Chapter Text
The silence in the manor’s library is sacrosanct, but it does not exist in commemoration of the dead: no, the aimlessly shelved books, printed on dead trees though they may be, are alive for the ideas they have carried from their inking to their reading years upon decades upon centuries later. And there are millennia yet to come.
In the silence, Oz finds much needed peace; with twenty other wizards in the manor, the noise is often overwhelming. There are few finer pleasures in life than a silence like this, surrounded by books in various sweet stages of decay, the sunlight tempered by satin curtains and darkness abated by chandeliers.
He wanders the aisles, reading the spines of things he knows and doesn’t, when the silence is defiled by song. It’s Riquet. By now, Oz can discern it. It’s Riquet singing, skipping, and the library—in wood and glass and paper and stone—drinking the sounds in.
Oz frowns at it. He frowns deeper when he realizes he predicts the song’s rises and falls immaculately: he knows the song. Where from?
“Oz, is that you over there?” The patter of light feet, and then there Riquet is, poking his head from around the corner, approaching Oz. “I thought so! I could see a stuffy old coat through the gaps in the shelves, and you’re the only one who wears something like that.”
“‘Stuffy’?”
“Yes. It means ‘boring and old.’ What were you looking for? Can I help you? Can you also help me look for a book about my Church? Mitile told me all about his town today, but—mmf!”
Oz’s magic has closed Riquet’s mouth. “Riquet,” he says, taking a step back as Riquet swats at him, voice an indignant hum, “tell me one thing at a time. Then wait for my reply. You talk too fast.” He waves his hand, undoing the spell, and Riquet is mid-complaint.
“—would never—! Oh, my voice!” He puts a hand at his throat, content, before narrowing his eyes at Oz. “That was rude, Oz! You could have just told me to stop talking instead of forcing me to!”
“It would not have worked.”
“So rude! I don’t want your help anymore, nor do I want to help you. Hmph!” He stomps over to a table and sits, adjusting the seat to face it away from Oz.
Oz draws his mouth to a thin line. He walks over to Riquet. “You are in the right. I should not have done that.”
Riquet whirls in his seat, eyes wide and mouth agape.
Disliking that, Oz looks away. “What was the first question you posed? I have forgotten it.”
“Was that an apology? From you? To me?”
“Why are you surprised…”
Riquet pokes him. “Because you’re stubborn. I was sure I would never, ever be able to go to one of your lessons again. It’s okay, though, because you apologized! Might I ask what changed your mind that quickly?”
In the manor, Oz’s past is irrelevant at best, unwanted at worst. With Riquet, a wizard of the youngest generation, his past egregiously wicked to anyone but himself, his present innocent and ripe for shaping, Oz does not know what to say. The truth is that Snow and White had once done unto him a spell in its antithesis: they had forced him to talk when he did not want to. He had resented it. But Riquet’s curiosity is insatiable. Admitting that would seep out other truths that must not be said, not merely out of Oz’s pride, but in being indebted to Snow, White, and most of all to Figaro, who had discarded his past and pushed Oz, under the same roof as him again, to do the same.
“Oz? Oz, Oz, Oz? Are you going to tell me?”
“I realized being forced to do something against your will is unpleasant,” he says, slowly.
“Obviously! Is that it?”
“Yes.” He crosses his arms. “Now. Repeat your earlier question. And speak quietly. We are in a library.”
“Ah, right!” Riquet’s whispering is poor. “I just wanted to know what you were looking for.”
“Nothing.”
Riquet blinks. “Nothing? You were walking around for nothing?”
“Riquet, your voice.”
“You’re strange, Oz,” he says through muffled laughter. “But if you’re not looking for anything, you can help me! Like I already said, I want to find a book about my Church.”
Ah.
“Mitile was telling me about the Town of Clouds because he lives there, but also because Doctor Figaro found a book in Central’s market about it, and we were both learning together. It was very fun, so I want to do the same for him with my Church. But the library is big. Could you help me look for a book about it?”
It is likelier that if it exists, it will be about cults. Riquet is not at an age where he can objectively process his upbringing. If they were to find it such a book, he would not believe what it said. Nor should it be what he shares with his friend. Telling Riquet this, of course, is moot. Oz uncrosses his arms and crosses them again. If he were to find the book, he could magic it away to prevent Riquet from reading it. But if Riquet is searching… Oz can alter the contents—Riquet will doubtlessly announce he has found it, and his reading level is below what a book like that would entail.
“If you’re going to take forever to reply,” Riquet says, standing, chair scraping the floor, “I will simply start searching on my own.”
“I will help.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! Thank you, Oz!” He reaches for Oz’s hand, far larger than his, but tugging it—and Oz—without fear. “Since you were searching over there earlier, why don’t you go back there? But search for my book instead of ‘nothing.’” He giggles. “You are very strange, Oz.”
Let him say what he will. Child that he is, insolent and innocent, his disparagements do not rankle Oz. He is a child. So is Arthur. So was he, once, somehow.
Oz returns to the aisle he had been in while Riquet takes the one across, chattering. “At first I was angry I had been taken from the Church to be here,” he’s saying, “but being a Sage’s wizard means I can help far more people. I’m fulfilling my destiny. The head priest will praise me a lot when he sees all the good work I’ve done here!”
In between cases of old books, kept from crumbling by magic, remembering history for those who have passed on, Oz halts mid-step.
The salt fell like snow, but no child—if any had lived—would be so foolish as to dart out their tongue. It fell, and it drifted over the piles of ash and bone and, always, the Northern snow, white and gray and white and gray again.
“Nothing is impossible for you, is it?” Figaro murmured. “It was one thing to know it, but seeing it…”
Oz turned his hand palm-up. A gust of salt piled on. Salt that had been a human or a wizard or an animal or a tree, killed and reclaimed into something that will poison the very land that had nourished it. Oz contemplated the nothing he had created. In him panged a similar nothingness.
“The extent to which you can manipulate anything and everything,” Figaro said, “is magnificent.” He let out a softly disbelieving laugh, and it was the loudest sound in the ruins. “This is why I wanted you dead when Lord Snow and Lord White found you.”
The salt on Oz’s palm swirled away. He summoned his broom, hearing Figaro’s apologies behind him.
“Sorry, sorry! All that to say: think of how your strength might have been misused if your life had unfolded any other way. Instead,” Figaro said, reaching for Oz’s hand, coaxing it open, “you use it for your own happiness. Ensure it thrives.”
In Oz’s palm he slipped in a mana stone.
Figaro smiled. “But I don’t think you will have any trouble with it. How far you’ve come from that feral child…” He dusted an indeterminate white-gray mess from his cloaked shoulder. “In one thousand years, I wonder who you will be.”
The mana stone gleamed as Oz swallowed it.
“Did you find it, Oz?! You got quiet suddenly. Well, you’re always quiet, but that was quiet-quiet.”
He rubs his forehead. From the next aisle, Riquet is peeking at him through the shelf, hands resting on a dusty empty spot, leaning forward.
“No.” Oz carefully pushes Riquet back. “Do not put your weight on the bookshelves. It is unsafe.”
Riquet pouts. He pads away to keep browsing his aisle.
Oz’s memory curls at the edges. He had destroyed so much, consumed unimaginable mana stones from the corpses he had reaped, that often what exactly he had done blurred to a single indistinct town in ruins, a single potent mana stone scratching his tongue.
But that day is no false recall. Figaro had always been careful in his praises, pointedly aware that Oz’s strength surpassed his and of the wild Northern blood that coursed through him. Praises they were less than they were pacifications, the taming of a beast. That day, the praise had been genuine. Figaro had wholly believed it was Oz’s natural right to forge his life as he saw fit, heedless of what or who might be harmed to achieve it. To ensure the happiness and liberty of one person, Figaro had burned the world.
It had burned for nothing.
“Ooh, Oz! I think I found something!” Riquet circles to his aisle, a hefty book in hand. He shoves it toward Oz. “A History of Central Country! I know that is what it says even though the writing is fancy! It isn’t as fancy as yours, so it must not be that old. Because of how important Saint Faust was to the founding of Central Country, he must be here, and he is also important to my Church. Do you think this book has what I need?”
The historians of this nation had, from its conception, mythologized what happened to what they prefer would have; Oz knows little of Central’s history, but he knows that much. As he knows of the figure who Faust had revered. The man behind the martyr. The book, then, will have no mention of Figaro for Central’s—and Figaro’s—historical revisions. And if something of such import will be lacking on purpose, Riquet’s Church, insignificant in the scheme of history, won’t have been given a thought.
Riquet has already opened the book, coughing at its dust, the musk of disuse. And then he cries out.
Oz peers closer at the page. There is an illustration of a Revolution battle’s aftermath and no gory detail has been spared.
“Have you heard?” Figaro asked, swooping down from his broom as he flew in through the window, opening for him with a wave of his hand. He hopped onto the marble tile, snow powdering off him, melted by his magic and Oz’s, imbued onto the floor.
Oz flicked his eyes up from his book. “Why are you here.”
“After my last visit, you amended your castle’s wards to allow me passage. You should ask yourself why you did that first.” He unsummoned his broom, waved close the window, and stood expectantly in front of Oz. “Even you must have heard.”
“I do not know what you refer to.”
“The last battle in the war!” Figaro paced, hands moving as if he was casting a difficult spell. “The odds were vastly against us, but we won. Faust heeded my advice and we won. It was…” He scrambled at the air as if he could find his missing words there. There was nothing Oz could see, but then Figaro looked at him, eyes bright, grin blinding. “It was magnificent.”
Oz closed his book.
“No one has ever trusted in me this wholeheartedly.” Figaro turned to the window, one hand pressed to it. Outside, the snow fell, eternal, the spring sunlight weak and the stained glass reflecting it weaker. “It isn’t the worship of my childhood. Faust is also a wizard; he knows I don’t make miracles. Or at least he should. For my knowledge, he takes what I say as inviolable. And how well everything has unfolded!” He craned his head over his shoulder, the sunlight weakest around his hair. “If there is any god at all, it favors us: myself in having met him, and him in everything he inspires his army to do.”
He had come here to gloat again. Oz opened his book.
“I have never seen a celebration like what happened afterward.” There was a pause, however slight, too heavy to ignore; and, looking at him, Oz saw no smile dancing on Figaro’s face. Only the sunlight. “No one thought to ask me how I could have conceived such a bloody strategy. They raised their drinks cheering my name, they laughed with me, and they did not ask how it had been conceivable. After all, to them, I am still Lord Figaro.” He glanced askance at Oz. “But I knew what to do because I did the same thing with you.”
Oz had not read a sentence since reopening the book.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? To go from someone who ruined the world to someone helping to guide it into the new era.”
No, it wasn’t. Because the one to do it was Figaro. He had always found the greatest joy in helping those who needed help. Long ago it had been Oz. Now it was everyone else.
Oz read on, saying none of it.
Riquet flips the page. “I realize the war was necessary,” he says, “but I do hope the soldiers sought penance for what they did. I’m sure God forgave them regardless. But it is more meaningful to first seek Him.”
Oz does not reply.
“Hmm.” Riquet continues to flip through the book. “This seems boring.”
“You can look at the appendix in the back. It is an alphabetical list of major topics covered by the book, along with what page they may be found at. That will be faster than searching page by page.”
“Alphabetical?”
Oz explains.
“Oh! That will be easy! I know the alphabet. Um, let’s see…” He mumbles the alphabet to himself, one finger trailing the page as he reads each listed entry. It is a slow process. Oz waits.
“Oz, you’re in here! Well, not you. ‘Oz’s Ravages.’”
The words he hardly wields wither in his throat.
Riquet thumps the book shut. “Then it can’t be a good book. Remember when we went? It was boring, too. Sunrotea edif.” The book wobbles out of his hands, quivering its way to its spot on the shelf, tumbling before it reaches it. “Ah!”
“Vox nox.”
The book crisply picks itself up and files itself away.
“Thank you, Oz,” Riquet says, “but it doesn’t go there. It’s the third shelf on the next aisle over, on the second bookcase to the right, I think.”
Oz tips his head to the side. The book adjusts itself.
Oddly, Riquet is quiet. He turns to Oz. “Will I ever be as powerful as you?”
A wizard has what he is born with. And then he has what he eats. “No,” Oz says, “but you can hone your specialty magic to make it your greatest strength.”
“Do you mean becoming good at something only I can do?”
Oz nods.
Riquet purses his mouth. “Was it that awful last year?”
“What is ‘it’?”
“The battle against the Great Calamity. I know the former Sage’s wizards died, and that is why I’m here, as are Mitile, and Nero, and Arthur. Was it as awful seeing it as that illustration?”
It had not been anything to Oz but a wound to his pride. To be called the strongest in the world, to have felt it himself, and to have, in the end, lost the battle and the claim to the title he had never wanted for half of each day—it angers him still.
But not here, not presently, when admitting to Riquet, eyes gleaming with tears and bottom lip trembling, that Oz remembers neither the names nor the faces of the dead Central witches, to say nothing of those who hailed from the other countries. It rings hollowly in Oz, now, to think the wizards too friendly with him were only summoned because those of years before, who feared him for the Oz of legend, are dead. He is that Oz—that is an incontrovertible truth. And he is also the Oz who took in an abandoned child better off consumed, and pointlessly reforged fate to avert that child’s death; who has been reunited with the people of his past more ancient than that, keeping the secrets they know he will keep; and who beholds another child, lost without knowing he is. Remembering two thousand years of living and losing and learning, Oz is panged by guilt so profound he can no longer meet Riquet’s gaze.
He feels the feathery weight of a child’s hand on his.
“It’s alright, Oz,” Riquet says. “I understand if it was too horrible to talk about.”
Oz’s guilt is unabsolvable.
“I love everyone in the manor. Mostly. Mithra smells bad and Bradley often annoys Nero and Owen eats my share of desserts. Cain laughs really loud, and you’re weird—”
“Riquet.”
“I don’t want anyone to die. If you’re the strongest wizard and you’re useless at night, when the Great Calamity attacks, what are we going to do? So many died last year, and you didn’t have your injury. What will happen this year?”
Oz can’t look at Riquet. Better for it; another flash of mourning his weakness has him glaring at the ground, has an equivalent flash of lightning quavering the room. He could not keep the Great Calamity away. He could not save Arthur. He could not take the world when part of his own laid dead. He could not make Figaro stay.
“Oz!”
The weight of Riquet’s hand is too great for his age, and the lightning haloes his hair, casts stern shadows along his face. This is a child, knowing a great nothing of the world. He should not be the stronger one.
Oz pulls his hand away. Outside, the abruptly gathered clouds scatter, and the sun shines through again. “There are other powerful wizards in the manor,” he says, and does not name them. “We may not get along. But when it comes to preventing our annihilation, we will succeed.”
Riquet thinks it over. “You have been working on getting along, thanks to the Sage.” He nods to himself. “And because of me, God will guide us to victory.” He clasps his hands. “I will be praying for everyone’s safety a lot more as the time draws near. I already pray for everyone in the manor, but I will be very, very good about it when we need it most.”
Oz stills. “For everyone in the manor?”
“Of course!” The sun glows kindly over his smile. “Even you need salvation, and only I can bring it.”
Humans and wizards will worship anything possessing power—be it for deeds, as Faust; the physicality of magic, as Figaro; the nigh-omnipotence of a land’s spirits; or the intangibility of a faceless god. All of it is pointless to Oz. It is dependence on another who you may not reach by distance or word or heart. If he, in the strength that had seen him through millennia, had not been able to grasp the whole world and just one boy’s fate, what good will a god he has never met do? What is there to save in him after all he’s done and continues to do by not telling Riquet or Arthur the full, ugly truth?
Oz casts his face away wordlessly.
“I’m a bit hungry,” Riquet says. “I know I shouldn’t eat when reading a book that isn’t mine, so I’m going to go to the kitchen and stay there until I’m done. Maybe Nero is there and can make me something! Oz, do you want to come along?”
He shakes his head.
“I thought you would say that! But wasn’t it polite that I asked? Thank you for helping me look for a book like I wanted! We can try again later. We have so much time!”
Riquet bounces away, humming the song that had first heralded him, and Oz’s eyes widen in belated recognition. It had been a song Figaro had taught him.