For a moment, all Vera could do was stare. It seemed so impossible. The duke, fallen? And after all that fanfare about his blackfire magic. Something must be very wrong.
Scarbeaks had a small amount of venom that they spit at their more unruly prey, but as far as Vera observed, the duke hadn't let any of them get close enough.
Well, not close enough to attack. Her mouth dried as she replayed the frenzy of the past few minutes in her mind. The first scarbeak that attacked. He had plunged his sword into its abdomen, and blood had sprayed. If some of the scarbeak's insides had gotten into one of his wounds, the venom might have entered his bloodstream.
Vera was still stranded up high in the tree. She scanned the sky for the celestial warrior. It remained hovering in the air, eyes fixed on some distant point she could not see.
"Hey, you're supposed to protect your summoner, remember?" she called. "Help me down from here."
The warrior did not turn, nor even glance her way. It continued to hover, and after a moment, it shot off across the sky.
"Where are you going?" she shouted after it.
The memory of her command resurfaced. Eliminate all scarbeaks, was the first part of it.
Vera leaned further against the trunk of the tree in defeat. Oh no. It's going to hunt down every scarbeak on the island, isn't it?
Witherstone would be bad enough. She could only prey that it didn't interpret her command as all scarbeaks in the world. If so, she would never see it again.
Vera grit her teeth. She could dwell on that later. For now, she needed to get herself out of this tree before the venom worked its way through the duke's entire system.
The branch where she sat was strong, but the others were not. This was about to be perilous, and she had no upper body strength to her name.
I suppose I was the one who asked him to come back to the island, she considered. I can't just leave him.
Vera bit her tongue in an attempt to regulate her breathing. She inched as close to the tree trunk as possible, then began to pick her way down. The first branch swayed when she gripped it, and she gasped. She was just barely able to put her foot on the one below to relieve her weight before it snapped.
Slowly, she made her way down the tree. Both arms screamed with pain and they shook with the effort. More than once her grip slipped and she nearly dropped to the ground.
I never should've left. I should've stayed in the Archive, she thought again and again. The only thing that kept her going was that tiny, stubborn spark of indignation. The duke had saved her from being snatched up into the sky. There was no way in all the hells that she was going to remain indebted to that man.
When her feet were at last on solid ground, she stood for a moment, hands still braced against the trunk of the conifer as she fought to catch her breath. She swallowed, desperate for some water. But that would have to wait. Vera turned to face the duke, and found a new obstacle in her way.
The dark-furred wolf creature had fused back together to its original, towering self, and it was standing directly in her path. When she took a step forward, it released a deep, guttural growl that vibrated through Vera's bones until her fingers were numb.
She froze, raising both hands up in surrender.
"It's all right," she whispered. "I won't hurt him."
The creature snarled in response. If it understood her words, it did not believe them.
Vera lowered her left hand, the one with darkened veins from spellcasting, and held it out. The creature stiffened as she did, and Vera held her breath. There was a very real possibility it was about to rip her hand off.
"I can help," she said in a quiet voice. "I promise."
The wolf creature sniffed her hand. It must've had a talent for identifying certain types of magic, because now it seemed to believe her, sitting back on its haunches and flattening its ears in distress. It likely identified the residue beneath her skin to be of the healing variety.
The creature whined, much higher pitched than Vera expected from something of its size. Vera had to stand up on tiptoe to give its lowered head a pat.
"Oh, you're just a big puppy, aren't you?"
Many years ago, when Vera was still in her schooling, Sybil had found a hunting dog outside of the Archive that had been abandoned when its adventurer master fled the island without it. Sybil had hidden it in her room for a week, where she and Vera looked after it and snuck it food from the dining hall.
It took three days for a support worker to hear its barking and report it. Sybil had pleaded with Idonea to let her keep it. When Idonea explained that an animal was a hazard to the Archive's collection, Sybil had bawled her eyes out until the Head Librarian offered a compromise. She allowed Sybil to choose exactly which of the world's royal palaces the dog would be sent to live in, ensuring it the best life possible.
Vera didn't remember which palace Sybil had picked, but the duke's massive canine reminded her of that old dog. Something in its glossy black eyes begged her not to let its master leave it.
Vera's eyes trailed from her own aching wrist to the two summoned books that were still splayed across the ground. After working with two unfamiliar magics in quick succession, she doubted she had the stamina to cast more healing magic.
She stepped around the wolf creature and kneeled beside the duke. He was not unconscious, rather squinting up toward her as if he could not quite determine what he was looking at.
"You alive?" she asked.
The duke's response was muddled, but still understandable. "Yes. No thanks to you and that spear-wielding nuisance."
"We can argue about it later. I think you've been exposed to the scarbeaks' venom." She reached for his cloak. "Can you sit up?"
The duke lurched away, as if her touch was an additional poison. "I'll do it myself." He managed, with considerable effort, to prop himself up on his elbows and shift so he was sitting up against the tree, scowling all the while. "Why do those damn birds have venom, anyway?"
Vera shrugged. "Ask a beastiary, not me."
The duke eyed her with evident suspicion. "Are you going to cast more healing magic?"
"If I have to," Vera said, "but I'll be the next to collapse if I try it too soon." She chewed on the inside of her lip for a moment, considering. Her other method was unconventional, and would spell a world of hell if she got caught using it, but she saw few other options. "I have another idea."
The duke's brows lowered. "What, can your bibliomancy heal?"
Vera shook her head. "Not exactly. Bibliomancy deals with classifications assigned to certain items within the Archive. I won't be the one healing you, per se, but the Conservatory will be."
"Huh?"
Vera sighed, her patience hanging on by a thread. "Do you want me to waste time explaining it to you, or do you want me to get the venom out of your bloodstream? You kept lighting yourself up with that soul-sucking fire. I'm betting that the venom is attacking the parts where your soul is thinner. We don't have time for a lecture."
The duke's eyes hardened, and his frown deepened. He was clearly displeased that Vera had figured out how blackfire magic worked.
Vera tilted her head in sudden realization. The blackfire had leeched the color from flesh and vegetation alike. The duke's hair was likely not white by nature, but bleached from a lifetime of using his own soul as fuel for his magic.
The duke shook his head. "I'm not letting you do––" he waved a hand in her direction, "––whatever it is you're about to do."
Vera crossed her arms, glancing back at the wolf creature. It continued to sit nearby, its tongue hanging to the side as it panted to express its stress.
"If I had ill intent, your dog would've killed me by now," Vera remarked.
"Just… tell me…"
The duke slumped to the side. Vera darted forward grabbing him by the collar of his cloak before he could hit the ground.
"Hey, hey, no passing out. It's probably not good for your vulnerable soul, or whatever." She released a breath, giving him a desperate shake. "I'm not a doctor. I just know how to use bibliomancy to fix things, and you clearly need fixing."
The duke cracked one eye open. Exhaustion had shot the white part through with veins of red.
His voice was faint. "Fine."
Vera let go of his collar. What came next would be a stretch of her ability, but a familiar stretch. She no longer had the capacity to perform anything other than bibliomancy. She was going to tap into the Applied Thaumaturgy magic that ran the Archive, then redefine the duke's body as a "damaged record" so the system would route the maintenance magic into him as if he was part of the building's infrastructure.
The danger was not with Vera's ability to do this. She knew she could. The biggest risk was if she got caught.
Vera stood and scoured through the trodden undergrowth until she found her satchel. She pulled out a catalogue card and quill, snatched the piece of retrieval shelf from the ground, then returned to the duke.
She kneeled and pressed her uninjured palm against the damp ground. "Locate subsystem 'Preservation Matrix', live branch connection."
The edges of her paper slip began to flicker. Bibliomancy that was connected to the Silent Archive could be performed anywhere on Witherstone, but it took a few moments as she was attempting to pull metadata from outside the walls of its usual domain.
Next came the forgery. Her left writing hand ached as she scribbled down the new ID.
Case Study: Bodily Restoration, Field Instance.
When she was done, she looked back to the duke, frowning. He was not going to like this next part.
"Give me your hand," she said.
"Why?"
"Or your arm, or your foot. I need a stretch of skin to stick this slip of paper to."
"I don't––"
Vera heaved a deep, heavy sigh, leaned forward, and snatched up his hand. It was larger than hers, and twice as cold. She flipped it so his palm was facing the ground, then laid the paper across the top of it.
"No arguing," she said. "You already agreed to let me do this."
"Which I am regretting," he hissed.
Despite the derision in his tone, the duke didn't move. He likely didn't have the strength to. Vera chose to ignore all protestations until her task was complete.
One hand still holding his, and the other touching the index card, she began to speak the next bibliomatic sequence. "Define object class: Archive asset. Condition: Compromised integrity. Access mode: Auto-repair."
The white shade of the paper faded into something transparent as it embedded itself into his skin. In a blink, her handwriting had become a faint tattoo on the back of his hand.
The duke snatched it away, holding it up to examine. "What did you just do to me?"
Vera continued to ignore him. She touched the ground again, where she had invoked the initial command.
"Retrieve corrective protocol from Applied Thaumaturgy, Preservation layer."
The surrounding leaves shook as the ground began to vibrate. Thin strands of golden light crawled up from the soil and wrapped themselves around the duke's hand. He tried to shake them off, but they were not quite physical. When his expression darkened and he clenched his jaw, Vera leaned forward to grab his wrist and stop him.
"Don't even think about using blackfire to burn those off. It might travel back to the Conservatory and light up the entire Archive."
At that, he raised a brow. "Light it up?"
Vera adamantly shook her head. "No Archive, no Blackfire Codex, and no healing for you."
The duke made a sour face, at which Vera had to restrain herself from scoffing. She was trying not to revel in it, but he presently looked a lot less like the feared "Duke of Ruin", and a lot more like that weak, abandoned dog Sybil once found.
She released his wrist. The veins on his hand glowed as the maintenance flow began and the Archive's magic worked to eradicate the contamination from its "damaged asset." Since she had started this process early, it didn't take long for the glow to fade, the strands to retreat back into the soil, and Vera's writing to vanish from his skin.
The duke flexed his hand, then his other, as if assessing that everything was in order. Once satisfied, he pushed himself to his feet. The wolf creature leaped up from where it was sitting and trotted over, giving his cloak a thorough sniff. The duke patted its head.
Then he turned to tower over where Vera still kneeled, eyes narrowed in displeasure. "You are now going to tell me exactly what you just did."