When Alissa reached the academy that morning, she was allowed to enter without any fuss once she showed her token to the stationed guardsman outside.
A junior member of the faculty greeted her and accompanied her in so that her entry would not trigger the alarms from the wards set around the building. The young man then guided her the rest of the way towards the library itself.
"Please take extra care while reading the books you will find inside," said the young man as he led her inside. "While we mostly keep copies and transcriptions here instead of the originals, some of these copies are penned by the original authors themselves, and thus nearly as priceless as an original would be."
"I will keep that in mind, thank you," replied Alissa with a nod. The academy's faculty members seemed to take great pride in their library, which did not surprise her much. She too would have been proud of it if such a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts belonged to her school.
The library itself was huge, easily large enough to fit in tens of thousands of books in the myriad shelves Alissa saw. Each shelf extended from the floor to the ceiling, easily fifteen feet or so in height, laden with books and tomes of all kinds as far as the eye could see.
There were a half-dozen librarians on duty at their station near the entrance, mostly younger people, either junior faculty members or senior students who found work in the library, Alissa guessed.
On the other hand, the head librarian looked every bit the part. The woman must have been at least in her fifties if not sixties, with her graying brown hair collected in a severe bun tied behind her head. A pair of glasses rested on the bridge of her nose, while she dressed in a nondescript black frock.
The woman looked at Alissa with some suspicion but likely thought that the warning given by the junior faculty member that brought her to the library was good enough, as she returned to the book she was reading soon after. That said, the old woman did give Alissa a look that practically screamed “Try me, and I’ll get you thrown out of my library before you even know what happened” though.
Alissa wisely decided not to test the old woman’s patience and just went to where a thick book lay, underneath a sign that stated “Catalogue” in bold letters. She would need to peruse the book to get the sort of reading material she was looking for, after all.
Fortunately – and conveniently – for Alissa, there was a separate section for “ancient records and literature” in the library’s catalogue. She supposed that she shouldn’t have been too surprised as those ancient records were something the library prided itself on, and was glad that the librarians nearly categorized the texts in that category into further sub-categories.
It took her only a couple minutes to find out which section in the library the ancient texts related to [Heroes], [Champions], as well as the overall war with the demons were located. On the other hand, it took her another good fifteen minutes before she found the shelf that corresponded with the section, and another few minutes before she located a stair, climbed up, and picked an ancient book from the shelf.
Then she sat down on one of the many tables scattered around the library and began to read.
The text Alissa found did not immediately unravel the many mysteries and doubts she had, of course. She was not so lucky so as to discover exactly what she was looking for in the first book she checked. Such luck was mostly relegated to fiction, unfortunately, and none of her skills had anything related to luck either, so they were of no help.
Even so, there were a few interesting tidbits in the book she read, especially in its early parts, which recorded a time that was closer to the Rise of the current Pantheon of Gods than the present. The records mentioned purges and hunts targeting “heretics”, those that still clung to the belief of the old gods overthrown by the current Pantheon. It was something that the newer texts she read in the Royal Palace’s library also mentioned occasionally, but mostly as an off-handed mention of something from a time long past.
Meanwhile, the ancient text recorded the circumstances of one such “purge” in notably greater detail.
Of note was how the text described the “inhumane” ways of the heretics where they forced humans to breed with demons, resulting in hybrid abominations being born from the unholy union. The narrator described with notable enthusiasm how the forces of the Kingdom’s nobles rounded up such heretics and burned them down to the last, at the time believed to have rid the Kingdom of their taint.
That said, later parts of the text noted that the purge apparently failed to properly cleanse the heretical taint from the Kingdom, and that a few heretics were discovered and “cleansed” over the following decades. No other large settlement of such “heretics” were found during the narrator’s time, however, and given how the newer texts made no mention of other, more recent purges, chances were the one recorded in the ancient text was one of the last major purges the Kingdom did.
Alissa found it curious that she had never been briefed or notified of such a matter, but then again, given the lack of attention given to this issue in the recent history of the Kingdom – at least as far as she learned about it from the books she read – it might well be that the Kingdom no longer considered them as an issue.
Given the existence of the Demons and the constant outbreak of war with them, Alissa could understand such a point of view.
A minor, perhaps nonexistent insurgency by members of what might be considered a cult would be a lesser threat compared to open war with the fate of the entire race hanging on it, after all. If there had been no activity from the so-called “heretics” of late, then it made sense that the Kingdom had not devoted much attention to them.
After all, there might not even be any more heretics around in the Human Kingdom’s territory.
Alissa also read about the chronicles of victories and defeats of the wars in that period. Most of the time the [Heroes] and [Champions] involved were people she could not identify at all, but on a few occasions, even from the text’s relatively vague descriptions, she was quite certain that she could identify who certain [Heroes] were.
Like how the text mentioned a [Great Hero] from several thousand years ago, Ephemera time, who was noted to be an imposingly tall man, with a gaunt face and scruffy beard, who led the Kingdom’s soldiers by example with great feats of mighty strength. Another was noted to be a rather short man who was a master strategist that inspired great courage in the soldiers he led.
There were also chronicles from another period of time that detailed a woman so charming that not even the demons could resist her charms, as well as that of an archer who was so accurate that it was said that he never missed a single arrow, no matter the distance or the situation.
And all of those were just from the first book Alissa read through.
Granted, it took her a couple hours to go through the book’s content, during which time she was completely engrossed in her reading. Alissa then went back to the shelf that contained the ancient texts, returned the book to its original location, and picked another to read. She repeated the process until she noticed that the sun was about to set and she left the library since she had forgotten to inform Nadine and Maribel that she might be staying until late in the library so they should not wait for her.
Apparently some of the librarians noted how she was engrossed so much in the books, since they offered her kind smiles and understanding nods when she passed them by. The looks the offered were that of people who had discovered a kindred spirit, which was something Alissa couldn’t exactly disagree with either, given how much of a bookworm she herself was.
She returned to the inn just in time to have dinner together with Nadine and Maribel, during which time she informed them that she would likely stay until late in the library for the following days, and that they shouldn’t want for her to have dinner. She would handle her own dinner arrangements. The other two girls nodded though they also shook their heads at Alissa’s “addiction” with the books.
Alissa made good on her word as she spent the entire day and even a few hours into the evening in the library the next day, subsisting only off a quick breakfast in the inn when she woke up and a quick snack off some street vendors when she returned at night. Fortunately, the academy had its own mess hall where she could get some refreshments as well during her reading binge, though like most libraries, they didn’t allow people to bring any food or beverages into the place.
While Alissa had yet to make any concrete findings from the texts she had read so far, she did notice a pattern that further reinforced some of her doubts. Many of the past [Heroes] were noted to be quite involved in the Kingdom, with how some introduced new farming or smithing techniques, others reproduced recipes from their previous world in Ephemera, and so onwards. Yet for some reason not a single one of those heroes ever stayed even if they clearly had quite a bit of attachment to Ephemera.
It was one of the unexplained doubts Alissa had kept quiet on for a while, as she could imagine some simple excuses on why the heroes never stayed. Perhaps they were never meant to stay for too long. Maybe their continued existence in Ephemera might result in undesirable things due to their otherworldly nature. There were many possible reasons – or excuses – for such a case, but none that were documented.
Alissa imagined that if there truly was such a reason, it should have been plastered somewhere unmissable in bold letters as a warning, and perhaps even explained to the summoned [Heroes] as soon as they arrived. That there was no such thing noted anywhere she looked was rather suspicious in itself, especially when combined with how all the [Heroes] returned home in the end.
Even the ones whose original lives had ended in the other world.
It was late in the evening of the third day Alissa spent in the library, when the sun had already set a while ago and Alissa had just picked up one last book to read for that night and sat by the table when she noticed something different.
The feeling was a very, very vague one. The sort of feeling that made her feel as if someone was observing her, although Alissa couldn’t tell from where the feeling originated. The seat Alissa chose was pretty deep in the library, close to the section of the shelf which housed the ancient texts she perused, so she was not in direct line of sight to anyone else in the library, and as far as she knew, there were no other seats deeper in.
At first she tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted, like an itch behind her back at a place she just couldn’t reach to scratch. It was a rather annoying feeling, and while the feeling itself never intensified, Alissa somehow felt as if the source of the feeling was getting closer to her. She even looked around herself with the aid of her passive skills just to be sure, but saw nothing.
Until she suddenly felt a presence deeper in the library. A presence that seemed to beckon to her for some reason. It was a presence that she found somehow familiar, despite it being utterly alien to everything she had come across in Ephemera so far. Curious, Alissa left the open book at her table and walked towards the source of the presence.
There in a dark corner deep in the library, stood a figure clad in a dark gown, facing away from Alissa. The figure slowly, calmly turned around, and Alissa caught sight of a face she never expected to see again. At least not here, not in Ephemera. A face she was all too familiar with.
“Zaza…?” asked Alissa with a doubtful tone. “Is that you?”
Avitue
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When Alissa reached the academy that morning, she was allowed to enter without any fuss once she showed her token to the stationed guardsman outside.
A junior member of the faculty greeted her and accompanied her in so that her entry would not trigger the alarms from the wards set around the building. The young man then guided her the rest of the way towards the library itself.
"Please take extra care while reading the books you will find inside," said the young man as he led her inside. "While we mostly keep copies and transcriptions here instead of the originals, some of these copies are penned by the original authors themselves, and thus nearly as priceless as an original would be."
"I will keep that in mind, thank you," replied Alissa with a nod. The academy's faculty members seemed to take great pride in their library, which did not surprise her much. She too would have been proud of it if such a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts belonged to her school.
The library itself was huge, easily large enough to fit in tens of thousands of books in the myriad shelves Alissa saw. Each shelf extended from the floor to the ceiling, easily fifteen feet or so in height, laden with books and tomes of all kinds as far as the eye could see.
There were a half-dozen librarians on duty at their station near the entrance, mostly younger people, either junior faculty members or senior students who found work in the library, Alissa guessed.
On the other hand, the head librarian looked every bit the part. The woman must have been at least in her fifties if not sixties, with her graying brown hair collected in a severe bun tied behind her head. A pair of glasses rested on the bridge of her nose, while she dressed in a nondescript black frock.
The woman looked at Alissa with some suspicion but likely thought that the warning given by the junior faculty member that brought her to the library was good enough, as she returned to the book she was reading soon after. That said, the old woman did give Alissa a look that practically screamed “Try me, and I’ll get you thrown out of my library before you even know what happened” though.
Alissa wisely decided not to test the old woman’s patience and just went to where a thick book lay, underneath a sign that stated “Catalogue” in bold letters. She would need to peruse the book to get the sort of reading material she was looking for, after all.
Fortunately – and conveniently – for Alissa, there was a separate section for “ancient records and literature” in the library’s catalogue. She supposed that she shouldn’t have been too surprised as those ancient records were something the library prided itself on, and was glad that the librarians nearly categorized the texts in that category into further sub-categories.
It took her only a couple minutes to find out which section in the library the ancient texts related to [Heroes], [Champions], as well as the overall war with the demons were located. On the other hand, it took her another good fifteen minutes before she found the shelf that corresponded with the section, and another few minutes before she located a stair, climbed up, and picked an ancient book from the shelf.
Then she sat down on one of the many tables scattered around the library and began to read.
The text Alissa found did not immediately unravel the many mysteries and doubts she had, of course. She was not so lucky so as to discover exactly what she was looking for in the first book she checked. Such luck was mostly relegated to fiction, unfortunately, and none of her skills had anything related to luck either, so they were of no help.
Even so, there were a few interesting tidbits in the book she read, especially in its early parts, which recorded a time that was closer to the Rise of the current Pantheon of Gods than the present. The records mentioned purges and hunts targeting “heretics”, those that still clung to the belief of the old gods overthrown by the current Pantheon. It was something that the newer texts she read in the Royal Palace’s library also mentioned occasionally, but mostly as an off-handed mention of something from a time long past.
Meanwhile, the ancient text recorded the circumstances of one such “purge” in notably greater detail.
Of note was how the text described the “inhumane” ways of the heretics where they forced humans to breed with demons, resulting in hybrid abominations being born from the unholy union. The narrator described with notable enthusiasm how the forces of the Kingdom’s nobles rounded up such heretics and burned them down to the last, at the time believed to have rid the Kingdom of their taint.
That said, later parts of the text noted that the purge apparently failed to properly cleanse the heretical taint from the Kingdom, and that a few heretics were discovered and “cleansed” over the following decades. No other large settlement of such “heretics” were found during the narrator’s time, however, and given how the newer texts made no mention of other, more recent purges, chances were the one recorded in the ancient text was one of the last major purges the Kingdom did.
Alissa found it curious that she had never been briefed or notified of such a matter, but then again, given the lack of attention given to this issue in the recent history of the Kingdom – at least as far as she learned about it from the books she read – it might well be that the Kingdom no longer considered them as an issue.
Given the existence of the Demons and the constant outbreak of war with them, Alissa could understand such a point of view.
A minor, perhaps nonexistent insurgency by members of what might be considered a cult would be a lesser threat compared to open war with the fate of the entire race hanging on it, after all. If there had been no activity from the so-called “heretics” of late, then it made sense that the Kingdom had not devoted much attention to them.
After all, there might not even be any more heretics around in the Human Kingdom’s territory.
Alissa also read about the chronicles of victories and defeats of the wars in that period. Most of the time the [Heroes] and [Champions] involved were people she could not identify at all, but on a few occasions, even from the text’s relatively vague descriptions, she was quite certain that she could identify who certain [Heroes] were.
Like how the text mentioned a [Great Hero] from several thousand years ago, Ephemera time, who was noted to be an imposingly tall man, with a gaunt face and scruffy beard, who led the Kingdom’s soldiers by example with great feats of mighty strength. Another was noted to be a rather short man who was a master strategist that inspired great courage in the soldiers he led.
There were also chronicles from another period of time that detailed a woman so charming that not even the demons could resist her charms, as well as that of an archer who was so accurate that it was said that he never missed a single arrow, no matter the distance or the situation.
And all of those were just from the first book Alissa read through.
Granted, it took her a couple hours to go through the book’s content, during which time she was completely engrossed in her reading. Alissa then went back to the shelf that contained the ancient texts, returned the book to its original location, and picked another to read. She repeated the process until she noticed that the sun was about to set and she left the library since she had forgotten to inform Nadine and Maribel that she might be staying until late in the library so they should not wait for her.
Apparently some of the librarians noted how she was engrossed so much in the books, since they offered her kind smiles and understanding nods when she passed them by. The looks the offered were that of people who had discovered a kindred spirit, which was something Alissa couldn’t exactly disagree with either, given how much of a bookworm she herself was.
She returned to the inn just in time to have dinner together with Nadine and Maribel, during which time she informed them that she would likely stay until late in the library for the following days, and that they shouldn’t want for her to have dinner. She would handle her own dinner arrangements. The other two girls nodded though they also shook their heads at Alissa’s “addiction” with the books.
Alissa made good on her word as she spent the entire day and even a few hours into the evening in the library the next day, subsisting only off a quick breakfast in the inn when she woke up and a quick snack off some street vendors when she returned at night. Fortunately, the academy had its own mess hall where she could get some refreshments as well during her reading binge, though like most libraries, they didn’t allow people to bring any food or beverages into the place.
While Alissa had yet to make any concrete findings from the texts she had read so far, she did notice a pattern that further reinforced some of her doubts. Many of the past [Heroes] were noted to be quite involved in the Kingdom, with how some introduced new farming or smithing techniques, others reproduced recipes from their previous world in Ephemera, and so onwards. Yet for some reason not a single one of those heroes ever stayed even if they clearly had quite a bit of attachment to Ephemera.
It was one of the unexplained doubts Alissa had kept quiet on for a while, as she could imagine some simple excuses on why the heroes never stayed. Perhaps they were never meant to stay for too long. Maybe their continued existence in Ephemera might result in undesirable things due to their otherworldly nature. There were many possible reasons – or excuses – for such a case, but none that were documented.
Alissa imagined that if there truly was such a reason, it should have been plastered somewhere unmissable in bold letters as a warning, and perhaps even explained to the summoned [Heroes] as soon as they arrived. That there was no such thing noted anywhere she looked was rather suspicious in itself, especially when combined with how all the [Heroes] returned home in the end.
Even the ones whose original lives had ended in the other world.
It was late in the evening of the third day Alissa spent in the library, when the sun had already set a while ago and Alissa had just picked up one last book to read for that night and sat by the table when she noticed something different.
The feeling was a very, very vague one. The sort of feeling that made her feel as if someone was observing her, although Alissa couldn’t tell from where the feeling originated. The seat Alissa chose was pretty deep in the library, close to the section of the shelf which housed the ancient texts she perused, so she was not in direct line of sight to anyone else in the library, and as far as she knew, there were no other seats deeper in.
At first she tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted, like an itch behind her back at a place she just couldn’t reach to scratch. It was a rather annoying feeling, and while the feeling itself never intensified, Alissa somehow felt as if the source of the feeling was getting closer to her. She even looked around herself with the aid of her passive skills just to be sure, but saw nothing.
Until she suddenly felt a presence deeper in the library. A presence that seemed to beckon to her for some reason. It was a presence that she found somehow familiar, despite it being utterly alien to everything she had come across in Ephemera so far. Curious, Alissa left the open book at her table and walked towards the source of the presence.
There in a dark corner deep in the library, stood a figure clad in a dark gown, facing away from Alissa. The figure slowly, calmly turned around, and Alissa caught sight of a face she never expected to see again. At least not here, not in Ephemera. A face she was all too familiar with.
“Zaza…?” asked Alissa with a doubtful tone. “Is that you?”
Avitue
If you enjoy this story, please consider leaving a rating or review to help it gain more exposure, thank you! Or help support the author by leaving a tip!
Read ahead on my Patreon! For 5$ a month patrons will gain early access of a week's worth of chapters ahead (3 chapters), or for 10$ a month, gain early access to ALL the available Advance Chapters! (as of the moment of this writing: 25 Chapters ahead.)
Or you can subscribe to all my stories and get a discount on the price!
Join the Discord for silly stuff and chat with us!
