“Anything?” The cool wood of the library’s table relaxed the side of Jule’s face as she laid against it.

  Ellio looked at her, then glanced to Mouse snoozing across the way, his chair barely keeping him in place. He shook his head, placing a few more books beside Mouse and sitting. Taiga yawned, glossing over a page, not reading it, before turning to the next. She sat up.

  “We’ve found two rips. One isolated and not causing huge problems and one large enough for demons of all sizes to come and go as they please throughout an entire region. And we’ve zero means of closing either rip. Still?” She groaned, her eyes finding her red journal.

  She tried reviewing what she knew about demons… Beings of corruption. In a way, the opposite of Guardians who focus on consuming corruption and releasing purity, demons do the exact opposite. Guardian Spirits are few in number but great in power whereas demons are many but have little influence on the flows of magic.

  And demons needed to stay in areas of corruption to maintain their grip in their realm. This is the best guess as to why the demons attacked Winolin in the first place; to corrupt it enough to stay in the realm since the rip alone wasn’t enough. Why, though, was beyond her capabilities.

  The minds of beasts couldn’t possibly make sense to her.

  Rips, she found, were a natural occurrence. Notes of demon appearances repeated all throughout history. And just as those demons came, they left, as if to mock the scribes of the past who recorded and predicted the chaos they’d cause. But the longest recorded rip lasted two or three years at most. It was difficult to pinpoint due to the shifts in calendars of the time period and uncertainty of the author.

  But if demons rampaged around Winolin for over ten years, then the rip was a different beast than those of the past. The imbalance of magics had slowly deteriorated without anyone noticing. A demon here and there. Then a group attacked travelers. A village plagued every night. A rest stop. Bearthatch. Winolin.

  Greater and greater the offensives became in just two years. Taiga said the queen sent them on this mission to protect Lanrians. And yet she did nothing as the entire eastern region of her own lands were pelleted in attacks.

  Well, no, not nothing.

  Jule supposed disrupting communication and stopping the spread of information was, indeed, something.

  She sighed. Then there were the Guardian Spirits. In all honesty, she suspected the fool snoozing and drooling all over the table to be the one with the most knowledge of Guardians on the continent.

  And yet, he knew little of consequence. ‘They can speak with their minds’, he’d said. Cool! Like that helped them at all. Or that they had frog apostles. Which, in all fairness, Jule hadn’t known about. But it did little to help them uncover the reason for the Guardian’s corruption.

  The effects of the imbalance on the Guardian Spirits was far further out of control than Jule imagined. Sure, She and Ellio traveled to Lanria to discover more about the magical imbalance, but killing corrupted Guardians wasn’t exactly what she’d signed up for.

  Likely a build up of corruption within the Guardian caused the problem. Since the Guardians consumed corruption and gave off purity, it was likely that something suppressed the purity within the Guardian. But then…

  “Taiga, you said that pinks align closer to purity?”

  He nodded, leaning back and stretching. The two of them acted like sitting in the library and doing research was the end of the world. His eyes blinked several times and he shook his head, forcing sleep from him. “Yeah, pink magics tend to linger around Guardians and Sirens, both of which deal in purity.”

  The crack in the mask oozed pink, even Jule could see such extreme concentrations of magic. “Is something pushing the purity out of the Guardian? If so, it would potentially cause the corruption to overtake the Guardian and cause them madness.”

  Taiga perked his head up. “So some sort of illness that rids the Guardian of their source purity?”

  “I don’t know.” Jule realigned the glasses on her nose as they slipped. “I would need to test the theory, form a hypothesis, and go from there. Unfortunately, considering the subject needing testing, that's nigh impossible.”

  “But we can test everything around the Guardian. Try to find the cause of the illness, since we can’t test the illness itself.” Ellio drew a line over the page of his book with his finger, a habit he had when he found something useful. “We took those soil samples. One from the rip and one from the Guardian. We’ll examine them and see if something is off. Remnants of magic that shouldn’t belong, maybe. This book talks about medical practices of finding source contaminants for corruption. It’s old, but I don’t think outdated.”

  “Using Nickel?” Jule asked.

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  Ellio nodded before sighing, “and Night Blooms, unfortunately.”

  Jule let out a groan before Taiga raised an eyebrow. “Why unfortunately?”

  “You mean aside from being poisonous? They’re incredibly hard to find.” She closed her book, positive she’d gain nothing more from it. “I already ordered some nickel. It should arrive in a week, according to the merchant.”

  “Maybe in Monx. But here, Night Blooms grow along the Green River running beside Winolin. The ivy of that plant is what gave the river its name, afterall. ” Taiga rubbed his eyes when shaking his head didn’t wake him up enough. “I haven't gone to pick any myself, but I know the general idea of all plants in the area. I can ask the grass and trees to help find it. And I can pick it if you’re worried about poison.”

  “Well,” Jule’s shoulders relaxed at the surprising revelation. “That’s incredibly convenient.”

  “Yeah, the river technically connects to the lake in Winolin, created by a dam, but I haven’t found any Night Blooms inside the city walls.”

  A smile spread over Ellio, “will you go out with us tomorrow then? To find the ivy?”

  Taiga nodded. “Sure.”

  So they had a possible course of action for finding the source of the imbalance. It was a long shot at best, but it was better than nothing. On the other hand, whether they found clues to the cause or not, it still left the problem of fixing what was broken. The rips, the corrupting; those were major consequences of the imbalance they needed to figure out how to heal.

  Her mind wandered back to Monx and its own signs of imbalance. Multiyear long droughts, famine wreaking havoc on an already frail ecosystem. And then the magical beasts wandered from the forests…

  Those were all symptoms of the magic imbalance. And more things she didn’t know how to fix. She wondered, briefly, upon finding out Taiga was a Ganakri, if she could persuade him to Monx and fix the land.

  Only now did she realize there were even bigger problems in Lanria. Monx may be struggling, but everyone would suffer without the Guardian Spirits. She sighed, what a mess, and dropped the book onto the table.

  Mouse startled up, a growl slobbering from him. Taiga let out a laugh and put a hand atop his head, ruffling Mouse’s thick curls. Well, at least someone finally decided to join them, even if Jule had to force him.

  “Why did you even come if you were only going to,” she snatched a book from him, spotting drool on the cover, “sleep and destroy property?”

  “Taiga’s here.” Mouse shrugged, as if the reason was obvious. She supposed maybe it was, but her nagging annoyance clouded her a moment. She took the edge of her robe and cleaned off the drool. She glanced at the title. ‘The noble, his wife, and the stablehand’. She paused, recalling the titles of the books Taiga had brought to the library table the night she’d been arrested.

  Then she remembered Mouse could barely read a children’s book. He had never planned to help them research from the start. She set the book down on her own and picked them up, along with two more books.

  “These I’ll have put away. I’ll bring this one,”she plopped a blue bound book atop her pile, “back to the room to study more.”

  “We’re leaving?” Mouse jumped out of his seat. “The best news I’ve heard yet.”

  “Yeah, thanks for all the help,” she chided him, though he didn’t seem to notice.

  He smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  She took a deep breath. Oh, how badly she wanted to smack him with a book.

  Ellio took the books from her, which she’d gripped to the point her knuckles whitened, and lowered his voice. “He’s useful in his own way.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He was right, no matter how annoyed she was now.

  He checked out the book of her choice and another two of his own from the front desk. The old woman sitting in the chair chatted with him, slyly getting a touch on Ellio’s fingers, her cheeks blushing. Jule leaned over the counter, giving Ellio a chance to retreat naturally while also intervening herself between them.

  “Kaya, the books?” Jule reminded her. They’d frequented the library enough to exchange names, and for once she could put it to use.

  The woman sighed with a smile. “Oh, alright then.”

  Jule caught her muttering to herself about spoiling her fun while recording down their books in the log. She picked up the books, handed them to Ellio, and had him step back until they were free to go.

  “What was that, Jules? You were so rude to her. She’s been nothing but nice.” Ellio carried the books in his large arms as if they were as delicate as flowers.

  “She wasn’t being nice or considerate of you.” She let it go, and he took the hint as she descended the steps and didn’t mention it again. Ellio trusted too easily, and those around him noticed.

  She appreciated, at least, that neither Taiga or Mouse had. Or maybe they did and just didn’t take advantage of him.

  Mouse wandered off ahead of them on the walk. Taiga pursued but when a breeze passed over the street, he paused, shuddering further beneath his cloak, then ran a few paces ahead to where Mouse hovered over a nut vendor.

  The two returned beside Jule and Ellio just as they dipped back into the guildhall. Taiga handed her and Ellio a handful of roasted chestnuts. She took one, peeling its shell and plopping the steaming thing into her mouth.

  So, Lanria had roasted chestnuts, too. She supposed it wasn’t all bad here. Just mostly.

  “Hey, Taiga?” A man called to them from behind the mission’s desk. “Got a message for you.”

  Mouse ran over, with Taiga following loosely behind. Jule and Ellio wandered awkwardly to the side of the stairs and waited for their return. Mouse ripped the letter from the man’s hands, which Taiga scolded, even Jule could tell from where they stood.

  As they made their way to Jule and Ellio, Taiga opened the letter. His eyebrows furrowed together and he placed a finger to it, rubbing it. “I mean, fine, I guess.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jule asked, not sure if Taiga would actually answer her. But to her surprise, he did.

  “Captain Farren of the Gale Order wants to meet with me before he departs to Pall.”