The passage narrowed as he approached, books piled high on either side like walls of compressed memory. Dust puffed up with each step. The air felt colder here, heavier, like it had been holding its breath.
Behind him, the kid stayed where they were.
Ahead of him, the darkness deepened.
Ah'Ming rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers, and walked on anyway.
When he was walking, it felt as though he were going somewhere secret to the sub-story.
The air changed.
It pressed against his skin like a current flowing the wrong way, tugging at his clothes, his hair, his breath. Each step forward felt contested, as if the space itself had opinions about him being here.
"…Rude," Ah'Ming muttered.
The floor answered by pulling.
Not a clean drag. More like a persistent suggestion, a subtle backward lean that forced his calves to burn as he compensated. Dust skittered across the stone toward the passage behind him, flowing upstream.
Then he heard it.
At first, it was nothing.
Static. A soft, shapeless hiss at the edge of perception, the kind your brain usually edits out.
But it grew.
Layer by layer, the noise resolved itself into something worse.
Metal striking metal. Wood splintering. The wet, percussive thud of bodies hitting stone. Shouts, distorted and overlapping, voices bent out of shape by distance or panic or both.
Fighting.
Real fighting.
Ah'Ming's breath hitched.
"…Nope," he said, and immediately picked up speed.
Walking became a fast walk. Fast walk became a jog. The resistance fought him harder, air shoving at his chest, floor grabbing at his boots like it wanted him to stay uninvolved.
The sounds grew louder.
Closer.
The passage widened ahead, light flickering erratically at its end. Shadows danced along the walls, jerking and colliding, silhouettes clashing in violent rhythm.
Ah'Ming leaned forward and ran.
Each step felt stolen. Earned. His muscles screamed, but adrenaline smoothed it over, sharpened him into motion. He ducked under a fallen beam, skidded around a pile of books that tried to slide back into place behind him.
The noise was deafening now.
A crash. A scream cut short. Something heavy slammed into stone with enough force to make the walls tremble.
Ah'Ming burst through the last narrow gap and into open space, lungs burning, heart hammering.
He broke into the hall at a dead run.
And nearly tripped over the entrance at the sight (not sight, but sense. You get what I mean) of it.
The center of the library had become a war zone. A fully fledged, absolute war zone.
Shadows flooded the space in heaving waves, spilling from between shelves, pouring down from the upper rails, crawling along the ceiling like spilled night. Players fought them off in uneven clusters, backs to tables, to collapsed shelves, to each other.
They were losing.
Magic flared everywhere, bright and messy and desperate.
Sometimes, power bright enough lit up the room, just for a few little seconds, before the room plunged into darkness once more.
Some people were shooting blindly, slashing blindly, fighting blindly. Those people were the most bedraggled, the most injured. Others though, probably not newbies, managed decently well. They weren't too injured, and they were still fighting back.
Not doing much damage, but it was the thought that counted.
A man with skin like cracked porcelain hurled spheres of compressed air that detonated on impact, blasting shadows apart in concussive bursts that rattled the lamps. A girl with glowing runes stitched into her arms slammed her palms together, sending ribbons of violet light whipping outward like barbed wire, slicing through darkness but leaving her staggering with each cast. She might not last long. She was a funny looking light though.
Someone with a long, serpentine tail coiled around a fallen pillar and spat liquid fire that hissed and steamed as it burned shadows away, the flames guttering weakly as their breath ran out. It lit up the room briefly, and somehow none of the books or shelves caught on fire.
Ah'Ming didn't want to even imagine if it had. The whole library, an inferno? Thank the queen, no.
Another player slammed a book shut and screamed an incantation, the pages ripping themselves free to form a temporary shield that shadows clawed through in seconds. It was pretty cool to watch.
Power everywhere.
Control though, was nowhere.
Ah'Ming's eyes snapped to the center.
Tamer stood there like the calm eye of a storm.
Two little shadows hovered at his sides, bent far down low, moving with a startling level of obedience that felt very wrong, even though Ah'Ming was looking at it from a distance. When other shadows rushed at him, the other players veered unconsciously, shielding him with their bodies, their magic, their lives. Poor things, their minds messed up like that.
No shadow touched him.
No player would let one try.
Affection and an uncomfortable amount of obedience radiated outward from the main table in invisible, suffocating waves, thick enough to choke on. People fought harder near him, screamed louder, threw themselves into danger with smiles that were a little too wide.
He wasn't in danger.
He couldn't be.
Ah'Ming's jaw tightened.
Then he saw her.
The woman.
The one from earlier. The one he'd pointed at. Accused.
She was still here.
She moved carefully, too carefully, striking down shadows while constantly repositioning, never committing fully, never getting cornered. Each attack was precise. Defensive. Cleaning up after others rather than leading the charge.
Covering her tracks.
A few players shot her looks. Suspicious glances that didn't quite harden into accusation. She'd been near the kid. She'd been near the worst of the fighting. Patterns hovered at the edge of people's thoughts.
But doubt dissolved quickly.
After all, he'd accused someone already.
And most people probably remembered it differently.
Not the woman.
The child.
A bedraggled thing. Easy to misremember. Easy to dismiss.
No way a real NPC could infiltrate them for that long, right?
Ah'Ming felt something cold settle in his stomach. It certainly wasn't egg tart.
The shadows surged again, breaking through a hastily erected barrier of glowing sigils. Someone screamed. Someone fell.
The clock ticked on.
And Ah'Ming stood at the edge of the battlefield, breath slowing, vision sharpening, watching a room full of people fight for the wrong reasons against the wrong threats.