Chapter 5

Professor Norman Caldus repaired to his laboratory, comforted by the kind of silence that wasn’t empty but humming, alive with half-finished thoughts. The brass teapots on the sill had stopped whistling; one let out a final sigh of steam, like a curtain falling.

He sat down at his worktable, the book closed on the table top. The Lady of the Lake, by Professor Norman Caldus.

He stared at his own name. There was no date, no publisher, no sign of wear except along the edges, as if it had traveled far but been handled carefully. The slim volume was light brown leather with a dusting of silvery mica across the surface. The font for the title and author looked his own best handwriting, but embossed rather than printed.

He wanted to examine its properties, but he felt the urge to read it first. "Aha!" he said, smiling. "You're working on me! Now let's see how you work...."

He fetched his tools: a lens of smoked glass, a fine brass caliper, and a tuning rod calibrated for aetheric resonance. The tuning rod hummed faintly when he passed it over the book, then fell quiet. No magnetic field. Just a faint harmonic echo. “Not dangerous,” he concluded aloud.

He opened the cover. There was no preamble, just the announcement that it was the first Canto and then the first line of the story. The castle was built on whispers and weatherlight.... "Yeesh," he said, feeling embarrassment creep through his entire body. "Whispers and weatherlight," he repeated aloud. In what world would he ever put together a phrase like that?

He took a deep breath and focused on the first letter of the sentence. It was "T", but in an illuminated script, wrapped with leaves and vines. He pulled his magnifier out, and peered through it. Norman stared at it. Then, almost reflexively, he laughed — softly, incredulously. “A trick. A writer’s gimmick. A way to make one feel involved.” 

He sighed, picked up his pen, and began to take notes. The mechanism is clever but harmless. A tiny mechanism disguised in the illuminated T of the first word of the first sentence. He flipped back to the cover, then returned to his notes. Magnetic mica dust worked into the cover amplifies the effect, so that it works even when the book is closed. 

He wasn't surprised that the alternate reality version of him had to trick people into reading the book. Just based on the first line, the writing was horrific. But why had he felt the need to? What was so important about the book that the author had built in the compulsion to read it? He added these questions to his notes.

He bent to the task of disabling the mechanism in the first letter of the first Canto. He hadn't realized that he was still feeling the desire the read the book until he flipped the little "T" over and the desire faded. "Very subtle," he murmured, impressed. He wasn't sure if his own skill would have allowed him to build such a sophisticated mechanism or if his otherworldly self had had help. 

He started reading the book, and it wasn't he'd blown through the first two Cantos that he realized that the compulsion hadn't been completely disabled. But his guard had been let down by his own hubris and he was soon absorbed in the third Canto.

Rain came that week — long, quiet rain that veiled the towers and turned the grounds into a world of mirrors. The lake swelled until its edges licked at the marble steps. Alaric could not tell where sky ended and water began. Everything was reflection.

The Lady did not return to him in mirrors or dreams. But her absence was a kind of summons. Each night, he returned to the library’s underbelly, reading by the weak blue light of the lantern that never burned out. The silverleaf book had grown heavier, its pages damp as though it had drunk the storm.

The more he read, the more the castle itself seemed to listen. The staircases shifted toward him now, their steps aligning like thoughts in a dream. Doors that once required passwords opened at his approach. The portraits turned their eyes away.

From the book, he learned this:

Long ago, before the school was stone, four magi came upon the valley — scholars of the first order, seekers who believed that knowledge was not to be built, but called. They made a circle beside the lake and spoke to what lived beneath it.

The thing that answered was neither god nor demon, but the heart of magic itself, a consciousness made of memory and water, infinite and young. To speak with it was to dream aloud. To bind it was to make those dreams real.

And so they made a pact. The founders would build their college upon that sacred source, drawing its power to light their halls and teach their students. In return, they would shape the water’s spirit into form — a guardian to keep the flow contained.

Thus was the Lady born: not by womb or wand, but by the founders’ combined desire. They gave her voice, so she might sing to the sleeping current. They gave her beauty, so none would question her sorrow. And they gave her solitude — for power must never love what it guards.

When Alaric read that last line, the candle beside him cracked and went out. The pages glowed faintly on their own, pulsing like the surface of the lake beneath moonlight.

He spoke aloud, though he did not know to whom.
“Is that why you linger? Because they forgot you?”

And the air stirred — soft, immediate, alive.

Forgotten things are never gone.

Her voice moved through him like wind through hollow bone. He looked up, and she stood between the shelves — not reflected this time, but there. Barefoot, water-beaded, a mist clinging to her like breath.

“You were created,” he whispered, trembling. “Not born.”

“Creation is a kind of birth,” she said, “but with no mother to remember you.”

“Then let me remember.”

Her gaze held him — sorrowful, luminous, endless.
“To remember me is to unmake what keeps you safe.”

But Alaric could no longer turn back. He stepped forward, and the library dimmed around them, as though the world itself had drawn its curtain.

“What happens,” he asked, “if I unmake it?”

The Lady smiled — faint, knowing, and unbearably sad.

“Then the castle will wake,” she said, “and it will weep for what it has become.”

Outside, thunder broke — not in the sky, but beneath the earth. The shelves shuddered. The ink on the open page began to run, like tears.

And above them, somewhere far above the stones and corridors, a bell that had not tolled in centuries gave a single, hollow chime.

Norman finished the book, then read it again. He found more mechanisms in the first letters of the first lines of each canto, and disabled them. Again, the effect of the mechanisms was so subtle that he didn't realize the relief until the compulsion to read it again faded.

Now that the mystery of the book had been solved, Norman was worried about the open portal in the library. The fairies hadn't seemed interested in passing through, but who knew who would? And how long, exactly had it been open? Norman couldn't remember the last time that he'd walked past that portal, let alone looked through it.

Mira had trusted him with the book and had wanted it back. Now that the mechanisms had been disabled, the effect of the book should wear off on her and shouldn't affect anyone else. He didn't see any harm in giving it back to her, for now.

At the moment, he was more worried about the open portal. After Mira, his next stop would be Headmistress Enath.

It was just before noon, and most of the students would either be exploring the grounds and the lake in a final fit of freedom, or in one of the common rooms. Since Norman knew that Mira was expecting him to finder her, he figured he'd find her in one of the common rooms. 

Voices carried faintly from open doors, laughter drifted up the stairwells, and sunlight flashed on the brass fittings of the railings as Norman descended from the North Wing. The air in the corridor shimmered faintly with dust motes and sunlight from the tall, western windows. Below, he could hear the rhythmic hum of the great clock tower — steady, precise, the sound that kept the whole house breathing in time.

Norman took the narrower stair that wound along the inner wall of the East Wing, avoiding the busier main hallways where students lugged their trunks and shouted to friends. The route brought him down through the older parts of the manor — past classrooms that smelled faintly of chalk and metal polish — and into the cross-corridor where the two wings met.

He paused there for a moment, adjusting his cuffs. The murmur ahead told him he’d reached the Central Common Room. It was louder than he’d expected.

When he stepped through the open double doors, color and motion rushed toward him all at once. Light poured through the stained-glass clock face overhead, painting the floor in bright fragments of crimson and gold. The great circular room was crowded: students sprawled in armchairs and along the railings of the staircase, some eating pastries pilfered from the kitchens, others showing off summer inventions. Someone had strung paper lanterns along the upper gallery in anticipation of the Brass and Bloom, their brass frames already glinting with half-finished enchantments.

Norman slowed, surprised at the density of life here. The room had been hollow and echoing all summer. Now it throbbed with voices, laughter, and the occasional mechanical click of something experimental.

It took him a moment to spot Mira among the crowd — she was on the far side of the hearth, sitting cross-legged, facing Lorien Vale and Ned Bower. All three were bent over something.

Norman crossed the room, ignoring the looks of greeting from a few older students. The nearer he came, the more details he caught: a scatter of tiny gears on the rug, a scent of oil and lemon polish, Mira’s careful concentration.

A tinny, self-satisfied voice coming from the something they were bent over said, “Acorn acquired!”

Several nearby students turned to look. Mira laughed and Ned threw both hands up in triumph -- and the tiny backpack on the squirrel the kids were gathered around let out a puff of blue smoke.

"I'm on fire! I'm on fire!" The tinny voice shouted.

Ned quickly pulled the backpack from the squirrel and doused the backpack with a tiny fire extinguisher. "Sorry," he said to the squirrel, who chittered and scampered through the room, until Norman lost sight of it.

Norman cleared his throat. The three kids looked up at him. Ned quickly tossed his jacket over the tiny doused backpack.

“Professor Caldus!” Mira said, brushing her hands on her many-pocketed pant legs. “Oh— we were only—”

“Testing the ethical boundaries of squirrel sentience?” he offered dryly. “I can see that.”

Ned flushed and frowned. “The first thing I asked for was consent. The squirrel was happy to help until --”

“It nearly caught on fire?” asked Norman blandly.

Ned coughed. "Um--"

"Professorial supervision until the device can work without exploding, please, Mr. Barrow," Norman said. He turned to Mira and offered her the book. “Your reading material,” he said. “I thought you might want it before term begins.”

She accepted it carefully. “Thank you, sir,”  she said, wincing a bit at Lorien's surprised look. “Professor,” she said, regaining her sauciness. “You didn’t explode, so I’m guessing the book wasn’t cursed?”

“Not in the traditional sense. You’re quite certain you found it exactly where you said?”

She nodded.

“And no one else was nearby?”

“No. Just me, and the book, and that creepy painting.”

“The portal,” he corrected automatically.

She blinked. “Sorry. The creepy portal.”

Norman hesitated. “I believe it was sent intentionally. Possibly as a communication—or as a containment measure. Either way, it must be closed.”

Mira frowned. “Closed how? I thought you said the locking mechanism was—”

“Overridden, yes. But not irreparably.” He nodded toward the book. "Take good care of that."

She hugged it to her chest, and nodded as Ned and Lorian turned to look at her, waiting for an explanation.

The students all breathed quiet sighs of relief as Norman made his way back out of the room, taking his unwelcome authority with him. Beyond the thick wooden doors, the sound dimmed, replaced by the steady ticking of the clock tower above.

Norman exhaled — a trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. Then, adjusting his cuffs again, he started down the westward hall toward the kitchens. The day before the first day of school was always stressful, and Headmistress Enath's favorite way of blowing off steam was to get into shouting matches with the head cook.