Ignorance was a sin, some said. Riven could agree that wilful ignorance, or negligence as it was better known, was something to be abhorred. Riven wasn’t very pleased he was still mostly in the dark about the whole Essentier business, and it must have been evident on his face for Viriya had finally taken some pity on him. She’d admitted that yes, he was officially Essentier from now on, though she hadn’t said much else. Too busy, as always. He needed a library, according to her.

Viriya was so kind. Or maybe it was the Scions who were pleased he had finally prayed to them properly and had blessed Riven.

The Deadmage at Welmark had said that all Essentiers were fated to become Deathless, though Rose had denied any such thing. He ought to trust his sister, but it couldn’t hurt to check in the library, could it? All he needed was some information to make sound judgements.

In truth, all he needed was to know he wasn’t going to end up a damn Deadmage.

So first stop after he was done with all the Monastical business was getting to what passed for a library in Providence city. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to a night filled with books and pages, and alone though he might be at home, its familiarity would be much better than a dark room with nothing but books for company.

Well, it would have been just books for company, but Rio decided to insert himself.

“What are you doing here?” Riven asked. He could guess, but really, he was just looking for an excuse to get rid of Rio. If the bastard thought he could get on Riven’s good sides just by being his friendly, funny, languid self, he’d better think again.

“I have nothing better to do this night,” Rio said, “so I thought, why not spend it with a friend?”

“Friend is it?”

“Come now, Riven. I’ve explained myself. Isn’t it time you forgave me already? I still think I was perfectly justified in what I did but I apologize for leaving you when you needed me. Will I now be forgiven?”

“Screw off, Rio.”

Rio sighed, though he didn’t stop following Riven, who hailed a cab on the street beside the monastical. The Septfall was slow, the glittering bits descending like snowflakes, so Riven didn’t need to bother protecting his head. Many chauffeurs hung back, looking to pick up easy fares after a majority of the city’s population had turned up to pay their respects to Glaven. So silly. Riven’s brother wasn’t even dead yet. But that might be the first needles of jealousy talking and Riven shut away that line of thought. Who cared what happened to Glaven?

“Where might you be headed, sir?” the chauffeur asked once Riven had entered and closed the door.

Rio promptly opened the door before Riven could tell the driver to rush off as fast as his cab could go. Riven didn’t move at first. Rio was undaunted. He made to sit right on Riven, who made a sound of profound disgust and jumped to the other side of the car.

“Do you know any good libraries nearby?” Riven asked, trying to keep his voice under control. It was a wonder he wasn’t yet yelling at everything.

The chauffeur glanced at Riven through the overhead mirror, and Riven scowled. Yes, he was perfectly fine. “There ain’t none that can be called good, sir. But I can take you to the Weeping Library. I hear it’s nice there. A little old, but they keep everything there in good shape.”

Riven’s grunt was non-committal, which the chauffeur took as permission to go ahead. The driver started the car, and they were off, the light fall of Sept flicking on the car and making it look as though they were driving through a glittering blizzard.

“What’s at this library of yours?” Rio asked. His tone was conversational and light, as though Riven hadn’t done his best to brush him off. As though Riven wasn’t pissed at him anymore.

“Essentiers,” Riven answered.

“What?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m supposed to be an Essentier now.” Another noise of disgust broke free from Riven’s throat. “I don’t even know what goes on with Essentiers, so I’m trying to find out. That’s not a crime is it?”

“I mean, why not ask an actual Essentier?”

“Who? Everyone’s busy.”

Rio coughed.

“No one has the time to explain anything, sadly,” Riven continued.

Rio coughed again, more noisily this time. It even made the chauffeur look back in concern.

Riven grinned. “If only there was someone to answer all my questions, who wasn’t busy all day doing other things.”

“Okay, Riven,” Rio finally said. “Screw you. I’m right here, aren’t I? You can ask me.”

“I don’t know, can I? You seem awfully busy with your Arnish friends. What if they’re being attacked by a Deadmage as we speak? I think you might want to go and check.”

Rio stared at him.

Riven stared back for a while, then finally sighed. “How much are you getting paid?”

Rio blinked. “Was that what you were hoping to find out in the library of all places? Our pay scale?” Riven stared at him flatly this time until Rio wilted under his gaze. “I’m a Thirdmarked, so I get more than you’re going to start off with. Currently, my weekly salary is four-and-a-half-thousand seals.”

Riven stared for a moment before quickly looking out of the window, where the falling Sept was swirling everywhere. They were getting back into the heart of the city, more buildings appearing out of the gloom as well as more cars and rail carriages. Rio was getting paid nearly four times what Riven’s monthly allowance was. If Riven accepted this Essentier job, no doubt his stipend would be cut and he’d have to live off his salary like normal people.

“What did you get as a Fourthmarked?” he asked.

“Two-and-a-half-thousand seals. Which I think is slightly less than what you might start off with. I’ve head Invigilator Morell raised the salary scale of all Demesne employees, including Essentiers.”

“I’m curious, what was the Arnish opinion after you rescued them and they saw that the Deadmage was still at large. Didn’t they think to help, or were they happy to sit back and watch the rest of us die?”

“That’s a strange direction to go with your questions, don’t you think?”

Riven stared at him, giving nothing away. “I thought you said you were here to answer.”

Rio sighed. He too stared out the window for a while, watching the city go past “The general Arnish disposition isn’t that different from what you saw with the Luminary. They don’t appreciate being attacked, and they have no real intention of helping when it could cost them devastating damage, like with the Deadmage the other day. So, yes they fell back and stayed behind once they were safe. This isn’t their land after all, and they were promised safety.”

The other day hammered into Riven with a dozen different images. The scythes of air, the bodies lying on the ground, Rose and Glaven seemingly damaged beyond repair, and of course, the Resplendian soldiers charging all alone. After the first push, the Arnish troops had retreated.

“You couldn’t convince them to help?” Riven asked. “You couldn’t tell them that this Deadmage would kill everyone if he wasn’t stopped soon?”

“I tried. You can only push your guests so much before they threaten you.”

They lapsed into silence. Riven’s eyes jumped from lamppost to lamppost, the Sept glowing in them brighter than normal as though they were responding to the ones falling outside. He didn’t have the Sept crystal with him—too dangerous to keep around people in case it turned more of them into Deathless somehow—but he needed to find out more about it. And he needed to not let Rio know that it was a piece of a damned Scion. At least, that’s what the Deadmage had said.

“And even after that, you didn’t think to find us again, did you?” Riven asked. “Even after the Arnish had been seen to, you didn’t come back and join the battle, help us neat back that monster.”

“For which I profusely apologize. I think we’re circulating the same thing over and over here.”

Riven sighed. “Well, my point is that you’re a finnicky son of a bitch, and I don’t want to have to do anything with someone like that.”

This time, Rio looked angry. He opened mouth as if to retort with something quite biting, but then he snapped it shut. He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back, his face was smooth. His eyes still smouldered though. “Well, I’m not going to run away now. If you’re going to stick to your feelings and disregard anything that might actually help, that’s your priority. The ball is in your court.”

Riven didn’t answer. The buildings became sparse again, and their car finally came to a stop before a long, low tenement block. There was a steel sign in front with the words “The Weeping Library” painted on it. Riven paid the chauffeur and got out. He hadn’t expected much for a library with such an inauspicious name, but it being a refurbished set of apartments still made his eyes blink quite a bit.

The inside was little better than the worn-down exterior. The walls were drab and unadorned, the floor made of concrete with no carpets to soften it or tiles to make it look decent, and the lone librarian at the far end of the little entrance chamber looked like she was sitting on a toilet instead of a seat that guarded great knowledge.

“Er, is this place still open?” Riven asked.

The librarian had a hawkish face, her nose curves like an eagle’s beak. Her round spectacles with the thick glasses made her eyes look like they were going to pop out. “You think you’d have been able to get in if it was closed, you dumb brat?”

“No need to get nasty,” Riven said, trying to keep his voice even. Equanimity was hard after his little chat with Rio, but he did his best not to let his frustration get the better of him. “I just wanted to look at some books. Can you tell me if there’s a section devoted to Essentiers?”

“You think I have a sections devoted to bankers, hmm? Or the chefs at that horrid dump they call a restaurant two blocks away? Or maybe the garbage collectors?”

Riven sighed. His temple was starting to throb. “All right, I get your point. Then how about mystical or religious things? Like the Scions and the Chosen, or Sept, or the Beyond. Anything on those?”

The librarian pointed one bony hand to the doorway to her left. “Third row on the right. Everything’s shelved under religion. Take your pick. Just don’t come hounding after me if you can’t be bothered to even look.”

“Aren’t you the librarian here? Who else am I supposed to ask if I have trouble.”

“You’re not supposed to ask, sonny boy.” The hawkish woman dissolved into mutters as she stared down at the book she was reading. Riven didn’t catch much, but one was louder and clearer than the rest. “I make this place and free, and that’s not enough for these rascals. Expecting me to be their servant too.”

Riven held back from telling her who he was and marched through the doorway. Rio had fallen into step behind him but he had no comments on his little chat with the librarian.

As Riven had suspected, there wasn’t anyone in there. He went to the first shelve and thumbed through the books before picking on that looked the best. Journey to the Beyond. The benches were rickety and the table bending under the thick tome’s weight, but it all held for now. For now, was all Riven needed.

“I’ve heard of that book!” Rio said, one hand reaching out as though he was itching to touch some vaunted treasure. “It’s really informative on a lot of things and I suggest you look through the whole thing. But, if there’s not enough time, I can point to more specific things in there?”

Riven sighed, then thrust the book at Rio. Good thing he was making himself useful.

Rio wasted no time throwing it open flipping pages fast enough that, had the book been a little older and more destructible-looking, Riven would have worried he’d rip all the pages out at his speed. “Here it is. An interesting section on Essence. Want me to read it for you?”

“I can read, thanks.” Riven took the book from Rio, whose fingers lingered as though they were lightly glued to the pages. “The origin of Essence—the miraculous power that people now call Essence is derived from Sept. There is a similar power used by the Deathless called Spirit that also uses Sept as a source of whatever form of energy it needs to manipulate the world, but Spirit and Essence are two sides of the same coin. It is important to realize that Sept originates in the Beyond. Apart from the fact that it falls from the sky intermittently, there have been numerous times when meteors have been spotted in the great dome that covers the land, and in every, single recorded case, Sept has descended to the mortal realm afterwards, either as a light Septfall or rarely, in vicious Septstorms.”

“Nothing new,” Rio commented.

Riven agreed. He resisted the urge to flip the book over and check the author’s name. Everything written there sounded old, things he already knew or could hypothesize. But there was one connection to be drawn. “If Sept comes from the Beyond, then the origin of Essence, and Spirit too, I guess, is the Beyond.”

“I guess it is,” Rio said, looking carefully at Riven. “Why does that matter?”

“It matters because the Deadmage at Welmark said all Essentiers are supposed to become Deathless when they die.”

“Huh.” Rio didn’t seem bothered by that fact much. “Well, we do have Sept with us all the time, so it’s not an impossibility of course.”

“Yes we have Sept on us. Having Sept on us might turn us into ghosts, not demons or witches. But that Deadmage had specifically said just being an Essentier able to channel Essence meant all of us are going to become Deathless.”

Rio scoffed. “That can’t be right. I’m sure the book would have said something about that.”

Riven bent over to the book, reading page after page almost as fast as Riven had flipped through them. Rio was right. Not once did he spot anything saying that Essentiers were fated to become Deathless.

Rio had a momentary smug look on his face when Riven closed the book in frustration. Then it cleared, and he smiled sympathetically. “You don’t have that Sept crystal with you, do you?”

“No,” he said.

Rio got a look of disappointment, but that gave rise to a spark in Riven’s head.

He pulled the book open again, checking the contents page. Yes, there was a section on the Sundering near the end. Riven closed the book, then opened it from the back, pausing at the first page of the Sundering chapter. He started to read. “Around the Sundering—The Sundering is the great event that changed the course of the world. A meteor crashed down from the heavens, bearing a broken god who blessed all Deathless. This event caused, or perhaps led to the rise of, some sort of conflict among the Scions, spearheaded by the Chosen, and the chaos arising from it is said to have put the Scions in physical danger. It appeared the Deathless were being recruited for this very purpose. Reports everywhere indicated that the Deathless not only aimed to ascend to the Beyond by whatever means necessary, most sought to do so while bringing as many Deathless as they could with them.”

“I wonder if Sept has something to do with all this,” Rio said. He didn’t sound like the information was new to him, but then again, maybe he’d covered all this in Essentier classes. “A lure maybe.”

Riven didn’t pay much attention. He was flipping the pages again to get to a chapter on the Scions’ Chosen. He began reading again. “It is said that when the Scion’s first came into conflict, they sought outside arbiters who had no inkling of their histories. So they collectively chose representatives from the mortal realms to weigh in on issues and matters, and thus the Chosen were formed. As they were created around resolving conflicts, their continued existence depended on the need for there to be conflict in the first place, so it can be argued the Chosen became integral in creating those conflicts.”

With a little sigh, Riven closed the book. He’d read enough. The political things surrounding the Scions and the Chosen were interesting, but he had intended to read that just to throw Rio off the scent of what Riven had been seeking. The conflict thing proved that the Deadmage had been right—the Sept crystal was very likely a piece of a Scions. A broken piece that had fallen when one of them had gotten injured during the conflict.

“I think I’ve found enough for one night,” Riven said. He yawned too, though it was fake. “I’m going to head out for the night.”

“All right.” Rio sounded distracted. He pulled the book towards him as Riven rose from the bench.

When Riven reached the doorway, he turned back to notice that Rio still hadn’t looked up. He had opened the book again and was rifling through the pages as fast as he could, eyes scanning words with a speed that was going to leave him dizzy sooner rather than later. What had he found so interesting?

Didn’t matter. Riven shook his head then went away. He might have found little to nothing on Essentiers, but he’d learned a vital fact.

The Deadmage had been right. He was carrying a piece of a Scion.