The man’s eyes slid over him without purchase, stepping to the side while he held the door open. Elach nodded thanks, giving the man a polite smile as he stepped outside. Not ten steps later, he heard someone calling out behind him, and turned to see that same man running up to him.

“Are you Elach?” He asked, fishing a picture out of his pocket. He looked repeatedly between Elach and the pictures, then nodded assuredly. “You are. Good. My name’s Bryes, and Emperor Hoalt just sent me a message to come see you. He didn’t expect you to clear the first ten floors so quickly, you see.”

Bryes waited for Elach to respond, raising an eyebrow as Elach signaled for him to keep going.

“Wolf’s got your tongue? Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to say anything, just take in everything I’m about to tell you. We’re scouring all the zones for any evidence of Glasrime or Lavassil’s practitioners, but we haven’t found anything yet. You’re staying here, right? We’ll contact you with this if we get any leads.”

Bryes offered Elach a white card with a light blue filigree running along its edges. It felt cool to the touch, and Elach had to resist rolling his eyes. Was this guy even trying? If he just came out and said ‘I’m one of Glasrime’s apprentices’, Elach might have felt less suspicious of him. But the wolf in the middle of the road was no less deadly than the one hiding in the grass. Elach nodded and pocketed the card, making a mental note to see if there was any tracking Issi on it before he went back to his room, then smiled and shrugged helplessly as if to say ‘sorry I can’t talk’.

Bryes winced in sympathy. “Ouch. Alright, we’ll see you later then. Keep an eye out.” He gave Elach a salute and hurried back into the hotel. Elach rolled his eyes and decided he needed to keep an eye out for every dark corner and alleyway from now on.

By the time he darkened the doorway of the library, Elach had filled all fifteen of his lost teeth with the seeds the doctor had given him. His mouth felt both numb and on fire at the same time, yet it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the last time he’d had this done to him. He took a deep breath through his nose, held it for a handful of seconds, then let it out through his mouth. He didn’t know what he was looking for here, but there was so much he didn’t know. About Issi. About this side of the veil. He looked over at the librarian, a manifestation with long trails of misty red Issi running off of them and a face bereft of any features save for twin glassy black slits with pupils that glowed like heated glass.

They looked up at Elach, the burning glass narrowing down to the smallest he imagined they could go, then nodded hello. Their voice was as delicate as a whisper over the dull roar of a furnace, yet it scraped along his mind like a sharp knife. “You must be the practitioner who restocked our straware supply. I can’t thank you enough for that; everyone was growing just a little too grouchy for my tastes. They had no respect for the library’s request for silence.”

Elach smiled with a shallow bow of acknowledgement.

“I heard what it cost you. I couldn’t imagine regrowing all of those bones you call teeth. It must be a terrible ordeal, especially for a practitioner like yourself.” The manifestation shivered. “Can I help you with anything? If you’re looking for any specific topics, I can point you in the right direction. Oh, wait, I have something that is perfect for this. I made it the first time a mute practitioner came looking for a book.”

The manifestation’s form hollowed out until all that remained was their face and their arms resting on their desk, the trails of misty red Issi stretching through the rows and rows of books until it left Elach’s line of sight. He waited patiently for whatever they were doing, and shortly after the manifestation’s Issi retracted and they became far more solid.

They held a blood red crystal of Issi in one hand and a three-legged base fashioned to look like dragon’s limbs in the other. The crystal fit into the base perfectly, and the manifestation fed a little bit of their Issi into it as they spoke. “This is a thought-writer. If you place your hand on it, like so, and think the trigger word, it will reach into your mind and write the words into the air above it. The trigger word is scarlet.”

With that word the manifestation stopped speaking, their words now floating above the crystal in a blocky light pink font. “To get it to stop projecting, all you need to do is think the trigger word again. It will feel peculiar at first, and it will try to bypass your barriers. Get used to it for a moment and open yourself to it, then think ‘scarlet’ and what kind of books you’re looking for.”

Elach nodded and placed his hand on the crystal. His words hovered over the crystal, mirrored to him so the manifestation could read them. “I’m looking for something on how manifestations grow stronger. I have two of them with me, and I want to understand how to help them. Scarlet.”

The manifestation slowly nodded, resting their chin on their hands as they leaned over their desk. “What kind of manifestations do you have with you? Because a wisp manifestation will grow differently than a beast manifestation or a land manifestation. And object manifestations are completely different from all their fellows.”

He considered hiding what Flow was for a moment, but if they were already in danger from Glasrime, what could one librarian add to that? “A wisp manifestation, and I think the other is a land manifestation? But she could also be a beast manifestation. Definitely not an object manifestation, though. Scarlet.”

“A wisp manifestation? How rare.” The manifestation said with consideration, tapping where their mouth would be. They looked to be conflicted. “We have precious few books on wisp manifestations, but you won’t need them. I am a wisp manifestation myself, so I can answer any questions you have. I’ll fetch a few books on the other manifestations that you can take back to the hotel with you while you take a seat at any of the unoccupied tables. I’ll bring them to you, then we can talk.”

Huh. Elach watched as they walked away, trailing Issi in their path. He knew wisp manifestations weren’t treated very well in the glacier, but maybe it was just as dangerous for them in the Gilded Night. His brother had devoured his wisp thanks to the wolf Hoalt’s teachings.

“Thank you for waiting.” The manifestation said as Elach was pulling out the chair to the nearest table. They set two books in front of Elach, both weathered and looking as if they’d existed for hundreds of years with only a few of those under proper care. “Be careful with these; they’ve been enchanted so they won’t crumble to dust, but I couldn’t convince the overseer to pay to put in a moisture shield. So don’t spill anything on them or read them in the baths.”

Elach chuckled and set the crystal down on the table. “So you’re a wisp manifestation. Scarlet.”

“Yes, I am.” The manifestation sat down, a dome of misty pink Issi surrounding the table as she did. “To people like Glasrime or Lavassil, we are a precious resource. Dead or alive, we are used in the creation of the most powerful weapons and supplements. Our Issi is untainted by any source, so it will not impart anything onto the final product. If you wish to create a pill for a fire practitioner, you either have to find an unmanifested perfect flame in nature, or use the Issi of their bonded. Or you find a fire wisp manifestation and use them.”

Elach nodded, remembering when Sentence drank Flow’s Issi. “Because ingesting someone else’s Issi causes a horrible reaction. But couldn’t you just get permission from the manifestation for that practitioner to consume their Issi? Scarlet.”

The manifestation sighed and pulled a trail of Issi over their shoulder, running their hands over it as if it were their hair. “All supplements and potions are made with suppressors so that won’t happen. No; it’s because some of that manifestation will leak through into the supplement. You take the blood of a phoenix, you won’t get pure fire Issi. You get whatever mixture of Issi that phoenix had. But wisps are the manifestation of Issi itself. No tints, no secondary types. Perfect for someone who wants to strengthen their Issi.”

“What if a manifestation only had one Issi type?” Elach asked, thinking back to Y’talla’s Issi. He could only feel a single type of Issi within her. “Would they be targeted like a wisp manifestation?”

“Without a doubt.” The manifestation said grimly. “The cost of progress is paid in blood. The purer the blood, the greater the progress.”

Glassy ‘eyes’ grew glassier and distant, the burning points flickering out completely as the manifestation fell into a memory. They must have seen a lot of progress in their lifetime. “How can I make sure Flow and Y’talla won’t go through that? How can I protect them? Scarlet.”

The librarian sighed and shook their head as they came out of their memory. “Be stronger than anyone who comes for them. That’s unfortunately all you can do, because if they get taken, they’re gone. And when emperor Hoalt eventually brings the monster to justice, it will be a hollow victory. If you consider that a victory at all.”

“Damn. Scarlet.”

A smirk split the librarian’s face, giving Elach a flash of a maw filled with vicious triangular shards. Their mouth closed not a moment later, sealing shut with a soldering of Issi. “A perfect summary in one word. Damn. But you came here to help your manifestation friend grow, and I can help you up until a point. Just like you non-manifestations, there are actions you can take that will help any manifestation grow. But at a certain point, they’ll stop working, because everyone is different and what worked for one person most likely won’t for another.”

“Go on. Scarlet.”

“Wisp manifestations grow stronger as they develop an understanding of their Issi. We can compress and expand our container as you would, but we can’t compress our Issi. Because we are our Issi. We are our containers.” The librarian twirled their hand, a curved red blade with a jagged saw-like edge bursting through their wrist. It felt exactly like the rest of them; an extension of their being. “If I try to compress my Issi, I crush myself. The pain becomes too much to bear, I lose focus, and my Issi springs back to what it wants to be. What I see myself as.”

The blade burst into pink mist, joining the trails that came off the librarian. “If I want to grow stronger, I have to learn more about my Issi. Create a shape I’ve never made before. Stretch my trails a little longer than I ever have. Learn something about myself that I never knew was possible.” The librarian reached down and pulled a small handbook out of their robe. They turned it to a specific page, then put it down in front of Elach. “That is the type of wisp I manifested from. We’re known by many names; bloodied swarm, fragments of slaughter, scattered scarlet, and a few others that aren’t as descriptive as they are insulting. But the one that just feels right to me is sanguine shards.”

The picture was of a red mist with light red or pink tooth-like triangular shards floating inside of it. “Not scarlet?” Elach shook his head with a smile. “Shards? Scarlet.”

“No, no. If I put my own name as the trigger word for this, you’d have that exact problem you just had many times over. Though I could have made the trigger word something else entirely. Like, gobbledygook. Or sassafras.” The librarian shrugged. “But I already made the crystal, so scarlet it is.”