Midas
Location: Royal Archives | Candor | Midas
Time: December 31st, 1000 A.D.
It was the end of the year, and Lucieon was more than ecstatic about being allowed into the Royal Archives with the rest of his class. The last fifteen years of his life had been spent studying medical tomes to near obsessiveness. Memorizing procedures and medicines, the anatomy of humans, wargs, elves and orcs. It had filled his mind with enough meaningless knowledge that he had managed to trick himself into believing that he loved the medical sciences, and that he had always loved the medical sciences.
At age fifteen, he was not very impressive. He had blonde hair like spun gold, weaved into a dignified braid behind him. Velvet robes and belts hung to his thin body, and his cold sapphire eyes seemed glassy and dead. However, inside he was feeling a great deal of excitement. He, with seventeen others, mostly older boys of eighteen or nineteen were being allowed into the king's private archives deep in Castle Goldhollow. They stood before a great stone gate, carved with mysterious arcana known only to the Arcmagus of the king's court. Those doors were left open for their little group, led by one of the College of Medicine's oldest professors to access.
It was an agonizing wait, but soon the professor, an old doddery man with a beard nearly as tall as his person, entered the royal archive and bid them to follow. Each of the boys bowed their heads as they passed through the thin slip between the stone doors. As Lucieon passed through himself, his heart stopped and the breath caught in his throat.
The library was awesome. It struck him down into oblivion, it told him that he was insignificant. It destroyed his mind, soul and body and reformed it into a smaller creature, more timid and humble. And that was just from it's sight alone. The library could easily span the entirety of Candor, and it most likely did. The library was not so much a structured building as it was a huge cavern, thousands of feet high and thousands of feet deep. The gate itself was only a two dimensional protrusion in the rows and rows of stone bookshelves, each holding thousands of old leather tomes. The group was on a small pedestal in the dark abyss of the library, suspended over a great gaping darkness of bookshelf after bookshelf, or ledge after ledge, of walkway after walkway. When Lucieon turned back to look at the entrance, he found the door there, and only the door there. The hallway beyond that did not exist. It dawned on him that the Archive did not merely exist in forward momentum, but rather it stretched infinitely backwards as well. They were standing in the middle of a cavern, so huge that there were no ends to be seen by the human eye, either up, down or to each direction. The only illumination were small blue orbs that cast an ambient glow to each of the walkways and bookshelves, and they shone like tiny stars in the distant darkness, giving the impression that they were in another world, floating in some aetherial home to demons and angels.
He was overwhelmed, completely and fully overwhelmed. So much so that he did not realize his feet were following the footsteps of the professor and his peers, and he was so overwhelmed that he did not notice their steps becoming fainter and fainter until they vanished. When he came to realize his great folly, he had already been alone for a sizable portion of time. Lucieon looked around him, blue orbs of light suspended themselves in the air to light the walkway before him. It was straight, with no divergent paths. It was strange then, that he should be separated from the group on a perfectly linear path. He looked back, and the gate was gone, swallowed by the distant black sky filled with twinkling stars. Thinking nothing of his situation he started to walk forward, hopefully toward the group at quite a fast pace. He continued this for an hour.
After an hour had passed his pace quickened, he did not understand why he had not caught up to the group yet. Soon his heart began to beat quickly and his feet hit the stone walkway hard and fast as he sprinted forward toward the starry abyss. Perhaps they were just a few more meters ahead, maybe they were behind the next bookshelf, by the next set of staircases downward and upwards. But it was useless. After another two hours Lucieon fell to his knees against he cool stone. His breath came fast and shallow and sweat stung his sapphire eyes. He was lost. Lost on a linear pathway into oblivion. Though he couldn't see much around him, he could feel it on his skin. The dampness of the air, the pressure of it against the hairs on his neck. Somehow, while running straight forward he had made a descent of several thousand meters. And now he was panting maybe a thousand floors below the gate he had entered through. Briefly panic crossed him mind as he toyed with the notion that he might perish here, lacking in water, food and proper oxygen. But it seemed that the cave itself was quite finite, and he had reached somewhere near the end of one of its walls. It was an assumption of course, made by the faint sound of running water below him. And reduction in the density of glowing blue light in front of him. He would need to make the journey back up, but he needed water, lest he fall to dehydration and die on his way home. It was a straight path after all, it had to lead back to the gate at some point or other. Lucieon willed himself to his feet again and wrapped his silk cloak tighter around himself. The air here seemed suddenly cooler than usual. And he pressed onward, hoping to find this source of water he felt was near.
