Nobody's Servant 1.0

Cover To Cover

Back under the Directorate, we take libraries seriously. A respectable library is one of the largest buildings in town, well-stocked, well-staffed, well-maintained, well-funded, and even well-defended. They sit in only the starkest of contrasts with mausoleums; furnished grave sites usually bearing one of each of a seat and a shelf, accessible by key to the loved ones of the departed. Whoever is commemorated there is interred with their journals nearby, the self-recorded chronicle of their life, compiled and kept in Maxim tradition. I suppose this counts as my chronicle too, actually.

Having grown up familiar with both ends of that spectrum and everything in between, I'll say this library is pretty decent.

Finding the last tome to add to my stack, I slink back to my alcove up on the second floor, and add the new book to the sprawl I've been poring over. Theology, mythology, history, physiology, and whatever else might help me sort out what's up with me because I guess straight answers are top secret according to anyone fit to give them to me.

Getting myself a slip to gain access to the library was the easy part; it's been tucked into a little folder in the back of my ID booklet ever since I laid hands on it, four hours ago. Since then, I've been following a trail of citations and making do with the works present. And unfortunately, there's nothing set in stone about the process that made me like this.

One doesn't simply steal a holy site, let alone mash two of them together, let alone do that without either god involved noticing, so Suraokh's method of sticking someone with a reaper blessing still eludes me.

I figured out who one of those gods was, at least, not that it came as a surprise; even Kyra managed to guess at a glance. Isammet, Lord of the Ethereal. I guess if you need absolute compatibility with someone who is both dead and just filthy with aether, you can't go wrong with him. I found an entire study on his anatomy, too; a nonuple chimera, nine foxes blended into one prior to birth, with only their vertical partitions of fur color to distinguish them, and their nine partitions of brain, operating separately but to the same end, all fronting as a single-bodied council named Isammet.

Oh, and the nine unreasonably long tails diverging from his spine, those are a pretty good indicator of his provenance too, not to mention the aspect of his I physically took on along with his power. They rendered him unable to walk all his life; that level of hip dysplasia just couldn't be compensated for. Am I going to lose my ability to walk too? I don't have an entourage of devoted saints to carry a palanquin for me.

The other god escapes me. I thought Yau Yem at first, who presides over outcasts and the unfortunate; that'd be awfully fitting, he's even a jackal so it's possible his adjustment to me wouldn't be readily apparent since I'm one already, and I already have scary glowing eyes. Well, sometimes. That'd just be by coincidence, so I don't have anything conclusive just yet.

Eventually I put aside the theology volumes and start to bury myself in pages about void-siphoning technology, like my heart. Nothing published in the past twenty years is available here, but there are a handful of theoretical studies, as well as a very, very old mention of the first sustained example of the tech, achieved by one Bailey, no surname given, or indication if she even had one. Maybe there was once, but it's been three Ages since and things tend to get good and muddied in a fraction of that time. Apparently, it was very taxing on the body and she couldn't sustain it without aberrating herself. You would think there'd be more about her, but she's glossed over once and never again in the two hours I spend looking for leads.

No reason to suspect her name will come up later or anything, of course. There's a name for that phenomenon too, I think, but it's a shame it seems exempt from the very effect it describes.

I look over at the stack of phasmology texts, as well as an anthropological text on the Spiderfolk of Kiue I'd picked out just for curiosity's sake. Rubbing my eyes tiredly, I realize I've bitten off more than I can chew. Here's what you've intuited and I know; I died, I was out of my body for a little while, and I was put back into it, here I am. That's good enough for today.