I have eaten seventeen thousand, four hundred and twelve pages.
I know this not because I counted them — I am a worm; counting is not something I had previously concerned myself with — but because the moment the spellbook's magic cracked open inside me like a swallowed ember, every meal I had ever consumed rushed back into my mind simultaneously, catalogued and indexed with a precision that felt like someone had installed shelves inside my skull.
Seventeen thousand, four hundred and twelve pages.
And I had understood none of them.
It started, as most things in my life started, with hunger.
The eastern wall of the Aldenmere Grand Library smelled different today. I had learned over the course of my existence — which I now understood to be approximately four years, though I had experienced it simply as an unbroken sequence of eating and darkness — that smell was the first language of books. Vellum aged differently than pressed cotton paper. Ink made from oak galls had a sharp, almost metallic bite. Ink made from lampblack and linseed oil was richer, slower on the tongue, the difference between a stream and a river.
The book in the eastern wall smelled like neither.
It smelled like a storm that hadn't happened yet.
I was not a creature given to hesitation. Hesitation requires imagining a future, and until approximately three minutes ago, I did not do that. I simply moved toward food or away from threat, the same as I had always done, following the warm smell of aged paper through the dark channels I'd carved over years between the plaster and the stone.
The cover was leather — old, almost petrified — and the pages inside were not paper at all but something thinner and stiffer, like dried membrane. Every page crinkled faintly when I touched it, as though it were breathing.
I ate the corner of the first page.
Then I stopped.
This had never happened before. Stopping. I did not stop. Stopping was not part of the process. And yet something in that single bite had introduced into my body a sensation I had no word for, because I had no words for anything, and that wordlessness was itself beginning to feel like a problem I was suddenly aware of.
The closest I can describe it, now that I have language: it felt like a hook, sunk gently but firmly behind my eyes, and something on the other end of that hook was patient and enormous and waiting.
I ate the rest of the page.
The spell on that page was Lux Perpetua — Everlasting Light — a cantrip so elementary that the mages of Aldenmere used it to teach children the concept of mana shaping. It required almost no power. It produced a soft, pale glow that could be sustained indefinitely with the barest trickle of magical focus, a nightlight dressed up in academic Latin.
It was, in the grand taxonomy of magic, profoundly unimpressive.
It remade me entirely.
The mana did not flood in gently. It arrived the way a river arrives when a dam breaks — not as water but as pressure, as the sudden violent existence of space that had previously been absence. I had no mana before that moment. A worm has no more use for mana than it does for opinions. But the spell had been compressed into that membrane-page with extraordinary care, folded and refolded by a mage who had spent thirty years of his life — I somehow knew this, the residue of his intent still warm in the ink — ensuring that even the most magically inert student could absorb it safely.
He had not written it for worms.
He had not not written it for worms, either, and that technicality saved my life.
My body did not ask my permission.
The mana found chambers in me that I hadn't known existed, the way water finds the shape of whatever vessel holds it, except water does not generate heat, and water does not cause the tissue it fills to glow. A pale luminescence crawled along my skin from the inside — not light I was producing but light I was leaking, mana seeping through me faster than my newly-formed channels could contain it. I felt the membrane-page beneath me char slightly where my body made contact. I felt my nervous system rewrite its own priorities, violently and without consultation, and I felt — for one genuinely terrible moment — as though I were going to come apart at the seams like a book that had been shelved too tightly for too long.
Then something in me caught.
Channels narrowed. Pressure equalized. The glow dimmed to something faint and manageable, a thin luminescence visible only if you happened to be looking at the right angle through a crack in the plaster, and I felt, for the first time, the difference between sensation and perception.
And then the seventeen thousand pages hit me all at once.
It was not pleasant.
Volume III of Aldenmere's Civic Charter Amendments, 1203-1218 AD.A Comparative Study of Migratory Patterns in Northern Shore Birds.Twelve Elegies for the House of Brennavar.On the Proper Maintenance of Irrigation Channels in Clay Soil.The Collected Love Letters of Countess Mira Volshenko, Unsent.A Child's Introduction to Celestial Navigation.Fungal Taxonomy of the Damp Provinces, Volume Seven.
They arrived not as text but as understanding, which was somehow worse. I did not have to read them. I simply knew them, the way you know the shape of a room you've been standing in for years.
The Countess Mira Volshenko had been in love with her husband's secretary for eleven years and had never told him and the letters stopped abruptly in the winter of 1241.
I held that fact for a moment — not because it was useful, but because I could not immediately put it down. I did not yet have a word for what I was experiencing. I would later understand it as the first time I had ever held someone else's interiority inside my own. Eleven years of a woman's life, compressed into unsent letters, now resident in a worm in a wall. It seemed important to acknowledge this had happened, even if I could not yet articulate why.
I filed it carefully and moved on.
This, I would later understand, was not intelligence. Not yet.
What I had was coherence — the ability to hold things in relation to one another, to allow one fact to cast light on another. Intelligence would come. Coherence was the precondition. The difference, I would eventually conclude, was the difference between a library with books and a library with a catalogue: the same contents, made suddenly navigable.
I lay very still for a long time.
Above me, muffled through plaster and wood and the accumulated weight of approximately twelve thousand remaining volumes, I could hear the library breathing. Footsteps. The soft percussion of books being moved from one surface to another. A voice — a man's voice, older, with the slightly nasal quality of someone who had spent decades in dry air — saying something I could not quite resolve into words.
I focused.
"...third volume of the Kellian Histories is missing its back board again. I've told the restoration guild twice. Twice, Penelope. You'd think they were being asked to—"
"Worms," said a second voice. Younger, female, and considerably more alarmed. "Master Greaves. There are worm trails in the restricted section wall again."
A pause.
"How bad?"
"They go all the way to the Aldric Collection."
Another pause, longer and more expressive.
"Get the powder."
I knew, because I had eaten a volume on household pest management sometime in my second year, exactly what powder they meant. Desiccant compound mixed with ground limestone and something deeply unpleasant derived from a plant whose name I now knew in three languages. It was not fatal to a bookworm under normal circumstances.
Under normal circumstances, bookworms did not leak mana.
The desiccant, I understood with sudden cold clarity, would not merely discourage me. Applied to a body currently running unsecured magical current through biological tissue never designed to carry it, the compound would interact with the excess mana the way a lightning rod interacts with a storm. It would be, to use a term I had just acquired from a medical text on the treatment of mage-burn, catastrophic.
The reasonable thing to do was retreat. Go back to the western wall, which smelled only of municipal records and three centuries of property tax documentation. Dull. Safe. Free of desiccant and librarians with sufficient cause to use it.
I looked at the remaining pages of the spellbook.
There were forty-one of them.
I thought — and the fact that I was thinking at all was still so new and strange that the act of doing it felt like walking on a surface I wasn't sure would hold — about what forty-one more pages might mean. The first page had given me a cantrip, a complete mana system, and what appeared to be the foundational architecture of a self. The arithmetic implied by forty-one further pages was the kind that made retreat feel, for the first time in my life, like a cost rather than an instinct.
Above me, footsteps moved toward the restricted section.
I ate the second page.
Lux Perpetua had been a cantrip.
The second page was the theoretical framework underlying the entire school of Illumination magic — the reason light spells worked, the metaphysics of mana-as-wave-versus-particle, a fourteen-step logical proof that photonic magic was merely a specific application of spatial distortion, and a footnote suggesting that the author had serious reservations about the field's foundational assumptions and wished he were allowed to publish them somewhere other than a footnote.
My coherence did something I can only describe as deepening. A second level of shelving, installed below the first.
Not a number appearing in the air in front of me. I had eaten enough game design theory texts to understand that fantasy required the conceit of floating statistics, but the actual experience of gaining intelligence is less dramatic and more unsettling: it is the sudden awareness of how many things you were wrong about, arriving all at once, like a debt collector who has been very patient and has now decided he is done being patient.
I had been wrong about a great many things.
The most pressing: I had assumed, in the wordless animal way I had assumed things before sixty seconds ago, that the library was simply the world. It was large, it was full of food, it was occasionally hostile. World enough.
I now understood it was a building.
I now understood buildings existed inside cities.
I now understood cities existed inside a political and geographic framework of considerable complexity that I had, it turned out, excellent documentation on, having eaten three separate historical surveys and one atlas whose maps I now held in my memory with cartographic precision.
I was a worm.
In a library.
In the city of Aldenmere.
In the Kingdom of Velhast.
On a continent called the Settled Reach.
In a world that had, as best I could determine from available scholarship, absolutely no idea that one of its bookworms had just become the most well-read creature in the eastern provinces, and was currently glowing faintly behind the wainscoting of its most prestigious archive.
The footsteps were getting closer.
I ate the third page.
The first two pages had been complete.
The third page was not.
It contained a diagram — concentric circles connected by seventeen lines of carefully annotated script — that began at the top of the page and terminated, without warning or resolution, at the bottom. Not because the author had run out of room. The notation suggested deliberate incompletion. A shape designed to be finished not on the page but in the medium of a mind capable of holding all seventeen lines simultaneously and supplying the eighteenth from first principles.
Until sixty seconds ago, I would not have qualified.
I looked at the diagram. I looked at the seventeen lines. I felt the shape of what was missing the way you feel the shape of a word you cannot quite remember — not absent, but withheld, hovering at the edge of what I was.
I ate the page anyway.
The eighteenth line wrote itself.
Not in ink. Not on paper. In whatever part of me had recently learned to hold a woman's eleven years of unsent love with something resembling care — there, in that new and surprisingly spacious room inside myself, a line of fire appeared and stayed, and the diagram closed, and the thing it described — an axiom, not a spell — came fully into being for the first time since the mage who began it had died, three hundred years ago, without ever finding a mind that could complete his work.
I did not yet know what I had just become a component of.
I only knew the footsteps had stopped outside the wall.
Something brushed against the plaster — a hand, or a tool, or the careful deliberate motion of someone who had done this before and was not in a hurry because they believed they were dealing with a worm.
Then, through the hairline crack above me, fine white powder began to sift down in a slow and patient curtain.
The desiccant hit the mana leaking off my skin and the reaction was immediate: not pain, not yet, but a sudden sharp awareness of every channel the second page had carved into me, lit up all at once like a map of roads seen from a very great height. My body, interpreting this correctly as threat, did the worst possible thing.
It answered.
The glow brightened.
I had thirty-nine pages left and no hands, and a dead mage's unfinished life resident in whatever I was becoming.
The dust was still falling.
And the light was now visible — I was nearly certain of it — through every crack in the plaster within six inches of where I lay.
I ate the fourth page.