[Indigo]

"And do you know the normal rules of chess? Because that would give you an unfair advantage, at least to start with."

"I know a set of rules for chess, but the hrraktha version requires more pieces and a differently-shaped board, so it's hardly applicable."

"Hrraktha being..."

"My people. Properly it's—" He made a sound that shouldn't have been able to come out of a human mouth, layers of trills and clicks and growls on top of each other. "But I imagine that's a bit more difficult for you to parse."

"How did you do that? I know you're really a dragon, but you're human-shaped right now."

"I'm always me," he said, and smiled. "Shall we play?"

She let him go first, because he still had a better grasp of the rules, such as they were, than she did, and for a while they didn't talk, just moved pieces around the board in increasingly erratic ways. After a while Sauvage started putting them down in the air above the board, which seemed like cheating, so she retaliated by flicking one of them across the room. He relaxed, then, and only then did she realize how tense he'd been, and a silence that had not quite been unfriendly turned into a much more pleasant one, punctuated occasionally by conversation.

"You know," Sauvage said eventually, "I'm surprised you didn't encounter the word in the course of your research. I admit I know nothing about this library beyond what you told me, but its sphere of knowledge sounds large enough to include it." He balanced a pawn on top of a rook. "Then again, Roman didn't tell you the specific word either. As a distinction it's probably meaningless if you aren't already at least somewhat familiar."

"That reminds me," Jules said, stacking a few of her own pieces, "that book I was looking at had another name for you, apart from James Sauvage, I mean. A hrraktha name, I assume. I couldn't actually read it, but—"

"Good," he said, with such viciousness that she looked up, knocking over the chess pieces she'd been holding. It became apparent that she'd missed some very important cues in her concentration. Sauvage's expression had gone flat, empty, his hands gripping the arms of the chair he sat in with enough force to tear the fabric, and she couldn't tell if he was angry or just bitter or something else entirely. She'd never seen him angry, and hadn't thought about that much before.

"I..." She didn't know what to say, only that she ought to say something. "I just thought, because...you didn't tell me what you were when we first met, and I thought maybe you gave me the name you did because you were trying to seem more human, or...something like that. It doesn't sound right now that I say it out loud, though, does it." It wasn't really a question. She might not be the best at reading people, but sometimes they made it easy for you.

Sauvage met her eyes, and blinked, and an expression of shame descended over his face for a moment. He shook his head as if to clear away a memory. "I'm sorry, I—you couldn't know. If you knew you wouldn't ask. That is, after all, what questions are for." A pause, filled by breathing. He seemed to be waiting for something, some reaction. When a few seconds passed without a response from her, he turned away, and closed his eyes.

[Indigo]

Fear, she realized. He was waiting for fear, because she knew him to be a powerful and potentially dangerous being, one who had told her not to trust him, more than once by now, and one who had a long history of poor self-control. As if those were the only things she knew about him. As if the past always outweighed the present, no matter what had come in between.

She said, "You can stop making that face. Not everything has to be so dramatic all the time, even for you. I pushed where I shouldn't have, and I've upset you, and I'm sorry. I'll be more careful." Which was the best she could promise, because while she could certainly say she'd stop asking so many questions, she doubted she'd be able to follow through. But at least she was getting a better grip on where not to probe.

"You're so—" Sauvage broke off into a short laugh, and shook his head again. "To...answer your question, I do not use that name. I don't want it. I appreciate the impulse, but I told you my name was Sauvage because it is, and because that is what I want you to call me. If I could erase that other name from that library's records I would. If I could erase it from living memory, I would."

"I'm not sure what the library's policy on vandalism is," Jules said, "but I'll ask about it next time I'm there."

This earned her another laugh, which turned into a sigh. Sauvage rested his chin in his hand and looked down at the chessboard. The pieces he'd set above it had fallen when he'd stopped focusing on them. He picked up the white queen and turned it over and over in his hand. "So you did read about me, then. I had wondered. I rather expected you to confront me with my crimes, by now. And instead you let me into your home. I don't understand you at all, Jules."

"I don't understand you either, right now, so I guess that's an even trade."

"Well, if you've read about me, then you know what I've done, and if you know what I've done then there's no reason we should be here, having this conversation. There is no reason you should want to be in the same room as me at all."

There he went again, turning everything into high drama; but that was a little unfair, she thought, because the things he'd done before he met the hunters probably were fairly dramatic and had obviously taken on a lot of weight in his memory, and she couldn't blame him for that, either. If she'd unintentionally harmed large numbers of people she'd probably feel similarly about it.

Something else became clear as she watched him twirl the queen and resolutely look anywhere but Jules's face. "This is why you've been avoiding me since I told you about the library, isn't it?"

"I wasn't avoiding you," he said. "I was just...not going to a place where I knew you'd be."

"Sauvage."

"Yes, all right, what do you expect? I assumed there would be some sort of reckoning and I wanted to put it off as long as possible, because I...I enjoy your company, even though I have no right to. But of course, if I stayed away from you indefinitely it would have the same result, in the end. So I presented myself for judgment. Here I am."

"I didn't read about you," Jules said. "I saw your name and I glanced at the rest of it, but I saw it was mostly about before you met the monster hunters and I thought, well, I probably know all I need to know about that. It happened and it'll always have happened but that doesn't give me a right, as you'd say, to know all the gory details. Which, honestly, I don't particularly want to know. But if you told me about it all that would be one thing. Reading about it behind your back would be...I don't know. It wouldn't be right."

The white queen spun, once, twice, three times, and Sauvage sighed again and finally looked up. He smiled, almost. "I hardly think I've earned that consideration."

"Tough. You're getting it anyway."

"Well. Thank you." He set the queen at the edge of the board, in a space that made no sense in relation to the rest of the pieces, if you assumed the arrangement of the other pieces made any sense in the first place, which was a pretty big assumption. "I'll admit I'm not sure what to do with it. This was not an outcome I planned for."

"We might as well finish this game, right? I don't know about you, but I was enjoying it. Hang on, though, I could use something to drink." As she moved back toward the kitchen she tried what was rapidly becoming her patented awkward shoulder pat, because it seemed like a reasonable moment for it. Sauvage made a startled noise. "Sorry."

"It's fine," he said. "I'm not used to...being touched." The words were very quiet, and she sensed again that hidden iceberg of the past, an ancient pain she couldn't hope to understand. "But I don't mind. It's...nice."

Jules nodded, and, because he didn't seem to want to dwell on the subject, said, "Do you want something to drink? I have this fancy juice with I think blackberries in it, and something else? Let me look at the label, hold on."

Refreshments were arranged, and the game went on, and the conversation moved to other, lighter subjects; and once or twice Jules saw Sauvage giving her that strange intent stare again, like he still didn't understand something, like the answers to unasked questions might be readable in her face. She couldn't begin to guess what he was looking for, but she hoped he'd find it eventually.

[Indigo]

Thunder roared, the sky opened, and Jules, pulling up outside the cafe in her borrowed car, made an exasperated face in the rearview mirror. Bristlecone might be a habitually rainy place, but this was a little much, the third storm in as many weeks. Not quite enough to mean something, she thought, but enough to feel like it should.

She went into the cafe to find Roman fighting with the espresso machine. "Sometimes I wonder how you ran this place without me."

"As I recall, you brought this fancy machine with you. Ow!" He withdrew his hand sharply. "I couldn't begin to understand all those complicated drinks. Kids today, and so on."

"Oh yes? Then I'll be sure to ignore you next time you ask me for one of those complicated drinks. Here, let me fix that."

Coffee assembled, they loaded Roman's boxes into the car—a couple of shipments too large and long-distance to be handled by the Bristlecone post office, to be taken care of along with some other errands while Jules returned to the library—and set off for the city. They didn't travel together like this often, for a few reasons, but the one which immediately became relevant was that they could never agree on a radio station, and there were several minutes of button-pushing and sighing before they turned it off entirely. Jules considered that she could probably have saved some time by being less optimistic about this, but it never seemed to occur to her in the moment. Pity.

"You never did explain what you meant about the library being a metaphor," she said, once they'd been underway for a little while. Roman was muttering over his to-do list.

"Ah, yes, I'd forgotten. It's no great mystery, if you were hoping for one, only that Argent has never been one for libraries and it seemed unlikely that she would have gone into one on her own, even if it did appear from nowhere," he said. "She mentioned it at a time when we'd all been apart for a while—there was a strange lull in monster appearances one year, we never did figure out why—as an explanation of some new technique she had learned, and as she didn't go into much more detail we were all left to draw our own conclusions. I imagined it to be a simplification of something much more abstract."

"You know," Jules said, "I think it kind of is? I mean, it's just a big collection of information from a lot of different sources, maybe as many sources as exist, but being curated by a mind and shaped into something people can understand. The only reason I could learn anything from it was that it's organized, in its way. In raw form it would just be a mess."

"An excellent point, if one that stretches the concept of a metaphor somewhat. It reminds me," and here he paused, and took a long breath that Jules, over the last several weeks, had come to recognize.

"If you spent as much time talking to Sauvage as you do talking to me about him," she said, before he could get going, "things would be a lot better between you two, I think."

"How did you—"

"You do that same exact pause every time. I couldn't say how it's different from a regular pause if you asked, but I can tell," she said. "And, look, it's not that I don't want you to talk to me about your feelings, or anything, I want to be supportive, but I really do think you should just talk to him about it. He's the only one who can do anything with the information."

[Indigo]

Roman stared out the window, at the rain-obscured countryside. He took off his glasses as if to clean them but instead just held them in his lap in a way that Jules knew meant he was trying not to chew on one of the arms. "I can't."

"Why not? You told me yourself you don't even think he's lying about why he's here, anymore. You've stopped checking that...reality tearing meter or whatever it is—" This was a glass tube with a number of different objects suspended in oil that Roman had hauled out of storage and placed prominently in his office a few days after Sauvage's arrival. "—you ask me how he is, yesterday you asked me if he mentioned you much—"

He groaned and put his hands over his face. "Am I really that bad?"

"Yes! And I get it, okay, it's scary to tell people how you feel about them, although I would think you'd have had some practice by now—" She paused for a second as the full absurdity of having this conversation with a man almost twice her age set in. "Anyway, the only way you're going to be able to resolve it is to talk to Sauvage. For self-preservation, if nothing else, because you're my friend and all but you're starting to get on my nerves a little."

"I...it isn't only about me. I'm not without experience, as you have surmised, and if..." He seemed hesitant to continue the sentence, to say anything that might lend legitimacy to this subject that he danced around any time she brought it up. "If rejection, I suppose is the word, were my only concern it wouldn't be so much of an issue."

"Then what?"

Roman sighed, another of those long, heavy sighs that sounded like they had traveled a hundred miles. "Sauvage wants very badly to be liked," he said. "I have seen him make poor choices in pursuit of that goal. If I made him aware of my feelings he might...how to put it? There is a considerable chance he would feel an obligation to reciprocate, even if he really didn't, in order to maintain my positive opinion of him. He's a good liar, when he's trying. I would probably never know, or not for a long time, while I forced him into a life he never wanted to live because he didn't want to let me down again."

It was very like Roman to worry about, and it was entirely reasonable if what she knew about Sauvage was any indication, and under the present circumstances it made Jules want to scream.

But she said, "I see what you mean," because after all she did, and because she still wasn't in the business of telling other people's secrets, and it wasn't her job to manage her friends' love lives even when they were being absolutely ridiculous about it, anyway. It wasn't her job to fix everything.

Maybe if she repeated that to herself enough times she could finally learn to let go. Probably not. But it was worth a try, anyway.

Roman cleared his throat, a little awkwardly, and seemed to suddenly remember he was holding his glasses instead of wearing them. "So," he said, sliding them back on, "on the subject of things we have forgotten to fully explain to each other, you never told me what it is you're planning to research in this library that may or may not hold the sum total of all knowledge. It strikes me as a very broad category."

"Oh! I thought I might get a little more into the really large-scale magic you and the other hunters used to deal with," she said, and went on for a while about what she'd seen in the descriptions of battles, the patterns, the missing explanations that she knew must exist somewhere. She wanted to follow that thread to its source, to know how things worked in this new world she'd stumbled into, that was really the same world as before but with once-distant parts brought close.

And from this the conversation turned to other things, business and gossip and where they might go when they met up again for lunch, and the rest of the drive passed quite pleasantly. Jules dropped Roman off at the shipping center after they settled on a lunch spot and a time, and then parked in the area Roderick had indicated, which wasn't as far from the library as he'd implied. She was pleased to see that the building was still there; the library hadn't moved on yet, despite her delayed return.

[Indigo]

This time there was nobody at the circulation desk when she came in, and she had to poke her head around a few different corners before she found Roderick halfway up a ladder, trying to fit a glass sphere full of something sparkly into the empty space on a shelf. One of his ears swiveled to face her. "Be with you in a second! This fella just will not stay put. I wonder if..." He trailed off into a murmur, rearranging books around the sphere, and then slowly drew his paws away from it. It stayed. He made a satisfied noise and jumped down from the ladder. "Jules! It's good to see you again. I set aside some reading material for you, but I wasn't sure when you'd be coming back so it's a little out of the way."

She followed him back over to the desk and watched him rummage around in drawers and compartments she couldn't see. Once, briefly, he disappeared completely from view. After a few minutes he came back up and set a stack of books in front of her with a triumphant grin. "There! Might be kind of dusty, sorry. I think Alphonse must have moved them, because I don't remember putting them behind...well, anyway, if these aren't the right kind of materials for you I can find more. Like I said before, we have a pretty big selection on these subjects."

Several of the books were metareferences like the one she'd looked at before; the very same Who's Who guide was here as well, presumably because she hadn't had time to read through the whole thing. But there were more normal books, too, for a certain definition of normal. A magic textbook that had seen better days, a memoir or two, some regular reference books and natural histories of specific magical creatures...and something else, a thin book bound in linen, with nothing written on the spine or cover. She flipped through it. The pages were covered in neat but dense handwriting she had to squint to read. "Is this...this looks like a diary."

Roderick, who had started filling out some sort of form while she browsed the stack, looked up with a frown. The expression didn't seem to belong on his face, and didn't stay long. "May I see that? Oh! Yes, I remember this one. It's the journal of Timothy Barker, slightly infamous necromancer. He might have turned up in your reading last time."

"Sounds vaguely familiar." He'd been a side note in Argent's commentary, a fight where neither side had exactly won or lost and therefore, apparently, one she hadn't wanted to give much attention to. "But why does the library have his journal?"

"In this case he actually willed it to the Library after his death," Roderick said. "Or apparent death, I guess. You never really know with necromancers! The Library does sometimes pick up diaries and other personal documents in the course of its knowledge-gathering, but unless we have explicit permission to use them I usually just put those into storage because it would be sort of creepy to lend them out. One day maybe I'll convince it to ask first—any change around here is something of an uphill battle, but hope springs eternal! Anyway, you don't need to feel weird about reading that one. Or not because it's a diary. It did come from an infamous necromancer, so there are probably things in it you'll feel weird about."

Jules laughed. "Thanks for finding all these."

"No problem at all! I wasn't sure exactly what you were looking for, so it's a little broad, but let me know if you want to narrow the field and I'll see what else we have."

[Indigo]

She took one step away from the counter and paused. "I was wondering—is there any way to remove information from the library? So it doesn't appear anywhere in here?"

Roderick tapped his pen against the desk. "It depends on what kind of information. Whole books might be hard. There's a process, I think, but it's very complicated and doesn't always work, and Alphonse has to be here to do some of it. Smaller things are easier."

"It's just a name a friend of mine doesn't use anymore."

"Oh, of course! That's easy, we do those all the time. Sometimes it turns out to be the whole reason the Library came to someone in the first place." He pulled a form out of a drawer and handed it over, along with his pen. "Just fill that out and I'll file it. The Library works pretty quickly with those—if a name is in a lot of books it takes longer, of course, especially if some of them correspond to more...traditional books, because the name will be replaced in copies outside too. Though it doesn't come up as much. Most people who find the Library aren't famous enough to be in that many books."

She looked over the form, which was very short, and pulled the Who's Who out of the stack of books. It fell open to Sauvage's page without any further effort on her part. The hrraktha script required some concentration to copy accurately, just because of its complete unfamiliarity, but she managed, and there was room for identifying context on the form in case of misspellings or similar. She returned the form to Roderick and went off to a corner to read the books he'd given her.

There were a few hunter biographies, some of them falling into the category she couldn't help but think of as real books, about especially famous figures who even Jules had heard of but who had nothing to do with anyone she knew in more than a peripheral way. She glanced through these, but they didn't hold her interest. Moss's team had drawn her attention because of her sense that she already knew them a little, through the small window Sauvage and Roman's memories had given her, and that they were connected to her in some small tenuous way. The life stories of people she had no relationship to at all were much less interesting.

Battles, though, and monsters, in all the multifarious definitions of the word. These fascinated her no matter how far removed from her life. Barker's journal contained a deceptive amount of text given how small the book itself was, but she breezed through it, soaking up explanations of spell mechanics and accounts of repeated experiments that never seemed to go right. There were some rather disturbing experiments, of course. A necromancer does not become infamous by being nice, or good; Moss's hunters would not go after a mere scientist. But Jules managed a certain academic distance from these things, for the most part, and when she couldn't she skipped a page or two.

Some of the pages were also stuck together with what appeared to be dried blood. When she came to the first of these she thought about it for a while, and concluded that since this was only the library's reproduction of the journal—she confirmed this with Roderick, just to be sure—it was only a facsimile of blood and she shouldn't feel weird about touching it. Which only sort of helped, but sort of was better than not at all.

She read the most interesting parts of the magic textbook, too, and picked through the indices of the biographies for combat details and different hunters' strategies, what worked and what didn't and, on the rare occasion that it mattered, which things only worked for certain people. She studied the biology of magical monsters and cross-referenced with the effects of magic on other things. She became so absorbed in this research that Roman had to call her to ask if she'd forgotten about lunch.

Before she left she returned the stack of books to Roderick and gave him some parameters for what she'd be looking for next time, in the form of a very vague description with a lot of gestures. She didn't know how to explain what she was doing—she seemed to be feeling around the shape of something, a network of mechanisms, an ecosystem of magic—but Roderick said he'd give it his best shot, and the next time she visited he had another, more targeted stack of books for her, and helped her pick out the most relevant details.

The next time she came after that, she took notes, and with each visit the notes grew, and so did Jules's understanding of what made a monster. And, which seemed equally important, what unmade them. Or at least defanged them. Whatever worked.

[Indigo]

"I think I've been going about this the wrong way," Jules said one morning, closing one of the heftier magic textbooks with a thump. She'd accumulated quite a few of them by now, comparing them to other accounts and seeing where they contradicted or informed each other, with careful attention to their chapters on biology.

"Oh, gosh," Roderick said, "I hope not, after all the work you've put into it." On this particular day he'd had very little work to catch up on and had joined her on the floor, where he was currently picking through a book about sea monsters. Between them were several notebooks, some closed, others open to relevant pages covered in Jules's handwriting, marginal notes and cross-referencing and post-it flags all over like she was cramming for a final. She sat with another notebook balanced on one knee, held in place by her pen as she paused in her scribbling.

"I don't think I'll have to redo a lot, exactly," she said. "Just rearrange it. I've been looking for a kind of grand unifying theory of monsters, right?" Something better than Roman's flowery, nonspecific definition, she'd thought, something that would give her an understanding tied up in a neat little bow. She had to admit now it was a pretty unrealistic idea, but the library seemed like such a convenient repository, a simple solution for a difficult problem, and she wanted it to be so. "But that's impossible, it doesn't make any sense."

"When you put it that way, I guess it doesn't. I had a problem like that with my master's thesis, except it was about the workings of this place and places like it, and, well, you can see where that got me." It was a phrase that would normally imply bitterness, but Roderick said it with his usual cheer, and smiled fondly at the circulation desk. Jules thought he might be the only person she had ever met with no regrets. "I'm guessing a change in career path isn't your proposed solution, though."

"No, I don't think that would help me much. But! I have all this information in one place now, or...several places," she amended, taking in the vast expanse of notebooks on the floor. "And I've compared sources against each other to get a better idea of what's true and what's false, and even if I don't have some kind of centralized explanation for everything that's ever happened, I know how things work. Mostly. Enough to be able to extrapolate. So if I do a lot of careful editing and compiling and so on, I could put together...I don't know. Like one of your metareferences, but by hand."

"With better fact-checking, too! The Library tries, I think, but it doesn't have the same degree of media literacy that a person would," Roderick said. "Which is a little ironic now that I think about it. Are you planning to run off and join the monster hunters, then? I could probably tell you where to find them, with the catalog, but...mm."

"I don't have the right skillset for it, really."

"Well, far be it from me to speculate on what you do in your spare time, but that wasn't the impression I got from you, no."

"I want...I don't know." She looked down at her notes, at the ink smeared on her fingers from overenthusiastic writing, at the battered and slightly charred copy of Intermediate Hydromancy she'd been reading. "Maybe none of this will ever be useful to me. Roman's old enemies might come looking for him, although if he's been living in the same place for ten years you'd think someone would have done that by now if they wanted—" By this time Roderick knew a fair amount of what had led her to this research in the first place, because it was hard to spend hours in the same room as Roderick and not have a friendly conversation with him. "—but he definitely wouldn't expect me to fight them off myself. But I've been running into a lot of strange magicky things lately that I never would have thought about before, and it seems like they're going to keep happening if I keep living my life the way I have been. I like my life, for the most part. So I want to understand all the weird things that are going on in it."

"That is one problem the Library is well-equipped to solve," Roderick said. "Or maybe solve isn't the right word, since it's sort of an ongoing process, but mitigate? It's a good resource for you, is my point. Which is what libraries are all about anyway. I think I'm getting sidetracked into my own research again, sorry. You get my point."

"That I do." Jules opened up the textbook again, this time to a different section, one about manipulating weather and the dangers thereof. "Do you want to help me put all this into some kind of order? I know you probably have other things to do, but you are the resident expert on organizing things."

"I don't know if I'd say that! You should see what this place looked like when it was just Alphonse working here. I disrupted his perfect order a little bit, coming in with my own ideas about what belongs where." He laughed. "But I do love classifying things and I'd be happy to help! Although I have an appointment at...some time this afternoon. But you'll have me until then."

"Great. Why don't you take the elemental stuff, and I'll take the mechanical stuff, and we should get through a decent chunk by lunchtime."

[Indigo]

More or less everything about Sauvage had run contrary to her initial expectations, such as they were, but if she were to rank the most surprising developments of the lot then the fact that he could cook would make it into the top five at least. Jules, who associated cooking with favors and friends and, these days, work, had reacted to this revelation by wondering aloud who he could possibly have to cook for.

He'd tipped his head to one side like a wary bird. "For myself. Not to say I am the only one who should benefit from my skills, but as you are no doubt aware I haven't had an audience for a while."

"You can just...conjure things out of the air, though." She'd let "audience" pass, because she didn't want to argue with him about what kind of relationship he'd had with a bunch of people she'd never met.

"I can, but I don't. I move things that already exist. It's much less disruptive to the fabric of reality, if occasionally limiting. And I wouldn't create food that way even if not for the safety concerns. It's not the same. I would rather eat raw, live fish, and I have done so when there was nothing else available, and you may rest assured that it is not a pleasant experience."

And he wasn't half bad at it, either, although he sometimes prioritized intensity of flavor above all else with unfortunate consequences. It had taken Jules a while to find this out; it had taken Sauvage a while to start issuing invitations instead of waiting for her to come looking for him, a habit which became less appealing over time, though she probably wouldn't have minded it if it were the only thing.

But eventually there had been a series of lunch arrangements, which had in turn evolved into a regular weekly event, and so Jules was sitting on Sauvage's couch and discussing the finer points of gardening at not quite maximum volume while he did something elaborate and pleasant-smelling in the kitchen. He knew absolutely nothing about plants.

"You can't just keep it in the same tiny grocery-store pot forever," she said, "because the roots need room to grow or the plant will just choke itself to death. Which is exactly the problem Weston is having with his trees, I think—he didn't explain himself very well but that's what it sounded like—and if he doesn't manage to drop them off this week then I might have to go over there and take them by force so they don't die."

The landscape of the house had changed somewhat since her first visit. The walls remained dark red, the green couch sat in the same place it originally had, but the boxes had vanished with envy-inducing alacrity and the rooms populated with furniture so resolutely, consistently mismatched that it formed a coherent set anyway. At least it all seemed to be of roughly the same quality. A variety of paintings had been hung on the various nails she'd noticed in the wall on her first visit; Jules wasn't remotely an art expert but if pressed she would have described them as impressionist. Since Sauvage's first appearance at her house his living room had also sprouted a television, although she had never yet seen him use it.

"Given sufficient motivation, it appears that anyone can be moved to war," Sauvage said. "People in this town get very involved with each other, don't they?"

"I guess? It's not very big. Everyone sees a lot of everyone else, unless they try to avoid it." She had noticed Sauvage's presence at the cafe dropping off recently, apparently unrelated to her ongoing relationship with the library, and this last was the latest of many attempts to provoke an explanation. Normally it wasn't hard to nudge Sauvage into a discussion of what he was thinking, but it had been more difficult lately and on this subject in particular he just wouldn't take the bait.

[Indigo]

"The strangest thing happened to me the other day," he said, "after another of those storms we've been having. Part of my roof fell in—I was out of the house at the time, I've repaired it now—but once the rain had stopped, while I was still assessing the damage, one of the neighbors whose name I'm afraid completely escapes me came up to the house and asked if I needed any help fixing it." Sauvage was often confused by social niceties to some degree or another, but now he sounded downright quizzical, as if he truly could not fathom why his neighbor might offer to help him fix his roof.

"It's not all that strange," Jules said slowly. However bad she might be at reading people, she knew a pattern when she saw one, and she was seeing the edge of one now. "You live in Bristlecone, people recognize you, you go out of your way to talk to them. So when you look like you need help, they offer it, because you're one of them. Us. The community."

"I'm not, though," he said. "Not really." A sentiment echoed in many anecdotes about Sauvage's life, but rarely in such explicit terms. "It would be unfair to them, to take advantage of that misunderstanding."

Jules leaned back and stared hard at the ceiling for a moment, to quell a more frustrated reply than her eventual, "Suit yourself." She was beginning to lose patience with this sort of thing.

The conversation stalled there for a while, time marked by Sauvage muttering to himself in the kitchen and the occasional loud sizzle, and Jules found her mind wandering, absurdly, unaccountably, to her failed effort to persuade Roman to talk to Sauvage. All right, not all that unaccountably when she thought about it; she'd been trying to accept that it wasn't her responsibility, not something she could magically fix just by saying the right words. To ignore the way Roman still kept bringing conversations around to Sauvage even after she'd pointed out what he was doing; to ignore too Sauvage's wistful tales of the monster hunters and the way he shied away from a more than superficial mention of Roman's involvement in these stories. To look away and let them sort it out themselves.

But she couldn't really look away, because she saw both of them all the time and always, sooner or later, they talked about each other, even when they were trying not to. Maybe especially then.

She would never convince Roman to talk, that much was clear, and she couldn't even fault his reasons without telling him something she'd already agreed not to. So when Sauvage returned to the living room and passed her a bowl of curry before sitting at the other end of the couch, she said, "Have you ever thought about going down to see Roman sometime?"

Sauvage froze, that unsettling perfect stillness she'd seen only once before. "Why would I do that? I hardly think it would end any better than last time, and you know how that went."

"Sure, but you caught him off guard then and things were...different than they are now, in general. I mean," she said, gesturing vaguely around them, "I think you could make a pretty convincing argument against those frankly bizarre accusations from that time, if he made them again, which I doubt. We do talk, you know. He's commented on how well you and I get along."

[Indigo]

"Of course he has. He is rightly concerned with your safety."

"I don't think he is, anymore. At least not in relation to you. I'm sure he is more generally, that just comes with the territory."

Sauvage shook his head, mouth twisting into a grimace. "I—you're not—what is it you think I would achieve by doing this? Maybe you're right, his opinion has changed, I have no reason to discount what you've heard, but it doesn't matter. What do I have to offer him? I am a wholly self-centered creature, and he knows that as well as you do. He's just as capable of coming to me as I am of going to him, but he doesn't, because I don't have anything he wants."

"You don't know that," she said, and clamped the side of her tongue between her teeth. Roman had never asked for secrecy; that would probably have required putting a name to his feelings, and he was disinclined to do so. But that wasn't a free pass to just go telling anyone anything.

Her meaning hadn't been completely opaque, though, if Sauvage's astonished laugh was any indication. "You think I should tell him..." He sounded as though he meant to complete the sentence, but instead just trailed off and started a new one. "He wouldn't have wanted to know even when we were on better terms. As things are now—"

"There's always a chance it could work out." This she managed to say with confidence; unique circumstances aside, it was pretty much the advice she'd given to high school friends with crushes when she'd only known one side of the story, and was probably true in most situations anyway. Sometimes the chance was small, but it always existed.

"No, there isn't." Sauvage was staring past her again, into memory or imagined future or something else entirely. "Love," he said, "doesn't belong to things like me."

Remembering, later, Jules would decide that "things" had been the final straw.

"Shut up," she said, "shut up. Why are you so determined to keep anyone from ever caring about you? You spout all this shit about how you're selfish and careless and you've done terrible things and you don't have any right to anything, and sure! You've done terrible things! I'm not going to argue that! And you've made sure to the best of your ability that you won't do them again, even though it would be easier not to care, so excuse me if I'm not convinced of your unassailable selfishness. You said you wanted to build a normal life and you're doing it, you have friends and I guess friendly acquaintances, people who know who you are and want to help you out if you need it and you refuse because you don't want to take something you don't think you deserve, and you know what? I work in a cafe. People talk to me a lot, and sometimes they talk to me about you, and they think you're kind of a weird recluse, especially recently, but they also think you're nice. And you're not even all that nice! You don't have any manners and you show up places uninvited and expect to be accommodated. You're more self-centered than average, I'll give you that, but you care about people and they can tell! And you sit here and make your dramatic proclamations about love not belonging to you but you reject it when it's offered and I for one am sick of it!"

Sauvage's mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He said, in a tone of utter bewilderment, "I don't have any friends."

She threw up her hands. "Fine. You don't have any friends, and you're the worst person in the world, and nobody will ever love you. Believe whatever you want. I'm not going to help you wallow." With more than a little regret, she set the curry on the table and got up.

"Jules—"

"You know where to find me when you decide to grow up," she said, and left.

[Indigo]

Jules wasn't really prone to outbursts like that, and had been completely unprepared for one to come out of her, and after storming off home she found plenty of time to wonder whether it had been a good idea; as if that would have made any difference to whether it actually happened. She was acutely aware of having told a two hundred-year-old dragon to grow up, which seemed rather childish now. By this time she had a sense of Sauvage's reactions, but she still found herself uncertain of what he'd do with this, how long it would take him to react in the first place, whether, in fact, he would ever speak to her again at all.

These things were out of her hands, though. No use worrying about them now. Better and simpler to assume he'd sort himself out eventually, as he'd apparently done in the past, and get on with her life in the meantime.

As it happened he turned up at her house the following afternoon. She was in the backyard, preparing to plant four hazel trees that Weston had finally, finally gotten around to dropping off, and there was Sauvage at the corner of the house, hands in his pockets, looking everywhere but at her face.

"You were right," he said.

"I know that," she said. "Do you? Really?"

He sighed, expansively. "I do. And I don't. There are, as I'm sure you are aware, different levels of knowing. Old habits of thought tend to linger. But...you were right, and I'll try to remember. I don't especially enjoy being yelled at, of course, but I needed to hear it." Now he looked directly at her, where she leaned on the shovel with her eyebrows pointedly raised. "You've been a good friend, despite my best efforts."

She couldn't help chuckling at that. "You're not so bad at it yourself," she said. "Despite your best efforts."

"On which subject, do you want a hand with that?"

"I only have the one shovel."

"That's no trouble, I know where to find another." He didn't bother with the dramatic gestures this time; there was just another shovel in his hand. Its handle was painted a shiny red. "Where do you want me to dig?"

Electing not to inquire as to the origin of the shovel, she pointed to a spot directly between herself and the house, because it fit into her tree arrangement master plan and because it would be easier to talk that way in about equal measure. On his way to the spot he stopped to hug her, hard, briefly enough that by the time her surprise registered he had already stepped away. He looked vaguely guilty.

"Don't make that face at me," she said. It came out a little sharper than intended, so she tried to soften it: "It's fine. You're fine. Maybe give me a little warning next time, though." Pointless wallowing was worth pushing back against, but this was different, an uncertainty around other people that, as far as Jules could tell anyway, came from inexperience rather than self-defeating insistence.

"Noted," he said, and set to digging as if he'd prefer to just forget the whole thing.

[Indigo]

"Why do you do so many things the hard way?" she asked, after a while. "I know you won't just make a hole, because of your principles—"

"Now, hang on," he said, "a hole is not a thing that can be made. It is by its very definition an absence, and you can't produce an absence of a thing. Or...hmm." His voice frosted over. "I suppose one could. But I don't."

There was something in the choice of words there, she thought, but it seemed unwise to follow that thread at the moment. "Okay, fine, that makes sense, I guess. But you can move things with magic, I just saw you do it a minute ago. You could just move all that soil somewhere else without even blinking. You could unclog your sink with a snap of your fingers." The irascible drain in Sauvage's kitchen sink had become a recurrent shadow over his life, to hear him tell it. "I wasn't sure at first but I think you could probably have moved everything into your house without all the packing and unpacking and driving and all that. And instead you're digging a hole. So, why?"

"Because," he said, "it feels good to do real things, physical things—the doing of them is not always entirely pleasant, what with the sort of things I tend to find clogging that drain, but the action itself..." He paused, planted the shovel firmly in the ground, and leaned against it, frowning. "I'm not sure how to explain. It's similar to my feeling about food. It's just...not the same."

"I'm not sure I understand, but I get the sense I probably wouldn't understand any better if you explained it more."

"Probably not, no." He blinked a few times, aggressively, as if there were something in his eyes, and resumed digging.

For a little while there was only the light patter of rain falling and the sound of wet earth being tossed aside, but neither of them was capable of leaving well enough alone, and so it wasn't terribly long before Jules said, "I still think you ought to talk to Roman, you know. I think you might be surprised."

"Do you know something I don't, Jules?" he said with half a smile.

"I know a lot of things you don't. You probably don't even know what kind of trees these are."

He stopped digging again to stare intently at one of them, more or less the same way he'd stared at her the first few times they'd spoken.

"Sauvage?"

"I'm trying to remember the names of trees I know," he said. "There are, I will confess, not many. I'm afraid I have to question your motivation for insisting I tell Roman something I firmly believe he is better off not knowing. You must be up to something."

She considered this for a moment. It was not exactly untrue. She almost wished for fewer scruples, but only almost. "I think," she said carefully, "that it's possible for the two of you to salvage some kind of friendship, or something positive, anyway, out of whatever you had before and the people you are now. And I also think that the only way it's going to work is if you're honest with each other."

"Then I trust you've had this conversation with him as well."

He'd said it like he was expecting her not to have, but of course it was truer than he could know. "A similar one, yes."

"And why do you care so much?"

"Because I want my friends to be happy? Is that suspicious somehow?"

That made him stop digging yet again; they were never going to get the trees in the ground, at this rate. "Happy," he said. "I don't know if I ever have been, you know. Maybe...maybe that's what this is. I don't know. Something's been different recently. Maybe it's that." He took a deep breath and, fortunately, saved Jules from having to arrange a sudden profound sadness into a response to all that. "It scares me, Jules. The whole idea, talking to him again, about anything. Last time...I know you don't think it'll be like that again, and I trust you, but if you're wrong..."

"I know," she said. "But what if I'm right?"

"You have been right about a startling number of things, I will admit," he said. "I'll...think about it. That's the best I can promise you."

"I'll take it." She had a sense of relief; the trick of balancing two mirrored secrets had become increasingly difficult with time, and if she had to do it much longer something was going to give. "Now, we'd better hurry this up. The way the weather's been, I want to get these trees in the ground as fast as possible, just in case."

[Indigo]

Jules drove back from the city, her phone in the passenger seat with Roderick on speaker; he hadn't been around when she'd stopped by the library, but she had been neglecting her obscure grocery duties anyway, so there had been plenty to keep her occupied. She had paused at the turn that would take her to her parents' house for longer than strictly necessary, weighing the value of her good saucepans against that of her good mood, and had decided once again not to risk the fight. Maybe one day she'd get around to getting them back. Maybe.

Alphonse, who had seen her come into the library and declared solemnly that she must be one of Roderick's friends, had given her Roderick's personal number without her asking. In his position she'd be far from thrilled about that, but he hadn't seemed to mind, and they had picked up the previous week's discussion as if she'd never left.

"Actually, I've been focusing a lot on weather magic," she said. "With all these storms--I'm sure it's nothing, but it's good to be prepared, just in case." She squinted through the rain at the road ahead; the water collecting at its edges seemed a little higher than it ought to be.

"Oh yes! I'd definitely worry about that kind of thing," Roderick said. "Not that I'm advising you to worry, you seem to have that covered, but you know what I mean. I think you scoured the specific books on that subject last time, or at least the ones we had on hand last time--there might be something else now, I'll ask Al when I get back--but I happen to know of a few other hidden gems in other texts."

Maybe she was imagining it? "It shows up a lot in sea monster accounts, I've noticed. I guess a storm is a pretty good hunting strategy for something like that." She'd been thinking too much about weather-related disasters recently, it was starting to poison her mind. Maybe. With any luck.

"But on the other hand there have been a few periods in history where any disaster at sea was attributed to monsters or witches or both," Roderick said. "It's fascinating, and also kind of infuriating."

Bristlecone, broadly considered, was something like a large bowl scooped out of the countryside, surrounded by a series of hills over which the main road in and out passed. On this side the bowl was shallower, the village's edge closer to the aspiring downtown that occupied its lowest streets; Jules had seen a bowl shaped like this in a fancy restaurant once and still occasionally wondered about its purpose, but at least it served to justify the analogy in her head, even if it couldn't serve a full portion of soup. Now, as she crested the shallow hill in her borrowed car, she braked sharply to avoid driving straight into water.

She stared blankly at a lake that hadn't existed this morning, which appeared to be still rising slowly, lapping at the tires. Then she backed carefully over the hill and parked the car on the highest ground she could easily reach. She fumbled for her phone, which had fallen under the seat. As an afterthought she grabbed her notebook from the back; regrettably, it was the one with Monster Manual written on the cover, which had seemed funny at the time but now just made her hope the circumstances were enough of a distraction that no one would notice.

"Roderick," she said, "I'm going to have to call you back."

[Indigo]

She climbed back up to the top of the hill and looked down over lower Bristlecone, and tried not to panic. The water had risen to just below the rooftops of what buildings she could see from here--bad--but at least it didn't appear to have reached any of the higher streets yet. Things could, she thought, always be worse. Or almost always. Strange that she couldn't see any people from here, even around structures that weren't submerged, but maybe there had been some kind of evacuation. Impossible to tell from here.

Satisfied that there was no one in her immediate vicinity in need of help, she turned her attention to the next most pressing concern, namely: the rain was weird. Hard to tell, of course, with it falling right in front of her eyes, but it seemed less dense in front of her than it was behind, which struck her as, if anything, backwards, though any kind of directionality would have been odd enough anyway.

She really, really didn't want to go down there.

Something about the sky over the village was...not quite right. She'd expect it to be crowded with dark clouds, and it was, far more than over the road coming in even though there was apparently less rain coming out of them, but something was missing, or something else was there that shouldn't be. Illusions had been low on her list of research priorities, a decision she now quietly cursed. She studied the clouds, looking for answers, or for questions that resembled answers.

There. The lightning always flashed in the same pattern, first over Sauvage's house on the high hill off in the distance, then over towards the center of town and then once off to the west. Wait a few seconds and watch it repeat. It didn't tell her why the illusion was there, but at least now she could be sure it existed and she wasn't just making things up.

The air around her felt wrong, too solid. And why shouldn't she want to go down there, anyway? It was almost certainly very dangerous, and probably at least a little gross, because there's no such thing as a clean flood, but it was her village, her home, even if she'd lived there less than two years and her mail still sometimes went to the wrong address. She examined these thoughts of hers and then took another step forward, further down the hill, and for a moment there was resistance, but she pushed through it and then, finally, she saw.

Where the sky should have been, over Bristlecone, a battle raged, two creatures of unfathomable size wrapped around each other clawing and biting and flailing and roaring. One was a thing she vaguely remembered from the margins of one of the library's books, like an eel and a shark and a lizard and a bear all blended together into something with too many limbs and too many claws and not enough eyes, something that Jules strongly felt should not be, or at least should be a lot further away from her. The other, entwined with it, tearing at it, always moving, was an enormous serpentine dragon, black fur and black wings and six enormous red eyes, a mouth that revealed what must be hundreds of long sharp teeth when it opened to bite down on an errant arm. The eyes moved in pairs, and the rearmost set rolled to fix her with a look of disapproval, and then somehow Sauvage managed to give the impression of a shrug while locked in combat with an incomprehensible monster and looked away again, returning his attention to the task at hand.

There was a small rowboat on the hillside just below her, where there hadn't been before. She said "Thanks?" even though he couldn't possibly hear her from all the way up there. The boat appeared to be well-used, and she hoped he remembered where he'd gotten it from, to put it back afterward. She had to operate on the assumption that there would be an afterward, because otherwise why bother?

Impossible to know if there was anyone else still in town, but what would be the point of giving her the boat if there weren't someone down there to row out to? After all, she could just walk around if she were desperate to check on her own house. She pushed the boat into the floodwaters, climbed aboard, and began rowing in the general direction of the cafe. It was not exactly easy, since she'd never done it before, but at least it was a fairly intuitive process.

[Indigo]

She quickly discovered that there were...things in the water. What manner of things she couldn't say; they darted around just under the surface, murky shadows with sharp edges and excess fins, not enough to identify them from her research, if they were even anything she'd heard of to begin with. The beast in the sky was familiar, sure, but only in the abstract, a thing that many people agreed existed but couldn't decide on where or when, not something she'd seen in any of the monster-hunting accounts she'd read. Maybe these things were similar.

The sound from above was really very awful. She did her best to ignore it.

The things swimming around under her boat didn't seem particularly interested in her, for all that they were following the same course. Curious, and cursing herself for her curiosity at the same time, she tried to scoop one of them up with an oar. They kept slipping out of reach like soap in a bathtub, but on the fourth try she caught one.

It was a washed-out grayish green, covered in scales and fins and weird little spines with no obvious purpose or symmetry, with eyes that seemed about to bulge out of its head and teeth that didn't fit inside its mouth. It had five legs and two tails. With a chattering noise that Jules's brain desperately wanted to interpret as speech for some reason, it bounded up the length of the oar and climbed up her arm.

"Fuck!" But it didn't attack her, just scrambled all over with impressive dexterity, making those unsettling noises the whole time. It paused on top of her head and she heard it sniff, even though it had not appeared to possess a nose. Then it jumped off and disappeared back into the water.

No, they weren't interested in her at all. And they were going in the same direction she was, toward the cafe. When Roman had suggested someone might come looking for vengeance, she'd imagined indiscriminate destruction and carnage, the entire village laid waste in one fell swoop. She hadn't thought it would be so...personal. Though the water was still rising, if slowly, so maybe she shouldn't write off the total destruction just yet.

Landmarks told her she was nearing her destination, and as she did so she started to hear other strange noises, closer and less terrible than the racket in the sky. Little squeaks that sounded like they could have come from the sharp swimming things, and the occasional splash. Before she could analyze this too much she felt the boat knock against the side of a building, giving her an opportunity to look up and see for herself.

Roman was standing on the roof of the cafe with the rifle she'd seen in that old picture, although it looked even more worn-out now than it had on the page, shooting into an endless tide of little biting monsters. They converged on him from all sides, occasionally slipping by to get their claws into him, and now they weren't merely checking to see who they'd found; they were out for blood. Hardly any of them made any contact, and Roman seemed...more unfazed than she would be in his position, but enough of them, given enough time...well. It didn't bear thinking about, so she tried not to.

She noted that the gun didn't appear to be firing bullets, but bolts of purple light, which, she reflected, she would probably know more about if she'd read Roman's entry in the Who's Who guide. Hindsight and all that. But the details didn't really matter. She didn't have to use the thing.