I reached the second floor of the library with all the stealth and grace of a burglar who’d just realized halfway up the stairs that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t fully thought this through.
The chaos below faded into a muffled, frenzied hum—like a hive of bees trying to file taxes—while the upper level stretched before me in quiet, studious calm.
It felt like stepping from a hurricane into a museum where even the dust motes had performance anxiety. A handful of Velvets sat scattered around low study tables, speaking in hushed whispers.
None of them paid me any mind, which was good, because the last thing I needed was someone asking why a half-sleep-deprived Drudgewhore was haunting the aisles like some flamboyant poltergeist.
I smirked to myself, a quiet little curl of satisfaction, before slipping between the shelves with the kind of purposeful swagger that said: yes, I belong here, absolutely, please do not verify this claim.
The shelves towered in dark polished wood, the scent of old parchment and something slightly metallic hanging in the air like the ghost of ink long dried.
I trailed my hand along the spines as I walked, letting my fingers brush over embossed letters and gilded titles. Engineering. Architecture. Chemistry. Biology. I paused at that one—no thank you, I’d had enough biological upheaval in my life recently to last several reincarnations—then moved on.
A few shelves further and I found the odd ones: magical studies with names that felt overly dramatic even for this place. Azuro’s Theories of Spirit Severance. Foundational Curses and Their Implications on Interplanar Trade. Runic Symmetries and Their Chaotic Consequences. Whoever stocked this place clearly oscillated between brilliance and breakdown, maybe both at once.
What I needed was... ah. There. A plaque, hammered into a polished beam of wood with the kind of confidence only bureaucrats possessed:
"Magical runes and artifacts."
Perfect. My best bet. My only bet, really. And I was already running on borrowed time.
I followed the row, weaving deeper into the library until the shelves abruptly stopped at a dead end. At the wall, before a tall window, sat a large desk absolutely drowning in a chaotic sprawl of papers, ink pots, quills, scattered books, torn diagrams, and at least three identical mugs of cold tea that looked like they’d given up on living sometime last week.
I stared. There was a particular type of mess one only recognized after sleeping in close quarters with someone like Iskanda: a controlled, deliberate chaos, the kind that said: I know exactly where everything is and if you touch one sheet of paper I will tear out your soul through your throat.
This was absolutely one of those.
I stepped closer—hesitant at first, then unable to help myself—as the diagrams came into view. They all showcased the same ruby Iskanda carried, sketched with intense detail, fractal cuts and luminous shading, like the diagrams themselves had been done by someone in the midst of an existential spiral.
I sifted deeper into the mess, fingertips brushing over diagrams, annotations, arrows, crossed-out arrows, angry scribbles, entire paragraphs written sideways like she’d run out of patience with gravity.
The notes were relentless. The handwriting sharp, compressed, angry. Gods above, Iskanda wrote like she wanted to stab the paper.
And there it was again—that name. Merlin. I felt my breath snag in my throat, a little jolt of recognition sparking up my spine. She had mentioned him before, once, and only once—in that offhand, ominous way she used whenever she was referencing something she didn’t want me asking questions about.
It didn’t stop there.
There were notes about "resetting the curse," which alone made my stomach twitch, followed by more unsettling tidbits like "synchronization instability." Which, if I was understanding the tone correctly, was the magically polite way of saying explosive disaster waiting to happen.
"You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me," I whispered, the words escaping on a thin ribbon of disbelief that immediately became a prayer, a threat, and a resignation letter all at once.
But before I could process, panic, or enact the highly professional plan of flipping the desk, stealing each note, and vanishing into the shadows—something happened.
A voice slid into the room behind me. It didn’t echo. It didn’t hesitate. It was simply there, coiled in the air with the patient finality of doom.
"What are you doing here?"
I spun so fast I nearly knocked over an entire stack of papers. And there she was. Iskanda. Standing right behind me, hands on her hips, her face carved into a quiet expression of condemnation that said very clearly: you are dead, you are done, I hope you wrote a will because this is the end of your narrative arc.
I swear I nearly shit myself. Saints above, I hadn’t even sensed her presence. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t natural. This was Iskanda.
My brain panicked, sprinting through excuses, lies, half-truths, full lies, bold lies, spiritual lies, anything—but all of them collided like drunkards in an alley before dissolving into one miserable attempt.
"I—I—I—was just—this isn’t—okay listen, it’s not what it looks like!" I blurted, words tripping over themselves like they were trying to escape my mouth before I could strangle them. "I wasn’t snooping, I swear, I was actually—uh—checking for... infestations! Yes! A rare species of... uh... parchment-eating moth! Dunny mentioned them! Horrible little things, very destructive, very, very tiny, you can’t see them unless you hold the paper up to the light and squint like this—"
I demonstrated, idiotically, with a scrap of paper.
"And obviously the magical runes section is the most vulnerable because, uh, the glyph ink is like... a delicacy to them! High protein! Very sought-after! I mean you wouldn’t want a bunch of cursed documents suddenly bursting into flame, melting, or coming alive in the night just because of a moth, right?"
Iskanda stared for half a second. Then burst into laughter. Not polite laughter. Not a chuckle. A laugh. Genuine, loud, delighted. She tilted her head back, dark hair spilling down her shoulders, and bellowed like the world’s funniest joke had just been delivered directly into her veins.
I stood there uselessly.
"Well now," she said, voice a warm purr laced with amusement. "I didn’t expect you to crumble that quickly."
I glared weakly. "I panicked."
"So I observed."
I opened my mouth to defend myself. I really did. I prepared a whole speech about scholarly curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, noble intentions, and my right as a living being to look at things. Then I closed my mouth. Opened it again. Said nothing. Closed it again. At that point, dying seemed like the only respectable option left.
Finally, I managed, "How—how did you know I’d be here?"
She gave me a flat expression. "Oh, sweet child," Iskanda sighed, "You disappeared before dawn without so much as a whisper. Dunny has been watching me like a feral bat for weeks. And he snuck off last night without a word of explanation. It was only a matter of time before the two of you pulled something like this."
I flinched. Of course she’d noticed. Dunny wasn’t subtle. I wasn’t subtle. None of this was subtle. We were idiots. Idiots guided only by desperation and dumb hope. Saints above.
"It seems," she added lightly, "you’ve taken a sudden interest in my artifact. If you wanted to see it..." She turned her hand, letting the ruby fall into view on its chain, swaying gently like a hypnotic pendulum. "You could have simply asked."
I froze.
Gods above, she’d brought it with her.
I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing until a little gasp escaped me, embarrassingly tiny, like a mouse realizing it had wandered into a dragon’s nest.
My mind snagged all at once on the sight of that ruby dangling between Iskanda’s fingers, because Saints above that thing was glowing. Actually glowing. Not just shiny. Not just polished. This was the smugly supernatural kind of glowing that screamed You have no idea what I can do, mortal.
My voice squeaked out before I could stop it, something half-formed like, "Is that really—?" only for Iskanda to cut through my words with the gentle mercy of a guillotine.
"Yes," she said, utterly deadpan, utterly casual, utterly ruining any chance I had of maintaining the flimsy lie I’d been preparing. "This was Merlin’s relic. His original means of inciting my curse."
She said this like she was talking about a lost hairpin. Like Merlin was some middle-aged uncle who misplaced his favorite fishing rod. Meanwhile, I was frozen with my heart in my throat, because Merlin was not a name people tossed around lightly.
I could tell, Merlin was one of those names—ancient, ominous, and inevitably attached to stories involving curses, cosmic meddling, and questionable ethics.
I blinked, opened my mouth, blinked again. "You... sorry—what? You got that from where?"
"The Sea of Hollows," she said, as if that explained anything. "Picked it up on a scouting mission a couple years back."
"The sea of what now?" I blurted. The name alone sounded like an eldritch mistake.
Iskanda waved her hand dismissively, rolling her eyes. "That’s not important right now."
Which meant it was monumentally important, but she was choosing not to elaborate because my sanity was a low-priority consideration. Fine. Whatever. I could file that away for later, somewhere between "things that haunt me in my sleep" and "things Quentin cries about."
I took a breath—an actual inhale this time—and forced my tone into something borderline confident. "Right. So. I guess your big plan is... what? To reverse the curse?"
She didn’t answer immediately, and that little pause told me more than any speech could. Then she nodded once, firm but frustrated. "Yes, although I’ve had no luck so far," she admitted.
And Saints damn me, but I smirked. I couldn’t help it. The expression rose on my face the same way a rash does—unwanted, but unmistakably mine.
"Why would you even want to get rid of the curse in the first place?" I asked, leaning a little too smugly into the question because that curse happened to give her... well. Certain advantages. Advantages that had been repeatedly introduced to my peripheral vision in ways that were frankly unfair to my heart rate.
Her laugh burst out instantly—loud, sharp, and inappropriately delighted. "Oh please," she scoffed. "Do you have any idea how inconvenient it is to be hauling around this massive hunk of meat all the time?"
I choked. She’d said that with the casual severity of someone complaining about a broken shoelace. Meanwhile, my brain short-circuited into a sizzling pile of inappropriate images and overheated metaphors.
"I—well—" I stammered like an idiot because this was deeply above my comedic pay grade.
She raised an eyebrow. "Heavy. Always in the way. Completely unruly in the winter weather. Sometimes it swings when I don’t want it to. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?"
I snorted before I could stop myself. Actually snorted. A tiny, foolish little laugh sputtered out of me as I awkwardly scratched the back of my neck, trying very, very hard to downplay the sudden urge to drop dead from embarrassment.
"Okay, fair," I conceded, shaking my head as if any amount of movement could expel that cursed mental imagery. "I... yep. That sounds like a problem."
She gave me a look—one of those smug, feline smirks that meant she knew exactly what images were clogging my thoughts. And that was precisely my cue to leave. Or flee. Or pretend I had somewhere far, far more important to be.
Which I absolutely did.
My reason for sneaking here was spiraling down the drain faster than I could blink, and if I didn’t get away now I’d forget entirely that I had another mission to fulfill.
I pivoted on my heel, laughing a little too brightly, a little too nervously. "Well! Fascinating stuff! Really illuminating, but I should probably—"
I made it exactly three steps.
Three.
And then her hand clamped onto my shoulder like the hand of some wrathful statue come to life. My soul left my body so fast it probably hit terminal velocity. I froze, one foot still mid-step, looking like a deer caught committing tax fraud.
Her voice was right at my ear, low and maddeningly amused. "Loona," she hummed, "what exactly were you planning to do once you learned about the relic, hmm?"
"Oh... you know... research," I croaked, staring with intense interest at the bookshelf, the floor, the ceiling—anything except her. "Scholarly pursuits. Intellectual curiosity. Being a good student, as usual."
"Mhm." Her grip tightened. "So nothing like, say... stealing it? Gaining a little leverage against me?" Her tone curled around me like a teasing whip.
"...Noooo?" I tried, with the confidence of a toddler caught wrist-deep in the cookie jar.
Her laugh was bright, cruel, and entirely delighted. "Oh Saints, your face is priceless." She stepped around me so I was forced to look at her. "If you’re going to scheme against me, at least have the decency to be good at it."
I wanted to die. Or melt into the floor. Or burst into flames and take the whole room with me. Anything to escape the molten heat flooding my veins.
Then she straightened, tilting her head in contemplation. "You know," she said, "for this kind of behavior... I really ought to punish you."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "Punish me?" I squeaked, because my dignity had already abandoned ship.
Her gaze raked down my body like a physical touch, lingering on my chest, my hips, the tremor in my thighs, and I swear my pulse throbbed in places I didn’t know could throb. My fingers were already moving toward the hem of my skirt before my brain caught up, desperate, shaking, aching to obey.
She stepped closer—way closer—until I could count the faint sea of freckles crossing the bridge of her nose.
"Strip yourself," she murmured, "now."