The Great Library of the Azure Spire was less a building and more a mountain carved into the shape of a book. It loomed against the night sky, a monolith of black stone and stained glass, its spires piercing the low-hanging clouds like accusing fingers.
"I—Ronan—moved Murphy's body through the shadows of the western colonnade. I kept his stride long and silent, rolling the feet from heel to toe to dampen the sound of boots on stone. Taking the wheel wasn't just a preference; it was a tactical necessity. Elrend was waiting for his Commander, and the old elf would have spotted the amateur hesitation in Murphy's posture long before we were close enough to speak."
"Sector clear," I whispered aloud, tapping the side of my ear as if checking a comms-link that didn't exist. I slid into the shadow of a gargoyle, my heart beating a slow, steady rhythm of pure tactical joy. "Visual on the objective. No hostiles."
'Seriously?' Murphy's mental voice cut in, dripping with second-hand embarrassment. 'Who are you even talking to? You know you're the only one out here, right?'
He sounded irritated—mostly because he hated being shoved into the passenger seat of his own life—but he knew that my muscle memory for stealth was superior. I ignored him. He didn't understand the craft.
I reached the service entrance, a heavy iron door tucked behind a statue of the First Archivist.
A shadow detached itself from the gloom.
It wasn't a monster. It was my lieutenant.
The elf didn't look like the drunk who had nearly killed us in the arena days ago. He stood with his back straight, his shoulders squared. The black cane was gone. In its place, resting easily on his hip, was a longsword with a pommel wrapped in faded grey leather—the standard issue of the Aethelgard Guard.
He looked like a blade that had finally been sharpened.
I stopped three paces away. I didn't bow—we were in the field. I gave him the single, sharp nod of a commanding officer acknowledging a sentry.
"Lieutenant," I whispered.
Elrend's eyes, clear and grey as winter ice, scanned the darkness behind me.
"Commander," Elrend replied, his voice a barely audible rasp. "The perimeter is secure. The night watch passed two minutes ago."
"Good work, Lieutenant, let's move out."
He didn't ask why we were breaking into the most restricted building in the Empire. He simply produced a heavy, complex key made of dull brass.
"The wards on this door are keyed to the faculty," Elrend murmured, sliding the key into the lock. "Once you are inside, the internal sensors are passive. As long as you do not damage the books or cast high-yield destruction magic, the Silence won't trigger."
Click.
The heavy tumblers rolled over with a satisfying thud. Elrend pushed the door open just enough to admit a single body.
"You have until dawn," Elrend warned. "Until then, I will hold the door."
"Understood," I said.
I stepped past him, into the cool, dry air of the Library. The smell hit me instantly—parchment, leather, dust, and the sharp tang of preservation spells. It was the smell of history.
I turned back to Elrend. "Stay sharp."
Elrend rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. A grim, terrifyingly sober smile touched his lips. "I have been asleep for a hundred years, sir. I am wide awake now."
He pulled the door shut, sealing us inside the dark.
I took a breath, centring the vessel.
'Your turn, Murphy,' I said. 'The floor is yours.'
I relinquished the connection.
The transition was instantaneous. Murphy surged back into control, his posture slumping slightly into his natural, guarded crouch. He shook his hands out, rolling his neck as if trying to shake off the feeling of being worn.
"Okay," Murphy whispered, his voice echoing in the vast, vaulted entry hall. "We're in."
He looked up. The interior of the Library was staggering. Rows of shelves stretched up into the darkness, spiralling higher and higher until they vanished into the gloom. Floating magelights drifted lazily like fireflies, illuminating titles in gold leaf.
"Time to scale up," Murphy muttered.
He walked to the centre of the aisle. He didn't hesitate. He reached into the deep, oceanic reservoir of our Dark Blue Core.
'Full deployment,' Murphy commanded.
He didn't pull a trickle of mana. He opened the floodgates.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. The air shimmered violently. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Twelve figures knit themselves out of Aether and water.
They appeared in a perfect circle around us. Twelve clones, plus the original Murphy. They all wore the same grey traveller's cloak. They all had the same messy dark hair and the same sharp, hungry eyes.
It looked like a glitch in reality. A small army of thieves standing in the holy of holies.
The Murphys looked at each other. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. They shared a single, driving purpose: Survival through data.
"Scatter," Murphy ordered his reflection.
The squad moved. They fanned out into the stacks with the silent, terrifying coordination of a wolf pack. Two headed for History. Three sprinted for Runic Theory. Four went for Aetheric Physics. The others vanished into the gloom of High Fantasy.
The raid had begun.
They secured a reading room deep in the restricted archives of the East Wing. It was a dusty, windowless chamber dominated by a mahogany table large enough to butcher a dragon on.
"Load it up," Murphy ordered.
The clones moved like ants. They scoured the shelves, returning with armloads of leather-bound tomes. The Fundamentals of Aetheric Flow. Applied Runic Geometry. The History of the First Spark.
They stacked the books on the table in twelve neat piles. One pile for every chair.
"Sit," he commanded.
Thirteen bodies—twelve made of water and magic, one made of flesh and anxiety—sat down in unison.
"Read," he said. "Don't skim. Don't interpret. Just burn the image of the page into your retinas."
The room filled with the dry, rhythmic rustle of pages turning. It was the sound of a hive mind at work.
Murphy sat at the head of the table, his eyes closed, waiting. He wasn't reading. He was the hard drive. He was the server waiting for the upload.
'Sixty minutes,' I monitored the internal clock. 'That is the optimal duration for retention before the construct's short-term memory begins to degrade.'
We waited. The silence was heavy, broken only by the aggressive flipping of paper. It was boring. It was agonizingly dull. But I knew what was coming.
"Time," I whispered.
The rustling stopped. Twelve clones looked up at us.
"Upload."
Murphy snapped his fingers.
POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP-POP.
The sound was like a string of firecrackers going off in a closet. The clones detonated into mist, their mana rushing back into our core.
But the mana wasn't the problem. It was the memories.
"GAAH!"
Murphy slammed my head onto the table, clutching his hair.
It wasn't a headache; it was a cerebral assault. Twelve hours of dense, academic text slammed into his hippocampus in a single microsecond.
His vision flashed white. He saw diagrams of mana-flow. He saw lists of reagents. He saw a thousand pages of text overlaying each other like a chaotic collage.
...the angle of the intake must mirror the solstice... ...Aether is not a fluid, it is a song... ...never cross the streams unless the moon is waxing...
He gasped, sucking in air, waiting for the vertigo to pass. Our nose was bleeding.
'Stable?' I asked, concerned.
"I feel like I just snorted a library," He wheezed, wiping the blood onto our sleeve. "But it's there. I can see the pages."
"Again," he groaned, standing up. "We're not done."
He recast the squad. The room filled up again. The clones sat down. They grabbed the next stack of books.
We did it three times. Three hours of real-time. Thirty-six hours of study time compressed into a single night.
By the third dispel, he was on the floor.
He was shivering. He had absorbed more magical theory in one night than most students learned in a year.
And it was all useless.
He dragged himself into a chair, staring at an open book on Advanced Enchanting.
"It's garbage," he muttered, flipping a page with a trembling hand.
'It is the accumulated wisdom of the Empire,' I countered, though I was worried about his state.
"It's gibberish, Ronan!" He snapped, pointing at a diagram. "Look at this! 'To create a light spell, one must entreat the Aether to mimic the morning sun.' What does that mean? How do you 'entreat' energy? Do you ask it nicely? Do you buy it dinner?"
He flipped to another page.
"'The Rune of Binding requires a loop of gratitude.' Gratitude? It's a lock! Why does a padlock need feelings?!"
He shoved the book away. It slid across the table and fell to the floor with a heavy thud.
"I have the data," he whispered, pressing his palms into our eyes. "I memorised the books. I know the shapes. I know the chants. But I don't understand it."
It was a jumbled mess of poetry, religion, and superstition masquerading as science. There were no constants. No rules applied to everything. One book said Aether was a river; the next said it was a fire; the third said it was the breath of dead gods.
"It's like trying to learn engineering from a book of riddles," he said, frustration bubbling up into rage. "There's no logic. It's just... 'Do this weird dance and hope you don't explode.'"
'Magic is an art, Murphy,' I said gently. 'It requires intuition. Feeling.'
"No," He said, shaking his head. "The Resonance Crystal wasn't art. It was hydraulics. Flow and pressure. The Academy runs on logic, but they teach it like it's a religion."
He kept grinding, pushing past the point where exhaustion usually turns into failure. I had to hand it to him—his willpower was incredible. It actually hurt to watch him struggle like that, knowing there was nothing I could do to lighten the load.
I stood up, pacing the room. My Danger Sense was quiet, but my brain was screaming. There was a pattern here. There had to be. Beneath the flowery language and the prayers to the sun, there had to be a mechanism.
I looked at a diagram on the chalkboard—a complex spell for "Water Purification."
I stared at it until my eyes watered.
It had a start point. It had an endpoint. In the middle, it had a messy, spiralling knot of lines that looked like spaghetti.
"Input," I muttered, touching the start of the rune. "Dirty water."
I traced the line to the end. "Output. Clean water."
I looked at the mess in the middle. The "Processing."
"What are you?" I whispered to the chalk lines. "You're not a prayer. You're a filter."
I stared at the looping, repetitive structure of the rune. It looked familiar. Not in a magical sense, but in a structural one.
A recurring loop. A conditional trigger. An exit command.
My heart skipped a beat.
I had seen this before. Not in this world. Not in the trenches. Not in the desert.
I had seen it on a glowing screen in a dark room that smelled of floor wax and teenage body odour.
"Ronan," I whispered, my voice trembling.
'Yes?'
"I need to go back," I said, gripping the edge of the table. "I need you to take me back."
'To where?'
"To school," I said. "High school. Earth. There was a class... Mr. Henderson. Intro to Computer Science."
'Err, how am I supposed to help with that?' Ronan reminded me. 'I never went to your school, remember.'
"I have the memories, I need you to help me amplify them, the way we do with music," I said, my eyes locked on the rune. I brought the flashes of images forward. I was sitting in class. I project an image of the monitor to Ronan.
"I need to see that screen again."
I closed my eyes. I didn't try to clear my mind; I tried to clutter it. I dug through the sediment of a thousand lifetimes, pushing past the mud of the trenches and the sand of the desert, reaching for a memory so mundane I had almost let it rot.
"It's slippery," I muttered, the image of the classroom flickering in and out like a bad signal. "I can't hold it. The trauma... It's too loud. It drowns out the boring stuff."
'Anchor it,' Ronan instructed, his presence wrapping around my mind like a stabilising field. 'Give me a sensory detail. A smell. A sound. I will amplify the frequency.'
"Floor wax," I whispered. "And... the hum of a cooling fan. A low, electric drone."
I pushed the sensation toward him. Ronan grabbed it. He poured his focus into the fragment, turning the volume up.
The darkness behind my eyelids shifted. The hum grew louder. The smell of cheap industrial cleaner filled my nose.
The Library dissolved.
I was sitting in a hard plastic chair. The desk in front of me wasn't mahogany; it was particle board with gum stuck to the underside. A bulky, beige monitor hummed in front of me, the screen glowing with harsh green text against a black background.
Mr. Henderson was standing at the whiteboard. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie that was too short. He looked exhausted.
"Syntax," Henderson droned, tapping the board with a dry-erase marker. "Computers are stupid. They don't know what you mean. They only know what you type."
I stared at the board.
-- if (x > 10) { print("Hello"); } else { print("Goodbye"); } --
"If you forget the semicolon," Henderson warned, "the machine doesn't guess. It crashes. It creates a syntax error. The loop fails."
My eyes snapped open in the dark, quiet Library.
I looked at the chalkboard where I had drawn the Water Purification rune.
I didn't see a mystical spiral anymore. I didn't see a prayer to the River Spirits.
I saw a While Loop.
"Holy shit," I breathed.
I grabbed a piece of charcoal and scrambled over to the board.
"Ronan, look at this," I said, my hand shaking as I pointed to the outer ring of the rune—a complex, wavy line that the textbook claimed represented the 'Eternal flow of the ocean.'
"The book says this is a 'Binding of Continuity'," I explained, sketching rapidly. "Thaddeus Vex says we have to draw it with a 'feeling of eternity' or the spell fails."
'And?' Ronan asked, watching through my eyes.
"And they're wrong," I said. "It's not a feeling. It's a bracket."
I drew a curly brace "{" next to the wavy line.
"It's a container," I said, tapping the board. "It tells the Aether, 'Everything inside this shape is part of the spell.' If you don't close the circle perfectly..."
'The energy leaks,' Ronan realised. 'Like water from a cracked cup.'
"Like a Syntax Error," I corrected. "The spell crashes because the code is open-ended."
I moved to the messy knot in the middle—the "Filter."
"And this," I said, tracing the jagged lines. "The 'Prayer of Separation.' It's supposed to ask the water to leave the dirt behind."
I looked at the computer screen in my memory.
-- If (dirt) == True: Remove --
"It's a logic gate," I whispered. "If/Then. If the particle is solid, eject it. If it's liquid, keep it."
I stepped back, staring at the entire diagram. The realisation hit me with the force of a physical blow. The magical system of this world wasn't a religion. It wasn't an art form.
It was a programming language.
And it was a mess.
"Ronan," I said, "look at these flourishes." I pointed to a series of loops at the top of the rune—ornate, decorative swirls that every textbook swore were essential for 'honouring the source.'
"What does that look like to you?"
Ronan studied it. 'It looks... decorative. Like a salute before a duel.'
"Exactly," I said. "It does nothing. It doesn't guide the mana. It doesn't shape the effect. It's just... comments. It's the magical equivalent of someone writing - // Praise the Sun - in the middle of their code."
I grabbed the eraser.
"What are you doing?" Ronan asked, alarmed. "That is a standard rune!"
"I'm debugging it," I said.
I erased the flourishes. I erased the 'Prayer of Gratitude' at the bottom. I erased the wobble in the 'Binding of Continuity' and replaced it with a sharp, clean circle.
I was left with a skeleton. A jagged, ugly, stripped-down version of the rune that looked nothing like the elegant diagrams in the book.
It looked mechanical. It looked cold.
"This," I said, pointing to the skeleton, "is the Source Code. Everything else is just bloatware added by thousands of years of wizards who didn't understand what they were copying."
'Murphy,' Ronan warned. 'If you try to cast that... it contradicts every law of magical theory we have studied tonight.'
"The laws are wrong," I said, picking up a piece of chalk. "Or rather, the laws are just user manuals written by people who didn't build the machine."
I turned to the table. I grabbed a blank piece of parchment.
"I'm going to write a script," I said, my voice trembling with excitement. "A simple one. Just to see if the compiler works."
I drew a single, sharp line. Input. I drew a circle. Process. I drew an arrow. Output.
I defined the variable: Light.
It wasn't the "Lumen" rune from the book. It was a Print("Light") command written in geometry.
"Ready?" I asked.
'I am bracing for an explosion,' Ronan replied dryly.
I placed my finger on the parchment. I didn't pray. I didn't visualise the sun. I just pushed a single, tiny drop of mana into the input line.
"Hello World," I whispered.