thought you had this whole place memorised by now. Come, then. Let’s go find it.”

With little recourse but to follow, Yenna trotted alongside the librarian. As they walked, Yenna caught glimpses of the books, eyeing their titles. Each were named descriptively—overly so, with florid, complicated names like ‘At the Third Junction of the River whose Water Contains an Abundance of Mortal Life, at a time when the Light in the Sky shone Warm and Uncovered, the State of Thoughts on Moving.’ It was as though the elemental had recollections on just about every thought it had ever had, categorised by the events occurring at the time, though how helpful each book would be was yet to be seen.

Shulva’s path was leading Yenna to an area she knew as the ‘forbidden’ section. All great libraries featuring magical books had one—the books that were too dangerous to let any old student read willy-nilly, but not so worrisome that they couldn’t be kept safe by the watchful eye of the librarians. It made sense that the elemental would keep its more worrisome thoughts here—which made Yenna realise her own thoughts may have influenced the locale—as an attempt to keep the most important information safe from intrusion.

The old librarian pulled out a key and unlocked the door that led in, before waving a hand to activate the lights within the windowless chamber. Yenna had never had much more than a passing look inside the room, and as a result the place was far less detailed than the rest of the library. Where a column might have been, a pillar of rising water stood in its place. An enchanted fireplace that Yenna assumed was in there glowed with an unusual flame made of water. There were shelves only on the far walls—her mind had filled in the blanks on the unseen walls by placing a standard writing desk there. It was an uncanny feeling, to come face to face with the edges of one’s own memories, but now that she was here, Yenna wasn’t going to let a little thing like that stop her.

The mage pored over the books on the shelves, only to discover that some of them either had no title or had been shattered—as though turned to ice and smashed. Yenna wondered if that was due to the missing pieces of the elemental’s core—the two parts they had weren’t the entire whole. Some of the books she had thought promising were missing so many pages that it was useless, and a handful were simply gibberish.

“Is this normal?” Yenna looked over to Demvya, holding up a book that looked for all the world like a small child had scrawled over everything of value.

The spirit shook her head. “Nay… and yea. This mind is broken, pieces lost forever—yet, what remains defends its secrets in obscurity. It cannot lie to thee here, in the truth of its own self, but it can hide. From thee, at least. From a goddess, nay.”

Yenna watched in awe as Demvya’s body began to glow, her hair flowing as though caught in the wind. Petals fell from the flowers in her hair and filled the room, before being carried over to the unremarkable writing desk by the door. There, the white petals attached themselves to something, outlining the shape of a book. Looking closer, the volume had been made to look identical to the surface of the table—not lying about its form, but hiding in another’s.

Sharing a nod of thanks towards the spirit, Yenna moved forward and scooped up the book. Opening the first page, she beheld the title.

‘At a deep Wellspring of Magic and Purified Water, on a Serene and Windless Day, an Encounter with a Man who was a Beast, who Threatened with Terrible Power.’

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¹ - No pun intended. The elemental theory of contemporary mages allows for mana to be ‘aspected’ towards a certain element—though witchcraft already insinuates that it is instead lacking in all other colours of magic.

² - Yenna spends an inordinate amount of time re-describing the beauty of Demvya’s true spirit form. I have spared you paragraphs of phrases like ‘the sweetest of apples from atop the boughs’ or ‘like dark smoke traced in gold, sauntering and swaying.’ A poet, Yenna is not.

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