Fabrisse Book 2 (Chapter 6)

Library work was kind of boring in the best way.

No voidspawns and no Liene leaping out from behind a stack of lexicons. People whispered here. If you did your job right, nobody noticed you at all.

Fabrisse liked that.

It meant he could take twice as long cross-checking a shelf number ‘just to be sure,’ and in the process read half a page of Practical Resonances in Sedimentary Quartz. 

He slipped the book back into its slot and wandered toward the front desk, where Magistra Veirlan was sorting a pile of returned folios one-handed while drinking tea with the other. She was in her thirties, with an easy half-smile that suggested she had long ago stopped being surprised by anything library clerks got up to.

“Magistra Veirlan,” Fabrisse said, trying to be casual. “Would it be all right if I . . . sorted the geological section again?”

She looked up at him, one eyebrow arched. “Again?” Somehow, her quill was still moving. That was a kind of skill Fabrisse wished to be able to learn.

“It’s, um . . . gotten disordered.” Which was technically true, just not disordered enough to require intervention.

She sipped her tea, watching him over the rim in a way that made it clear she knew exactly what he was after. “Thirty minutes, Kestovar.”

“Yes, Magistra.”

“Thirty,” she repeated, already turning back to her folios.

The geological section was three aisles over, tucked behind an unassuming sign marked Aetheric Mineralogy. Fabrisse slipped inside, pulling the rolling ladder along as if it were a co-conspirator.

His notebook was already open to a page full of tight, slanted handwriting and the occasional sketch of a crystal cluster.

“Grainbind.” He murmured the name as he traced the spine of a heavy vellum-bound volume, jotting it down in the margin next to a crude diagram of a layered rock face. That made thirty distinct Stone spells so far—thirty—and he underlined the number twice, just to feel the weight of it.

He flipped through the entry, copying its subtle activation phrasing, the aether resonance frequency, and a note on its use in stabilizing loose scree. He’d copy down the diagrams too, to varying degrees of likeness. The diagrams in this one were particularly neat, so he tried to imitate them.

In addition to the spells from Anabeth’s book (which he still had to return in a week), he’d uncovered nineteen more Tier 1 incantations, nine Tier 2s, and two Tier 3s.

He started sorting them in order, muttering each name under his breath as he penciled arrows between them. He’d start with the ones that were both foundational and possible for him to learn after he’d mapped out their progression route.

“Kestovar.”

The voice came from directly behind him, too close for comfort. Fabrisse didn’t have to turn around to know it was Severa Montreal; she had a way of making his surname sound like an official reprimand. Sneaking up from behind unannounced was sort of her thing anyway.

He took a second to finish writing the arrow between Grainbind and Strata Lock before looking over his shoulder.

Severa stood with her arms crossed, the precise fall of her robe sleeves framing a leather-bound tome clutched against her side. “Do you have time today, as obliged?” Her braids were once again so impeccably intertwined that not a single flyaway dared disrupt their sleek order. It was clear she had personally tended to every twist and tuck, or maybe she had a spell that specifically did so for her.

“Yes. But let me finish my shift first.”

Severa didn’t move. She just stood there beside the rolling ladder, one brow faintly lifted as though she were inspecting the geological section itself and finding it only marginally acceptable.

Fabrisse waited a beat for her to say something else. She didn’t. So he went back to writing, adjusting the angle of his notebook so it didn’t feel like she was reading over his shoulder.

“Grainbind,” he murmured again under his breath, penciling in a bracket that looped toward Strata Lock and Bedhold.

Suddenly she was much closer than he thought, her voice right by his ear. “Are you going to specialize in trapping?”

He jolted and turned just enough to see the faint glint of her hairpin. “How do you know?”

“Your notes happened to catch my eyes. It wasn’t like I planned to look at them,” she said in a tone that suggested she absolutely had.  He didn’t know how she came to that conclusion, seeing how his current page was on Grainbind, an entry-level spell into Stone Formation that would likely branch out into stone projectile offensive moves. “If you’re set on restraint spells, you might want to learn Shearline and Binder’s Clasp. They’re easy Tier 1s, but they’ll let you branch into both pressure-locking formations and flexible stone shaping. From there, you could pick up Bedhold II or Vein Snare—both Tier 2—without wasting cycles relearning foundations.”

Before he could think about whether he wanted her advice, he blurted, “Can Binder’s Clasp be combined with Faultweave for a Tier 3 composite?”

Her brow furrowed slightly. “I don’t know that one. Faultweave?”

Ah, she wouldn’t know a spell from Anabeth’s family line. Maybe Severa didn’t know everything after all.

“Thanks,” he said. He didn’t ask for her advice, but it wasn’t like he wouldn’t welcome it.

She watched him a moment longer, then asked, “When’s your shift over?”

He glanced toward the high clerestory windows, where a wedge of light was just starting to fade. “Eleventh bell.”

“I’ll be waiting outside.”

And just like that, she stepped down from the ladder and disappeared between the stacks, the faint click of her shoes swallowed by the muffled hush of the archive.

He stared after her for a beat, then looked down at his notes without actually seeing them. He’d never seen Severa with anyone outside class or the instructants. No one meets her halfway across the library with that unspoken look of friends who already know what the other’s thinking.

Not that it was any of his business. 

***

Severa was literally outside of the Library’s entrance as he walked out. She was holding something wrapped in an elaborate length of silk—deep green with gold-thread embroidery so fine it caught the last light like water. Maybe her lunch was inside, but it looked . . . flat. Whatever was inside, food should not look that flat.

“Do you . . . eat lunch?” He asked without thinking.

“Are we still doing this?” She turned and looked at him like he was an exam question with no correct answer.

He stared at her silk cloth. She noticed it immediately and raised it closer to his eye level. “Oh. This? This is a bag of blood. I suck blood from the nape of people’s necks for sustenance. Would you like to volunteer yours?”

“I’m good.”

“Shame,” she said, tucking the bundle neatly under her arm again. The gold threads caught the light for an instant before the shadows took them. “Shall we go?”

“Do I have to meet your father again?”

She didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched just long enough for his shoulders to tighten. Then she said, “Possibly.”

He gulped.

***

Rows of glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls greeted Fabrisse as he entered. Each cabinet was filled with specimens cradled in velvet-lined cradles: spheres of rose quartz, glinting shards of tourmaline, whole geodes with their hearts split open to reveal glittering interiors. Every label was written in the same elegant, slanted hand, the ink brown with age but perfectly legible.

Fabrisse took two slow steps inside and almost forgot to breathe. This wasn’t just a private collection—it was almost on par with the specimen archives in the Synod laboratories. Not specialized for rocks, no; but the arrangement, the climate wards, even the quality of the preservation cases were unmistakably professional. Whoever had curated this had known exactly what they were doing.

“Why are you standing there? Come in,” Severa said as she walked past him. When she turned around and he still hadn’t moved, she said, “I hope you don’t just stand still and gawk like this in your lab work.”

Fabrisse shut his mouth, which he hadn’t realized was slightly open, and stepped fully inside. His fingers itched to run over the nearest case, to test the seal on the brass fittings, to see if the imprint resonance matched the ones in the Synod, but ultimately decided to keep his hands behind his back.

A central table stood under a suspended brass lightframe, its surface scattered with jeweler’s tools, small resonance gauges, and a half-disassembled aether lens.

Severa slipped a hand into her robe and brought out the quartz. “What do you need?” she asked.

He stepped closer, studying the stone. The milky veins on the quartz still looked as mesmerizing as the first time he saw it. “To emulate sub-zero conditions. Aetheric catalysts, if possible. And . . .” He trailed off, eyes flicking toward the climate wards in the room. “. . . stabilization lattice, if we want to avoid shattering the imprint before it’s released.”

“We might have that,” Severa said without hesitation.

“You sound very sure.”

Severa crossed the room toward a long cabinet, glancing at the brass labels. Kestovar followed. In the end, they found only two of the catalysts he’d listed, and the stabilization lattice was of an older design.

He straightened, holding one of the small crystalline ampoules to the light. “It’s not perfect, but I can make do.”

As he set out the tools, he hesitated again, glancing toward her. “I should warn you—this . . . I’ve never done it in practice before.”

“That’s fine,” Severa said without missing a beat. “If you fail, we’ll just train you until you succeed.”

Kestovar stared at her for a long moment, as if weighing whether that was meant to be encouragement or a threat. He still didn’t know by the time he looked back down at the quartz.

Specimen detected: Cryoflux Quartz — Grade II

Integrity: 99.3%. Residual aetheric activity: stable.

Estimated Rarity: rare ~ legendary

He’d gone all this way without seeing even the shadow of her father the Magistra, and now he got to work with quartz this rare? Could this day get any better?

[New Sidequest Received: “Shards Beneath the Ice”]

Objective: Conduct a 3-point aetheric grain survey on Cryoflux Quartz under coldfield conditions

Recommended tools: sub-zero emulation matrix, fine-tuned aether probe, patience

Estimated completion time: variable, depending on user competence

Reward:

+65% Understanding toward unlocking Aetheric Grain Analysis (Rank I)

+3 Stone Thaumaturgy Mastery Points

Bragging rights (local)

Would you like to accept the quest?

[Yes] [No]

[SYSTEM NOTE: Just do it.]

Aetheric Grain Analysis? That’s the skill Min Hajin’s going to teach me. He gasped. He hadn’t had much time to begin with. This would make things so much easier.

Without another word, Fabrisse reached for the fine-tuned aether probe, fingers closing around the instrument.