Fallen

Chapter 13

The Gregorian Library, what a silly name for a place like where I was standing. The place obviously predated Gregory by several thousand years, but try to tell that to humans and their eyes just glaze over while they think about their name being attached to something important. Besides, I was the one who'd showed the place to old Gregory, why hadn't anybody offered to name it after me?

The entrance to the Library of Gavin, oh alright, the Gregorian Library was hidden underground in the Sahara, a place so inhospitable and difficult to navigate that it had made perfect sense to hide humanity's greatest repository of supernatural knowledge in it. I say that sarcastically of course. Still, somehow, the collection had been updated regularly as new knowledge and research became available so it was still the best place to go if you had question about the hidden world. That is, if you knew how to find it and had the key. I pulled the octagonal prism from my jacket pocket and felt its uncannily smooth but faceted surface, an ancient symbol of light had been painstakingly etched into its face, and the differently grooved edges made it almost impossible to duplicate if you didn't have the original. Quite ingenious really.

I strode up the to the giant, circular, and rune etched door to the library and cleared a mass of dirt and fallen stone away from the key slot and pushed the prism into its place. The key slid in easily and clicked into place. I turned the key until a resounding thunk echoed through the cave. The runes etched into the door lit up with latent magic and the door began to swing open. I retrieved the key and waited for the slowly opening door to make a wide enough gap for me to enter. The library was warded against any supernatural travel, including my flight, so I had to walk. So annoying, but still, at least the library was self-lit. The same magic that had lit the door now ignited torches and oil lamps all over the vast storehouse of scrolls, parchments, stone tablets, and books. Several centuries ago, a few enlightened had been sent to organize the place. It had taken over a decade, and not everyone sent survived. It hadn't been their fault. If you send a fifty five year old man to a harsh environment and ask him to live underground for a decade during the sixteenth century, then you can't really expect him to make it back. Still, those guys had done a wonderful job, and the generations since had followed their system to the letter, making sure that everything belonging to a certain subject stayed together, which would make my search so much easier.

"Let's see, where was the language section again?" I asked myself, tapping my chin. It had been a while since I'd visited the library. Just a few hundred years or so, but I can't be expected to remember everything! I browsed the spacious chamber for a while before finding the section I was looking for. These were writings about every known language or dialect that had ever existed. Granted, they didn't all translate to a language that I could speak. Like I said, I can't be expected to remember everything.

"Enochian dialects," I muttered to myself, pulling the card emblazoned with the strange symbol from my pocket. There were several books on the language of both demons and angels, translating its myriad of symbols as best as the authors could into the languages of mortals. Many words, however, didn't have an equivalent to any language invented by humans. The Fae were a little closer, but that was a whole different ballgame.

I flipped through several books, searching for something that would clue me in on what this new language was, but to no avail. While there were many writings on the two popular versions of the language, any other variation hadn't been studied or observed my many writers throughout history. I was just about to give up when I reached the more modern section of the library and found a book written by a Romanov. No, not Anastasia. Something like her half-brother Yurri who wasn't officially a Romanov but kept the name even after the family had been butchered during the revolution. I'd had the pleasure of meeting little Yurri when he was a teenager being raised by a close friend in the church. The boy had been a very talented Prophet, a variation of the Enlightened who could sometimes glimpse a possible future or were able to naturally decipher the language of either angles or demons. Yurri had been able to do both, so naturally when I saw his name, I decided to see what a friend of old had to say, and Yurri didn't let me down.