Chapter Text
The Land of Shelves and Towers is beautiful and glimmering. Blindingly so, Jaynne thinks dryly, squinting as she surveys her surroundings. Each glass spire reaches toward the white sky and refracts its glow, passing it around like a secret.
It's the first time she's been alone in a while, she realizes. Solitude was once a comfort born from anonymity, but now she just felt vulnerable. She loathed the feeling and straightened her back. If her suspicions were correct, she could be off her planet in less than an hour.
Each stiletto-thin tower holds innumerable books, filled with knowledge she could spend sweeps absorbing. She could lose herself in just one library, game be damned.
But, she reminds herself, she has a mission. Her footsteps, no matter how light, thud and reverberate through the stained-glass ground beneath her feet. Picking a tower at random, she strides through the transparent doors. The light is slightly less blinding inside and she allows herself a moment for her eyes to adjust. The sheer number of books, thick tomes made of oddly thin engraved glass, dims and filters the light.
For just a minute, she allows herself to wander. Her fingers trace the cool spines of the books and her eyes take in their titles. 50 Fantastic Grubloaf Recipes, The Troll Iron Chef Companion Guide, Old Alternian Cook. The entire tower is filled with cookbooks. There were certainly worse towers to test her theories on.
She picks a shelf at random and deposits its contents in a neat stack on a nearby glass table. An inspection of the shelf itself provides no insight and she sighs. Nothing is ever so simple.
At random she picks a book. 101 Uses For Mind Honey Outside Of Lusus Training. Her mind flashes to Zierre and for a moment she considers tucking this specific book away. Surely a goldblood could have use for it, certainly more than Jaynne herself.
Instead, she diligently flips through as she ascends the translucent spiral staircase to the top of the tower.
On top, the whole of her planet stretches out in front of her. Stained glass dapples the ground in dazzling barely-there shadows. She can see the thousands of books in the tower beside her, and thousands more in the tower beyond that, off into the curving horizon.
There are millions upon millions of books, she thinks. Losing one for the sake of learning more than its pages could ever dream to contain is a small sacrifice.
She holds the glass book out and lets it slip from her fingers to shatter to the floor stories before. The shattering makes her flinch, but she waits a moment, listening carefully. She waits to feel something, an idea bestowed as a reward for solving the puzzle.
She waits, and nothing happens.
Descending the stairs, she eyes the books she passes as if committing their titles to memory. Glass crunches under her feet as she steps back outside.
She is blinded again as the sky turns its full force on her again. She allows herself a moment to adjust to the light and coolness as she positions herself in the middle of the glass walkway.
Looking up at the glass spire full of recipes makes her feel small.
The reassuring weight and coolness of the pistol in her hand, deftly removed from her strife specibus, builds her back up again. For a sober moment she rudiments on how easily violence can tear knowledge to its knees. How one bullet can reduce a library to dust.
In the next moment, she is taking aim at the center of the spire, its weakest point in her sights. She fires, and hits her mark with a clink .
Spiderwebs of cracks branch out from the tiny hole in its outer wall. There is a sharp groan, and a symphony of small crystalline shatters as books within fall from the quaking walls.
And then, all at once, it collapses.
Its suddenness takes Jaynne off guard. The tower seems to explode outward, expelling shards of glass the size of her that pierced the ground and cracked the green pathway she stood on.
Jaynne, not for the first time, wondered if she was going to die. Dying alone had seemed like an inevitability once, but faces flashed through her mind that she was afraid to leave behind.
She caught her own expression in a falling shard, met her own terrified eyes, just before an impossible pain sent her crashing to the ground atop the shards.
She laid there still until the all-encompassing crashing silenced around her. Her own ragged breath was the last sound until she realized, belatedly, that she was surrounded by blood. It gleamed on the glass like precious gems until its color registered and she bolted upwards with a strangled cry.
She studied her scraped hands, her bloodied arms and her shirt drenched with blood.
There was a part of her, as she took inventory of herself, that already knew what she would find once she looked lower.
There was so much blood, that color that filled her veins and was kept well hidden now spreading across the ground like spilled ink.
And, like an odd funhouse mirror that distorted her body and distributed it across warped mirrors, she saw her own leg behind a towering chunk of glass.
She screamed once, a harsh and pained animalistic sound that bounced back around her and filled her ears with her own sickening distress. It cleared her mind just enough for instinct to take over and she pulled out her palmhusk, slippery with blood.
Her shaking fingers hesitated. Zierre was a healer, and had handled Clairre's own impromptu amputation well. Last she saw of her, however, was her deeply sleeping body.
Clairre was certainly strong enough to help her, and was no stranger to sudden limb loss. She feared that they would freeze, and that would still leave her dead and Clairre undoubtedly upset.
For her resilience, Jaynne did not have all the time in the world, and yet she still spent precious few seconds yearning for her… whatever they all were to each other now.
The logical answer popped online not a moment too soon.
"Aerith," Jaynne said shakily. "I may have made a mistake."
"Hang on, I'll be right there," Aerith sighed, but worry tinged her flat tone. "What happened?"
"I-I, well. It's a long story."