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“I’m trying!” Jael pressed the bloody cloth Trap had thrust against his throbbing temple, where the shadow had cut him deeply. He must look like death, his face and arms smeared with his own blood, blood that still seeped from the deeper wounds. “But the runestones are not holding. They’re going to fail, Father. It’s not a question of if but when. I have seen nothing like it—I don’t know what is attacking the Bifrost, so I can’t fight it.”
His own battered body should be a testament to this cruel fact.
Silence answered him.
“How long?” King Ereb rasped at last. He crossed his arms over his chest defensively, as if he might hold the news he didn’t want to hear at bay by brute force.
Jael’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know, but our stores are running out. We won’t be able to keep up with the repairs if these attacks continue.”
“How long, Jael?” The king’s eyes pierced him through the vision of the Obelisk.
“Two days,” he finally offered, exhaustion tainting every word. “Three at most.”
“I can have more runestones brought to you, but it will take time.”
“Time we don’t have.” He massaged the back of his neck and tried to think of a solution—any solution—that didn’t involve the destruction of their world, of their people. But after what he’d seen today...he didn’t know how to fight this evil. “And it would be a temporary solution, anyway. We’d just be depleting your stores to find ourselves right back where we are now. We need to find the root of the problem and cut it off at the source.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
He flinched at the desperation in his father’s voice. He didn’t have an answer, not one idea. Silence stretched long and tense between them.
At last, it was the king who shattered it. He sighed so loudly it almost sounded like a groan. “There is one thing that might work,” he said, each word faltering as if he didn’t want to speak them. “But it’s dangerous.”
“Would it give us some time to find another solution? I will take any risk, Father.”
King Ereb stared at him through the Obelisk, so tense he appeared to be carved of stone. “You will be taking every risk, my son. You need to understand that before you commit to this.”
“What will I be risking, then?”
His father flinched as if he’d been struck. “Your life,” he whispered. “Stones, I can’t believe I’m considering this.”
Jael couldn’t either, but he didn’t say as much. This was his job, his purpose. “Go on.”
The king’s nostrils flared, the stone-hard mask breaking for a flicker of time before he schooled his features. “There is a book in your library, in the forbidden section. I placed it there when I was Runemaster before your predecessor.”
When King Ereb hesitated, Jael moistened his lips and tried to encourage him. “Which one?”
The king’s throat convulsed as he swallowed. “It’s one of the Nameless Volumes, Jael.”
His stomach knotted and heaved. The Nameless Volumes, tomes so dark and horrible they must not be named, where all the deepest and most horrible secrets in Rhuin were transcribed.
Few even knew these volumes existed. Opening them was forbidden, except in the direst of circumstances, and only by the consent of both king and Runemaster.
“Which—which one I am looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
The tone in King Ereb’s voice sent a chill down his spine. “How so?” he croaked.
His father held his gaze, expression brittle, but something agonizing writhed within his eyes. “You’ll recognize it because it’s the one locked with my seal and covered in my blood.”
Jael’s stomach twisted and sank. His father had given his own blood to seal this book away, and here he was planning to reopen it? “And what will this book do? What am I looking for?”
King Ereb leaned closer to the obelisk, his face growing larger as he advanced. “You’ll be sharing your life force with the Bifrost.” His eyes clung to Jael’s, and for a moment Jael thought his father might recant. “If there is no other way…this may be our only option. But—stones, help us—be careful, Jael. Please.”
He walked the labyrinthine tunnels that made up Imenborg’s library with a heavy heart. The forbidden books pulled at his thoughts as if they were a flesh and blood hand and not his own anxiety, quailing against what he may find in that never-used section of the library.
Rather than choosing a single chamber and filling it with wooden bookshelves for Imenborg’s literature, his ancestors had utilized an intersecting array of tunnels to carve the shelves into the walls: wood was harder to come by in Agmon than stone.
