Chapter Text
One of her earliest memories is piecing a skeleton back together bone by bone, matching a chalk outline left in one of the unused storage rooms of the Compass Points Library. The skull there, each vertebrate descending in the proper order, each finger bone and kneecap and toe following the simply worded instructions and detailed pictorial guide etched into the wall. Once the task was finished, she’d hefted the book of pirate spells and set it on the bones, stumbling back from the exhalation of magic in the air.
A withered hand had patted her shoulder gently and the aging voice of Rawlins said, “Thank you, Quartermaster. You always set me to rights. Now, back to the front desk with me, I suppose.”
“Will you teach me something?” she’d asked, scratching at a spot on her downy wings until sparks flew from it.
“That depends,” he had replied. “Are you a pirate?”
“I don’t know the qualifications.” She had liked the word qualifications at that age; it demanded specificity. She still likes it.
“Then I suppose you are not yet a pirate.” He left the room and she heard his shuffling footsteps fade down the hall, flesh and cloth and rings once more where there had been naught but bone.
This is her first experience with rebirth.
---
The first Ayda to reside on Leviathan had clearly not expected to die there; there are no notes from her, on paper or etched into anything else. There is barely any evidence of her existence beyond a short list of material things—a half-melted candle gathering dust on the mantle that smelled of a strange spice, a set of leather bracers tooled with motifs long out of fashion, the library charter in its heavily enchanted case with the name Ayda Aguefort emblazoned in shining ink.
The second Ayda on Leviathan left notes about the charter specifically, among her many, many journals and scrolls.
Principled? Driven? A success in establishing something, she had written. The question remains—why? What is the purpose of a library? What is the purpose of a librarian? What is the purpose of this one?
The only writing of the first Ayda that exists is her name on the charter and a note, folded and re-folded many times. Some kind of residue left a faded smear of color on the bottom of the parchment, beneath the very distinct handwriting: Congratulations—now remember that you’re brave, darling.
Ayda has no notes on any of her previous incarnations asking Garthy O’Brien anything about the message. In her seventeen years on the floating island, she doesn’t ask either.
The library was a permanent sort of thing, Ayda thinks now, as she reviews glyphs and components for a plane shift spell, perhaps it is not that she was unconcerned with death; perhaps she simply did not know she would be reborn.
---
The second Ayda left written records, meticulously labeled and dated. Notes on her own physiology, speculations on the precedent set by her rebirth. Instructions for organizing and integrating new books into library records and recipes for allergy cures and salaries for various future positions are all laid out in her journals.
The writing is formulaic, something that Ayda has found in turns comforting and dull. Nothing is ever revelatory in these notes; there are flashes of inspiration and discovery but they do not change the format that the second Ayda followed year to year. Ayda has wondered, sometimes, if the style of the journals was so consistent to make up for the fact that the first Ayda left nothing beyond the charter as a foundation. She’s wondered if the second Ayda felt any doubt at consigning her predecessor to the past, at writing that any study of her was a waste. The charter was the only thing that provided her any guidance and it must have been worrying, in those early years before pirates began bringing her books to add to the collection.
The second Ayda had been very public-facing because she’d needed to be—she’d needed to go out and convince people to get library cards and convince them to return at least some of the books they’d borrowed and convince, convince, convince. She had not enjoyed it. She had not enjoyed much of what she’d done, but Ayda is grateful for the groundwork and the heavy lifting that were finished in those years. The results are clear even now; she sees them in the city funding and the fact that the shelves are never left entirely barren.
For all the talking to people that the second Ayda did, though, she left little advice on the subject. There are brief mentions of feeling awkward and other, but never any instructions on how to fix that feeling. It is a little unusual, Ayda thinks, that she was able to leave instructions for what to do in the event that the island capsized or lost all gravity or any other number of scenarios, but couldn’t capture a decisive strategy for social interaction.
Perhaps that is not so strange, though. Ayda hasn’t managed an ideal one yet.
---
The third Ayda took a wholly different view on past lives. Not content to leave the charter member of the Compass Points library to a faded memory, she worked constantly to build out the shell of who that person might’ve been.
The bracers, the candle, the note, they fascinated her. She took wax scrapings and put them through various magical tests, etched runes into a spyglass to see through illusions and identify different schools of magic. She invested herself in the past, looking for an answer to a question the second Ayda had ignored.
The Ayda before me was a curator, she left scribbled in the margins of pages covered in chemical equations and notes on the rate of decay for different types of parchment. The Ayda before her is a mystery and I am an investigator—what is the library for, if it is not to answer questions? What is the past for, if not resurrection? Am I not a product of such practice?
Her notes were not as well-kept as her predecessor—she would divert from her format frequently and didn’t keep things in chronological order. And such a volume of them; when Ayda grew old enough to be interested in the desk in the observatory, she’d had to shift through hundreds of bits of parchment.
She didn’t write much about life outside the library, not in the way the second Ayda did. There are no notes from meetings with the denizens of Leviathan or breakdowns of crew makeups from her years as librarian, only lists of reagents and their reactivity. It’s clear now, to Ayda, that no one was knocking on the door for her, no one was extending her a hand of friendship. Brief mentions of Jamina and rare notes on conversations with Garthy about acquiring supplies are the only instances of interaction with other people among her disordered records. She didn’t write about being lonely, but none of her previous incarnations did either. (Ayda has considered that she might be the first, the only one to be so deeply lonely even surrounded by books and star charts and maps of ocean currents.)
She’d died abruptly, the third Ayda. There were several notes on experiments expectant of results, and several questions left unanswered. When Ayda was thirteen, she’d found a note left scribbled on an end table dated for, when else, thirteen years previous.
Leviathan is burning. I can see it moored—Bill Seacaster’s ship. What will happen now? Will there be a new king? This will disrupt my work. I will not let them take my library.
---
The fourth Ayda-on-Leviathan, who is Ayda, has a relationship with the library best described as contradictory. It is not that she dislikes it—she has nothing to compare it to, knows no other home but the observatory and the space between bookshelves—but she is... sometimes not content. There are the stars above her, changing as Leviathan moves through the seas, but they are little comfort to a young girl. There are the library patrons, but they don’t seek her out very often; there is the library staff, but they look to her for guidance from the time she takes her first unsteady steps.
(When Ayda puts her thoughts on paper they spill out in waves; This is no cage/but I am caught/sure as a songbird, she’d written in one of her poetry phases. But she is not caught, not really, she could leave at any time, she could go—)
When she is six years old, she discovers her favorite book: The Definitive Treatise on Magical Contracts, by H. J. Harrowmont.
When she is eight years old, she has a rickety bookshelf set against one of the empty walls and adds the library’s first book on friendship: Customs and Camaraderies on the Fifth Sea, by Carolyn Shore.
When she is ten years old, she has enough books to dedicate a new section of the Compass Points Library, adding a row to the second Ayda’s plans for new departments. That day she buys herself an orange and each section tastes impossibly sweet.
When she is thirteen, organizing the spellwork section, she comes across Prolegomena to Any Future Magicks, by A. Aguefort. She then spends three weeks methodically working back through all of the notes left for her, searching for a mention of her father and coming up empty-handed.
When she is fifteen there is a riot on Leviathan and Rawlins’ book is stolen, reducing him again to bones. She spends four harrowing days ducking into doorways and behind walls hunting it down, piecing together remnants of parrots and banana peels and burning and burning and burning all the while, viciously lonely and certain that something is wrong with the world. She’s bitter, a dried up orange with too much pith—why is this her job, why does she live on Leviathan anyway, why is the only person she can rely on the one she sees in the mirror—furious not that a book has been stolen but that this book has been stolen.
When she is sixteen Garthy O’Brien looks over her runes and nods, connects her to a tattoo artist that does not protest when she adds a drop of her own blood to the ink, when it turns to fire on contact with her arms.
When she is seventeen—
When she is seventeen—
When she is seventeen she makes her first friend she meets the greatest wizard of the age she makes more friends through the transitive property she goes to Fallinel she goes to a party she leaves a party to follow a girl she kisses a girl and the girl smiles and asks her to come with them and Ayda, joyful and breathless and full of doubts and dreams and potential paths to failure, agrees to leave her library.
---
Maybe if the first Ayda had known, she would've left advice for this situation. It's possible. It would have been useful, to have someone leave a guide on closing up the library and leaving Leviathan to go and be with friends and the girl you like. To go and be anywhere that isn't Leviathan. Maybe the first Ayda had been somewhere before Leviathan.
But the first and second and third Ayda hadn’t been concerned with friendship, not the way Ayda-who-is-Ayda is. The friendship section of the library is wholly her design, an effort to obtain something out of reach until now. It is the work of nine years, that wall of tomes. She steals a moment between studying iterations of plane-altering spells to look up at the towering shelves, to run her hand along the books and step lightly through the many restricted sections.
It is not a betrayal. It is not. It is only uncertainty, only the first and second and third Ayda’s work on the library, and her own work, and the only home she’s ever had—but she wants this, she wants friends and a life and a girl who likes her, who called her perfect. She wants Plane Shift and Solace and whatever the future looks like, terrifying and amorphous and full of unclear terms and unknown qualifications.
(“I am afraid of this,” Ayda says to her mirror. Her reflection does not provide an answer.)
She brings the first Ayda’s bracers, the second Ayda’s enchanted ink bottle, the third Ayda’s spyglass. She packs them alongside her spell components, with the things she’s gathered over the last seventeen years.
Ayda hauls the enchanted case with the library charter to Jamina Joy, who heaves a mechanical sigh and agrees to look after the building. She stops by Garthy’s place because it seems like the proper thing to do, seems like something she’d have liked someone to do for her before leaving her or forgetting her or abandoning her or whatever it is that her father did that set her on Leviathan.
They look at her and smile, something complicated in their expression that she would normally want to untangle, but she’s looking in the direction of Solace already and thinking of Fig and Adaine and a future she fears and wants more than anything.
“You’re very brave, darling,” they say.
Ayda nods, a single bob of her head. She knows.