“What is the plan today then?” Louisa said as she put some meat on the fire they had made to cook. Camping in the building they had found was fortuitous because it seemed to have been a set of barracks for the policing agency of the town before its collapse. It had been made of solid stone and contained enough beds for everyone, so they rested well for their first night in the eleventh floor. The scent of meat wafted through the building, waking the four sleeping bodies who had not been on watch for the final hours of the night with Louisa and Jim.

Laurence was the first down from his bunk, still slightly bleary eyed and wrapped in six blankets. He sat down heavily in front of the food and grumbled something about waking earlier than Babel had intended. After some thought, and a momentary chuckle at Laurence’s state of being Jim replied.

“It seems,” he said, “like the best options are to either explore the town to find out what the hell happened here, or to move on and hope for the best. I'm an advocate for the former, though there is some prudence to the latter. I'm all for moving on as soon as possible, this place gives me the creeps, but I think we need to find out what happened here”.

“I guess I can see what you mean. There’s gain on both options, though they both could go horribly wrong for the same reason,” Louisa replied. “With how quiet the night has been though, I am unwilling to believe that staying for an extra day will cause us harm”.

“Agreed. If we find out what the hell happened, then even better. We should probably find out if there’s a roof before climbing on top of the building”.

“Eh?”

Jim sighed, looking back towards their entry into the eleventh floor. “It's a turn of phrase used in Spirit. Honestly I'm surprised you never heard it before. It mean to research before you decide to do something you might regret”.

“That's interesting. I never heard people use many of those, but then I didn’t talk to a lot of people in Spring Street. A lot of them assumed I was either as laconic as Yun, or as insane as Laurence. Of the odd phrases I did hear, the one I always wondered about was ‘you’re climbing into a barrel of wine’. I seriously don't understand what it is supposed to imply”.

“That’s based on a story about a man who was supposed to be so annoying that a mob came to his house and stuffed him in a wine barrel. It’s also where ‘purple skinned’ comes from, as his skin was supposedly purple when the bobbies pried open the barrel and found the body. Grim I know, but it is where the phrases come from”.

Louisa turned the meat cooking on the spit, with gobbets of fat dripping off into the sputtering flame as she sat in silence. After two minutes she took the meat off the spit and began putting it into slices of bread, handed one of the sandwiches to Jim, then to Laurence, and finally spoke. “I think I want to stay. There’s too much going on here that I don’t understand, and I don’t want to leave that kind of thing looming behind us. It doesn’t seem right”.

“I agree,” said Cleo as she walked through the door, rubbing her eyes. “I want to look around. This place gives me the creeps, and I want to know why”.

“With me,” Laurence said through a mouth full of meat and bread, “that makes four. We stay no matter how everyone else votes”. He quickly finished the bread and licked off the excess grease from his fingers. “I want to learn what happened to this place. It interests me, and I don’t understand why our mana doesn’t flow properly. None of this makes sense”.

Standing up, Laurence removed the blankets that he was wrapped up in, and shook the wrinkles out of his clothes. He turned and walked to the exit of the room and looked at Jim. “You want to come with me, Jim? You’re the only other person who’s actually ready to go anywhere, so do you want to come with me and case this place?”

“Sure, where are you thinking of looking?” Jim stood up and walked with Laurence to the window on the ground floor they had opened after entry.

They hopped through the window and began walking through the ghost town, looking into the dusty windows of each building. In the sixth, Laurence finally saw something he was interested by, a room full of books. He waved Jim over and pulled out Jormugand before smashing the hammer into a pane of glass. It cracked once, and then shattered on the second strike, letting Laurence lean in and unlock the window itself. The window rattled and there was a crunch of glass as the frame slid up and Laurence hooked himself into the building itself.

The building was dark and musty, filled with the scent of old books and the writing of people long since gone from the world. It was a mausoleum to the knowledge and creativity of the land they were in, but was covered in several thick layers of dust. Without waiting for Jim, Laurence walked out into the main room and gasped in excitement as he saw books on every wall, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. There was a disused fire pit near the main entrance of the building, surrounded by torn up books and two chairs, as well as several sets of bones. Laurence walked over and realised that they were animal bones, immediately discarding them and looking at the books that surrounded the pit. There was only one that was intact. Bound in soft leather, the book was title-less and sealed by a thin strip of dark brown silk. It was a book that reminded Laurence of his codex for some reason, so he could not help but open it and look inside.

He heard Jim walking around behind him, looking at the books in the shelves, before moving further and further back into the deserted library. Laurence paid him no heed as he turned the first page and read the words inscribed there. He frowned. There seemed to be some sort of global writing language that Laurence could read spread through the entire tower, something that he did not quite understand. He mulled it over and came up with several hypothesis, but did not dwell on them. He would find out in due time, and if he did not, then he would simply discuss it with Jim and Winoa for many days.

On the first page the words ‘Diary of Manas Magellus, Primer of the Kingdom of Biqiril’ were spread across in a cursive pen. The clarity of the penmanship was nothing less than breathtaking to Laurence, but like the issue of language he did not dwell on it. He flicked through the pages and began reading the diary, quickly learning about Manas and his life inside the town, Aledia. The town had been a military outpost, made to experiment with the concept of sentient arrays. Being the greatest arrayist in all of Biqiril, Manas was invited to test the idea and work on creating a single array that could comprehend and was able to run without interference from an outside source. He had spent several years doing it, and near the end there was even a second arrayist brought in, a man called Qema, but something obviously went wrong and Manas slipped up somewhere. Laurence could not tell however, as the last few pages were ripped out of the book, perhaps to fuel the fire in front of him. It was painful to Laurence, but the book had left him with more questions than answers. He knew what the place they were in was called, and what they were working on, but he had no idea what had actually caused all the damage, or the whereabouts of the man who seemed to have caused the mess in the first place. It was a predicament for him but he smiled at the fact he had learned something more by chance.

As he was mulling over his issues he heard Jim shouting from the back of the Library for him. He ran towards the rear of the building and came to a room. It was an odd room that was much like the previous one filled with books, however there was a faint red light exuding from the back. Jim was staring in confusion at the source of the red light that was hidden from Laurence’s sight by a book case. He turned and looked at Laurence.

“Law, I think you have to see this,” he said, eyes open wide. He took a step back and Laurence walked into view of the lightsource.

In front of them was a gemstone with an array carved into the centre. Above was a crucifix with a skeleton of a man bound to it. The man had been dead for a long time, but that was not the issue for Jim, nor the issue that Laurence found with it. Behind the crucifixion the wall was covered in pieces of paper with the same news article printed on them. Over those articles were words scrawled in what looked like long dried blood, dirt and ink. ‘Betrayer’, ‘You did this’, ‘Traitor’ and ‘Folly of Man’ were written around the corpse, with arrows pointing at it. Someone was being punished here, and to Laurence the way it had been done screamed of a mob mentality. But if there was a mob here, where had they gone? Where were their bodies?