The interior of the building wasn’t anything like the library in the dungeon.

Instead, it looked more like the surrounding buildings.

Cracked.

Crumbling.

Empty.

There were glass-less windows that let in just enough light to stop his darkvision circle from activating. Still didn’t stop the space from looking gloomy. The dark corners and pools of shadow meant that the prickling feeling of being watched grew all the more unsettling.

Kaldalis walked through the front door, swallowing his fear. The room beyond was large. Imposing. The ceiling was fifteen feet tall, and the room was about thirty feet square.

He imagined that, for the diminutive Lataxinans, this was an enormous space. But it was made larger to him because it was devoid of furniture. It was unlikely that this had always been just a big stone box.

Had this place been full of rotted-out shelves? Tables?

Where had they gone?

Maybe there had been wooden interior walls that rotted away.

He crouched down cautiously in a pool of the twilight that came in through one of the western-facing windows. Squinting at the floor, he imagined there was a darker area where part of the stone had some long-lasting furniture on it that had rotted away slowly. It was too dark to be sure, though, and in the absence of an obvious way to verify any suspicions that might arise, he just had to move on.

At the far end of the room there were a few openings in the stone wall. Two of them were dark, but Kaldalis could see light at the end of a hallway through the door on the far left, and so he made his way cautiously in that direction. As soon as he was in the pitch-blackness of the hallway, the prickling feeling of being watched started to fade, and he felt a little more comfortable as he crept down the hall.

He’d expected his darkvision circle to start working in the hall, but it didn’t. Only mildly concerning. Kaldalis crouched down and checked the floor ahead of himself as he made his way forward. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, so he just told himself he was making sure there wasn’t a huge hole in the floor for him to fall in.

Eventually he found himself in a back room. It was much smaller than the one he’d left behind, with the right side enclosed by interior walls that cut the room down to only about ten by ten feet. There was a large window against the left wall, and Kaldalis carefully peeked out.

There wasn’t much of a view - just a narrow alleyway between the opening and the ruins of the building across the way.

But the space was large enough that he could see the sky, and it let in enough of the twilight sun to see.

The north wall had a set of cracked stone stairs set into it, and Kaldalis made his way towards them. There was no railing along the side, and he considered them for a moment before beginning his ascent.

“Stay down here until I get to the top,” he whispered to Dalgaard. “I don’t want these collapsing under me.”

“Got it,” they said, turning and putting their back to the wall next to the foot of the stairs. “Just be careful, okay?”

Kaldalis carefully ascended the stairs. There was a sound of grinding stone on about a third of the steps, but nothing more dangerous than a little sprinkle of gravel came of it. One of the stairs shifted by almost three inches, and he nearly toppled over, but an instinctive flick of his tail kept him on his feet.

The room up above was another larger space. It was thirty feet wide along the back wall, and twenty feet long reaching back towards the front of the building. The roof of the building was riddled with holes, and the floor was littered with lumps of stone beneath each one. It let a little more light in, and Kaldalis could see much more clearly in here.

The imagined darker spots on the ground floor were here, clear and visible in the dying light of the day. They ringed the walls and were long rectangular shapes around the middle of the room.

“This was a library,” Kaldalis said quietly as he beckoned Dalgaard up the stairs behind him. “These marks were shelves. But this one wasn’t spared the elements. Why? Because it’s aboveground?”

“What?” Dalgaard said when they caught up.

“This was a library,” he repeated, “just like the one in the dungeon. You can see where the furniture was. But this stuff all rotted away.”

“So what does that mean?”

Kaldalis hesitated, mulling over the question in his head. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I only know that it reinforces a lot of what we already knew. A library in a tiny little village like this? These people were really devoted to academic pursuits.”

“If academic pursuits gave me superpowers,” Dalgaard said with a smirk, “I’d have been a lot better about doing my homework, too.”

“I’m not sure if it means there’s a power to be learned here or not, though. We’ve only been in one library. We’ve only been in one ruin. A single data point isn’t enough to base predictions on.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Time is wasting.” Kaldalis frowned at the room, as if showing disappointment would somehow answer all of his questions. “I just want to see what’s in this building, and then we can move on. If there’s a tablet here, we can spread the word and get everyone a new toy. If there’s not, then we can tell the researchers and see if that helps them figure something out about the lataxinans.”

The kid said nothing, so Kaldalis made his way across the room towards the front of the building again. As he made his way past the stains in the floor where shelves had once stood, he wondered what oceans of knowledge had been lost to the ravages of time here.

How many scrolls had crumbled to dust on the very spot he was treading on?

How many didn’t have other copies anywhere else on the island? Or on the planet?

How much knowledge had been lost forever?

Actually, probably none. This was all inside a videogame. Monsoon had carefully designed this place, right? They probably built these ruins pixel by pixel just a few months ago. There had never been a book in this place. Any actually valuable lore existed somewhere physically.

Monsoon would never generate valuable writing and then destroy it with no other way of finding it in the world. That would necessitate paying a writer and then not using the product of their labor. It would be a wasteful business practice.

Kaldalis wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.

At the far end of the room there was only one empty doorway, and unlike the last, the hall beyond had no light at the end of it. Kaldalis picked his way carefully down it, feeling ahead of himself in the darkness. His heart leaped into his throat when his fingertips brushed stone in front of him. And then again when Dalgaard ran into the back of him.

“Careful,” he hissed.

“Sorry,” Dalgaard whispered back. “I’m trying to stay close like you said.”

“There’s a wall here.” Kaldalis felt his way up the stone. “Or maybe a door.”

For a split second, Kaldalis expected some sarcastic remark from his companion. Some reminder that they were snarky or a badass. But their silence reminded him that this was a pretty stressful situation, and it was nice to have it be taken so seriously.

He felt around for a moment, tracing the darkness in front of himself with both hands. Kaldalis quickly discovered that it was, in fact, a door, and so he started to push against it. He didn’t actually expect it to open - he remembered having to force open the stone door in the library at the end of the dungeon, but it slid open easily with just a little more pressure.

The door opened into darkness, and he squinted into it. He’d expected a window, but with no such luck, there wasn’t really anything he could do. Kaldalis thought about his inventory, but opening it up in the dark didn’t do him any good. Even if his UI wasn’t obscured by the darkness, he didn’t really have anything for this situation.

He could try and improvise a torch with whatever wood and plant matter he had left over from gathering quests, but not in pitch blackness.

Right before he was about to give up, night fell. He could tell because suddenly the darkness was replaced by the globe of vision around himself.

“Fucking finally,” he muttered. “The trigger for that is so goddamn sloppy.”

Maybe his stream would complain and they’d get some sort of low-light trigger. Although Kaldalis wasn’t sure if that kind of change would be welcome or terrifying. Just another reminder that he was a man in a box.

Being watched by many.

For entertainment.

Kaldalis squared his shoulders and continued on.

The room ahead was an enclosed room with no windows, obviously. And it was surprisingly small for how much of the building he knew was still ahead of him, based on what he’d seen of the first floor. It was about seven feet on a side, and there were three stone structures clinging to the floor.

It took Kaldalis a moment to recognize them. They were the bases of stone tablets, like the ones he was looking for. Instead of stretching up into the tablets he sought, though, these bases ended abruptly with a jagged edge of broken stone.

There were two other things most notably absent compared to the tablet room at the bottom of the dungeon.

Obviously, the first thing was that the door wasn’t barred from the inside. He hadn’t had to break in.

The second was related; there was no skeleton inside.

“Fuck,” Dalgaard said, peering into the room over Kaldalis’s shoulder.

“Can’t argue with that,” Kaldalis said. “But this does tell us something.”

“There should be a set of tablets in every library?” they asked in a small voice.

“Should be, yes,” Kaldalis confirmed. “Also, I’m pretty sure this means that the power of the tablets are the reason the old library was intact. But how? And why?”

“I mean, magic seems like the obvious answer,” Dalgaard said. “It’s Monsoon we’re talking about. They’re not that smart.”

“You aren’t wrong, but there’s something else at work here. In the library in the dungeon, the door to this room was sealed and barred.” Kaldalis looked around the little room, and saw the metal brackets that would have supported a bar - pitted and rusted to shit - sticking out of the wall. “This one wasn’t.”

“No remains, either,” Dalgaard observed, pointing to the floor around the stone bases set into the ground. “No crumbled bits or gravel.”

“The tablets didn’t wear down or break by themselves,” Kaldalis said. “They were stolen.”

As soon as he said that, there was a crashing sound from behind and below them. They both whirled and Kaldalis wasn’t even aware he had moved until his arm had already pushed Dalgaard behind himself. His mind raced analyzing the sound as it reverberated off of the empty stone walls of the library around him. It was stone. Stone hitting stone. From behind them. The stairs. Something had just followed them up the stairs and slipped on one of the loose steps.

The hairs on the back of his neck started to prickle again with the sensation of being watched.