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That sight gave her significant pause, and even though she wanted to say something about it, no words were coming to mind. How much had changed here while she was out? And wait. He’d said an entire month had passed, hadn’t he?

“That’s better,” said Ibai. “Thank you for listening. Maybe I’ll whip up something nice for you later. Just don’t expect too much, alright? I’ve got a lot of things to take care of, right now.”

The Library made no further sounds, as far as Emiliana could tell.

“Anyway,” Ibai went on, “here, take a look at this.” He approached her and opened the book he was holding for her to read.

She didn’t know what he was getting at. The page seemed to have been rather quickly and haphazardly chosen, so how could anything be--?

The text was peculiar. The script being used--the alphabet--was one she recognized but did not have much basis for understanding. It was Ancient Ghisian script, and as far as she knew, almost all of the languages that used it were now dead.

Before falling into her meditation, she’d been trying to expand her comprehension of old scripts and languages like this one, but with so many out there, she still had quite the long academic journey ahead of her.

This one, though...

She couldn’t help grabbing the book with her own hands in order to bring it closer.

Despite the fact that even the symbols themselves were barely better than incomprehensible scribbles to her, she still felt like she could understand what the text was saying. Like the words were speaking directly to her.

This random page. It was talking about a conflict. A battlefield report, perhaps.

“You see it, don’t you?” said Ibai. “Pretty sweet, eh?”

She found it hard to peel her eyes away, even as the text merely described the mundanities of troop movements over multiple months of fighting. “How is this...? What is this?”

“It’s what they call an ‘elevated text,’” said Ibai. “Something that can be read by anyone--even the illiterate, supposedly.”

“How is that possible?”

Ibai smiled and gave a big shrug. “That’s the mystery, isn’t it?! I’ve been reading lots of theories about books like this, though!”

Chergoa intervened again. ‘You don’t really need to go into that, right now, do you? We’ll be here for hours, if so.’

“What, you got somewhere to be?”