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The whole section collapsed on itself in a fog of dust just behind Silifrey , crushing the three bogeymen that were chasing her. She leaned on a shelf to cough the sawdust and breath, the only thing keeping her from fainting was the plight of a rest full of nightmares. She raised her head and watched the books in front of her, only a few centimeters from her eyes. A little silverfish ran away between the pages of a volume titled "tlbpgmgs.krn". Gibberish, as always. But something wasn't quite right. Her torch was extinguished and she was at the 1012th floor, so deep that a majority of the hexes where collapsed on each other, sunlight never came here, but she could see everything with a warm and flickering glow. She turned around and saw candles lit on the railing of the aeration shaft. She took a step toward them and saw a path of little flames going through the other door, the one which still led somewhere. Some of them where even appearing on the railing the floor below. The floor above was completely filled with seedy collapsed wood. A page was visible between the broken planks, but the letters were too small to be read.

She took the door and ignored the stairs to stay on this level. In the next room, dusty handwritten books where sitting on the shelves, confirming the fact that this "cave" was inhabited. Silifrey crossed the path of a Librarian and chose to not disturb its job. The gigantic humanoid looked her with a benevolent smile and walked passed her to go up the stairs she didn't took earlier. The three next rooms were artificial libraries too. The dust on the books was conflicting with the lit candles. Was this place actively inhabited or the dweller was dead since long enough for dust to settle ? The fourth room answered her question, as an old man with a purple robe was in it, sitting on a chair, writing on a washed natural book. An hypermoth was squeaking in its cage. From here, the Word Seeker could hear the chant of a gentle waterfall not too far away, probably filled with fishes, seeing the plate waiting beside the man. He raised his head to look at the stranger. Quickly, a smile arose on his lips.

"A human ? I didn't see a human since ages ! Haha, welcome, young adventurer ! Please, come, come, take a seat !"

Silifrey almost teared up, seeing another person welcoming her and offering her a chair, but she couldn't walk forward, he was nice because he didn't knew about her. She thanked him but rejected his offer, keeping her left arm in her back and walking in the next room. The old man shrugged and went back to his writing.

The room was filled with strange objects. While the Library was in a sepia palette, they were much more vibrant, like if they came from another world. Silifrey took her diary and described her discoveries : "a crown with two theater masks, a strange and tall book with colorful characters fighting each other, a pitchblack cape strangely waving never mind, it's just a young tamed cloaker". She played a little with the monster. It was inquiring about her feather arm, tightly wrapped in bandages and decided to claw itself around her shoulders to mimic a cloth, making her laugh. She turned around to admire the quality of this "fabric" and couldn't prevent her jaw from dropping when she saw the mirror behind her.

"A glass door !"

The object was a heavily decorated mirror, encased in a bronze frame with a grinning coarse face sculpted at the top. A curtain was hiding the glass, but anyone with a little knowing could tell that a totally new world was waiting behind. Sadly, the laughing side was the window, you could see through it, but not use it as a door. Verifying that the mage wasn't looking, Silifrey started to push the curtain away...

But suddenly, the whole object started to violently vibrate, and the eyes of the mirror opened, emitting a blinding light.

The walls of the cave were rough enough to bite into the ends of the cape on Ariel's shoulders. She considered herself as someone at least a moderate talent for balance, yet she still found herself slipping on the uneven floor on more than one occasion. The hazards forced her to move at a snail's pace, infuriating, but at least it did not take long to reach what she sought.

A mirror, tarnished and worn in multiple places, and bronze around the edge. It had to have been down here for years, maybe even longer. Ariel propped herself up with the shaft of her glaive, using it as a walking stick to keep herself steady as she approached it. She reached a hand out to touch the dust on it's surface, but lost her footing on the way forward and gasped, bracing herself for the pain of broken glass and sharp rock walls...

It never came. Instead, she felt a hard, but dull, thump on her side as her grip on her weapon loosened and sent it bouncing away from her hand. Her body was curled around itself, her cape draped over her head and chest. "Ummph..." She mumbled, dazed.

Silifrey took a step on the side, right in time to not hit the person falling through the mirror, lifting a puff of dust. Her eyes blinked, in an instant inhumane, the sclera completely black, like filled with a cloud of ink. He was a humanoid, she could tell but it was hard, he was radiating a form of magic that harmed her cursed eyes, forcing her to close them. When they opened, they were normal again. The Raven's Wife crouched, approaching the stranger, she kept her misshapen arm behind her to not scare the newcomer.

He was like the objects in the room, way more colorful than the Library. Even his cape was a bright red Silifrey only saw in the brightest biomes of the world. The Word Seeker looked at the glaive with a curious gaze, but achieved to ignore the crudity of its lines to help the outsider to get back on its feets. To her surprise, he was actually a she. Silifrey wiped her colorful clothes to admire their brightness, the quality of the fabric, actually uneaten by the moths and silverfishes, in a way better condition than hers. She backed up two steps in front of her blue eyes. They were so unharmed and beautiful, untouched by the dangers of the Library and unharmed by a life of intensive reading of gibberish. No mad lines were tainting the iris. Silifrey took her diary, forgetting to hide her hideous arm, and started to describe the girl with a trembling hand : "Blond hair, blue eyes, she looks so young and fresh, her skin is smooth, unmarked with a little scar on the cheek. Her cloths are almost definitely too colorful for this world. She radiates a strong dazzling and benevolent light. She seems unharmed."

Silifrey raised her eyes with the smile of a treasure hunter finding the pile of gold we searched all his life. She close her thin book and kept it in her blackened hand, moving the other one toward the face of the seemingly young girl.

"Who are you, an angel fallen from the Mount Celestia ?"

It took a moment for Ariel to find the energy to raise herself. The fall had dazed her, leaving her motionless for just long enough to hear an odd noise, bugs? It sounded like... No, no. A pen, she recognized it now. Slowly, she opened her eyes, picking up her head first, then the rest of her body. Her head swung wildly around, eyes all about as she took in a, a,

"A library? What-" She said, then immediately regretted it as dust traveled in her inhaling mouth, hugging herself as she hacked, bruises on her chest throbbing with each cough. It took her a moment to recover, just long enough for the sound of writing to cease. Once it did, she looked up at the stranger, at first confused, as if her eyes took a moment to adjust at the sight of her.

"What?" She repeated, this time bracing herself for another fit, but it seemed to never come. "No, no. I'm human, I promise." She said with a smile as the act of the white lie tore at the edges of her lips. The truth was complicated, a little too complicated to grapple with explaining at the present. "My name is Ariel, ma'am." She nodded her head in a small bow. "I... May I ask something? Where am I?"

The lie made the word seeker frown with questioning. She tilted her head on the side, hesitating to watch the now named Ariel with her magical eyes again, to verify her angelic blood. But soon enough, a question came to end her though. Silifrey smiled and straightened up, embracing the place around them with her arms, forgetting once more to hide her tainted one.

"You are in the Library ! The greatest source of knowledge ever ! Here, you will be able to find any book, even if it isn't written yet. Maybe you'll even find the tome relating our meting, or the description of your own birth, even your death !"

Silifrey took Ariel's hand and got her closer to the railing to show her the ventilation shaft, going indefinitely in the abyss and showing an almost invisible dot of blue sky far away above. She opened her notebook again and sat on the really low railing, in a very dangerous position.

"Please, depict me your world !"