The method came from a priest.
Not a living one. A book written by one several centuries ago, called Meditations of the Contemplative Order. It was one of the last few volumes in the Reading Room I hadn't touched, and I'd been putting it off because it looked dull. Prayers and devotions, mostly. Long passages on humility and the mercy of the gods, in a style so gentle and repetitive that my eyelids grew heavy just turning the pages.
But by the time I was two and a half, I'd finished almost everything else on my shelves.
Volumes Comprehended: 27 / 48
So one night I sat down with the priest's book and a pot of roasted barley tea and resigned myself to an evening of devotions.
About two-thirds of the way through, I sat up so suddenly that tea slopped over the rim of my cup and ran hot across my knuckles.
The chapter was called The Inward Gaze.
It described a meditation practiced by the priests of the Contemplative Order. It began exactly like the exercise in The Elements of Mana: sit quietly, breathe slowly, place your attention just below the navel, where the wellspring lies. Then it went further.
Having found the warmth of the wellspring, the priest wrote, do not rest there. Look past it. Behind it, as one looks past a candle flame to the wall beyond. Let your gaze sink deeper, into the quiet place beneath all thought. There, if you are patient and humble, you may glimpse the light of the soul itself: the sacred inscription that the gods have written upon each of us at our making.
Few are granted a clear vision. Most see only a soft radiance, as of distant lamps. A rare few, after many years of devotion, report seeing patterns within the light, like letters in an unknown script, which no mortal can read. These are the handwriting of the gods, and it is not for us to understand them, only to give thanks.
I read that last paragraph four times.
Patterns within the light. Like letters in an unknown script.
In the margin, in pencil so faint and small I nearly missed it, O had written:
They see the light. You can read it.
I sucked the spilled tea off my knuckles. It had already gone cold, and I hadn't noticed.
The next night was a rest night by my rules, and I kept it. But before I let myself sleep, I lay awake for a while in the small wooden bed Tomas had built for me when I outgrew the cradle. The frame still smelled of fresh-cut pine, and one slat creaked whenever I turned over. I stared at the ceiling and thought about what O had written.
Skills are written, they'd said in the margin of the rune book. Think very carefully about what that means.
I had. I'd thought about almost nothing else for months. If skills were inscriptions on the soul, written in runes, and I could read runes, then in principle I should be able to read my own skills. See exactly how they were built.
I just hadn't known where to look.
Now, maybe, I did.
I started the next afternoon, in the garden, under the apple tree.
I'd meditated there nearly every day for about a year, ever since I first found my wellspring. Berta had stopped asking about it; she called me her little old monk and left me alone. I sat cross-legged in the grass, the stems pressing their pattern into the backs of my calves, bees droning in the wild roses, sun warm on my eyelids, and breathed.
The wellspring was easy to find now. It had grown over the year. Not by much. It was the size of a coal from a cooking fire rather than an ember, but steady and warm, and I could feel it as easily as my own pulse.
Look past it, the priest had written. As one looks past a candle flame to the wall beyond.
I tried.
It was like trying to see something out of the corner of your eye. The moment I looked straight at the space behind the wellspring, there was only darkness. When I relaxed and let my attention soften and drift, I thought I caught something: a faint glimmer, like light under a door. Then nothing.
Every day for two weeks, the same. A glimmer, gone the instant I reached for it.
It reminded me of learning to walk. You couldn't force it. You had to keep doing it until your mind stopped needing instructions.
Toward the end of those two weeks, Berta came out with her mending basket and sat on the bench beside me while I meditated. When I opened my eyes she was watching me, her needle stopped mid-stitch, with a thoughtful look. She told me I was a strange one, sitting there every day like a temple brother, and asked what I thought about with my eyes shut like that.
I had more words now. At two and a half I allowed myself short sentences, as long as I kept them simple. I thought for a moment, then touched my chest. "Inside," I said. "What's inside?"
Her eyebrows went up, and then her face softened. That was a big question for a little boy, she said, and let the mending settle in her lap. "My granny used to say that before you're born, the gods take a quill and write your name on your heart. Not the name your mother gives you. Your true name. The one that says who you really are. And when you die, they read it, to see if you lived up to it."
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I asked whether she could read it. The name.
"Oh, no. Not us. Only the gods." She chuckled and picked the needle back up, drawing the thread through with a soft hiss. "Though Granny said if you sat very quiet and very still, sometimes you could feel it. Like a warm spot. Right here." She tapped her own chest, just below the heart. "Silly old stories."
I didn't think they were silly at all.
I closed my eyes and went back to looking.
It happened on a grey, quiet evening, in my bed, in the dark.
I'd almost given up for the day. I was lying on my back under the blanket, listening to the rain tick into the bucket in the next room, half drifting toward sleep, not really trying anymore. My attention rested loosely on the wellspring, the way you'd rest a hand on a sleeping cat.
And then, without my doing anything, it sank.
Down. Past the warmth. Into somewhere quiet and dark and completely still, like the bottom of a deep, clear pool.
And there was light.
The priest had been wrong about one thing. It didn't look like distant lamps.
It looked like a book.
I don't know how else to put it. Floating in that quiet dark was something I understood, instantly and completely, to be me. It had the shape of a book standing open, its pages glowing softly from within. But it was also not quite a book, the way things in dreams are and aren't what they appear to be. The pages seemed to go on forever when I looked closely, and yet I could take in the whole of it at once.
Most of the pages were blank. Pale, clean, waiting.
Not all of them.
Near the front, there was writing. Lines of tiny glowing runes, arranged in blocks like paragraphs, like the inscriptions in the rune book. Above each block was a heading in the same voice-of-the-world script as my System notifications.
I let my attention drift toward the first one, very gently, the way I'd learned. The heading came into focus.
[Language Comprehension — Level 2]
Level two. The only notice I'd ever received had said one. At some point the skill had climbed without telling me, the way a ledger gets updated in a back office while the clerk at the front counter keeps reading out yesterday's figures.
Beneath the heading were the runes.
I could read them.
Not easily. Not quickly. It was like working through a dense technical manual in a language I'd been studying for a year. But I could read them: substance, action, measure, structure, woven together into something that was unmistakably a set of instructions. I went through it line by line and translated it into the plainest terms I could.
WHEN: sound or mark of a known tongue is perceived
THEN: gather the meaning. Bind the meaning to the mind.
REPEAT: for each sound, for each mark.
STRENGTHEN: with each repetition, a little.
It was a program. A small, tidy program, running quietly inside me every moment, translating the world.
My skill.
I don't know how long I stayed there. Time was strange in that place, the way it was in the Library.
I read the whole of Language Comprehension, slowly, rune by rune. Then I moved to the next block.
[Rune Literacy — Level 1]
That one was newer and simpler, and rougher at the edges, like a sketch rather than a finished drawing. I recognized whole passages from The First Grammar of Runes. It was as if the book itself had been boiled down into a few dozen glowing lines and written onto me.
Then the third block.
[Memory — Level 1]
I hesitated over that one. I'd never received a notification for any Memory skill. I'd noticed my memory sharpening ever since I arrived in this world, but I'd put it down to the Library, or to having a child's brain.
When I looked at the runes, I understood.
This skill was different from the others. The runes weren't just correct; they were beautiful. Every line flowed into the next with absolute precision, without a single wasted mark, like calligraphy by a master. And certain strokes ended in long, looping tails that I recognized. I'd seen that hand before, on a folded note of cream paper waiting on the desk in the Reading Room.
Welcome back. Do not forget to sleep. —K.
The Keeper had written this. Before I was even born. A small gift tucked in beside the large one, so that I would remember everything I read.
Even in that bodiless place, something caught hot and tight at the base of my throat.
And then there was the gift itself.
It wasn't with the other three. It sat further back, deeper in, on a page of its own. And it didn't look like a block of writing at all.
It looked like a door.
A door of dark wood set into the page, with a heavy iron clasp across it, shaped like the clasp on a book. Around its frame ran a band of runes so small and so dense they blurred into a single shining line. When I tried to read it, my mind slid off, the way your eyes slide off the sun. Too much. Too complex. Like trying to read a library's entire catalogue printed on a single grain of rice.
Across the top of the door, in the voice-of-the-world script, was the heading. Below it was the one fragment I could make out, at the very edge of the frame, where the band seemed to thin slightly.
[Gift: Akashic Library — SEALED]
Holder. Until— [remainder illegible]
I looked at that door for a long time. The clasp. The band of unreadable runes. That one fragment. Holder. Until. Until what?
Then, carefully, reluctantly, I drifted back.
One more thing caught my attention on the way out.
The blank pages.
There weren't as many as I'd first thought. When I looked closely, I could see that the book, the shape that was me, had a definite size. A definite number of pages. Perhaps a dozen beyond the ones already written on. And the further back I looked, the fainter and thinner those pages became, as though they hadn't fully grown in yet.
Soul capacity, I thought, remembering a passage in On the Nature of Gifts. Brother Anselm had mentioned it in passing, the idea that each person could hold only so many skills before they "could bear no more." He'd treated it as a vague, mystical limit.
It wasn't vague. It was pages. I could count them.
Twelve or so, with the back ones still forming. Three already spent. Every skill I would ever acquire, by any means, would have to fit in that space. I would have to be very careful about what I wrote on them.
I came back to myself in my bed in the dark, the rain still dripping into the bucket in the next room. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. My cheeks were wet; I hadn't noticed I was crying. Across the room, Berta snored.
I lay there a long time, staring at the ceiling, holding on to every detail before sleep could take it. My Memory skill helped. The Keeper's gift, in looping, elegant runes.
But one detail stayed with me more than the others. Not the door. Not the blank pages. Something much smaller.
In the middle of Language Comprehension, about two-thirds of the way down, there had been a section that didn't quite fit. A loop that repeated a step already done a few lines earlier, like a sentence in an essay that says the same thing twice in slightly different words. It didn't break anything. The skill worked fine. But it was untidy. Wasteful. Like the misplaced rune in the Kindle chant.
I'd spent my whole career as an archivist noticing things like that.
And as a man who had once written a clumsy forty-line Python script, I knew exactly what you did with redundant code.
You cleaned it up.
My pulse picked up again just thinking about it, and my fingers curled into the blanket.
Then I thought about the Keeper's warnings, and the fever, and my rules propped against the green lamp, and I made myself take one long, slow breath, and then another.
Not tonight, I told myself. Not without a plan. Not without thinking it through.
Carefully.
But I didn't stop thinking about it. Not for a single day, for the next three months.