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Crumbled buildings covered in vines with white, four-petaled stars breathe for the first time in seven years. The left wall of one building has become a pile of bricks that waits for reconstruction beneath the gray branches of a hairless tree.
Strohl lounges with Will on a stone bench beside the tree. When he scoots closer to his friend and squeezes his hand, Strohl feels skin scarred by kindness.
“We should head back to Grand Trad. There’s no use in spending all day here staring at rubble.” Taking his hand back to fix his yellow jacket with a popped collar, he smiles at Will. “Thank you again for coming out here with me.”
“I still have some time to spare. If it’s okay with you, we could walk around Grand Trad for a little while. Maybe you'll come up with some new ideas on how to help Halia.”
Strohl wraps his arm around him as the pair walks back to the gauntlet runner. Soon, debris gives way to the first signs of new grass.
“I certainly have a new set of eyes with which to look at the city.” He squeezes Will’s shoulder. “Besides, seeing you reading all the time has inspired me to pick up a few new books for myself. Admittedly, I’ve been slacking the past few years, but there was a time when I could finish several novels in a matter of days.”
“Is it all right if I read with you sometimes?”
“There’s hardly a soul in Euchronia with whom I would prefer reading.”
Cement slabs that combine splotches of gray and brown decorate Grand Trad with the help of green, sheep’s wool trees. They live beneath the jagged, inverted-pyramid cathedral and its sandy colors. It helps travelers survive the miles of surrounding desert, which are populated more by bones than people.
A bell chirps. With dark stone covered in the white stains of spider egg sacs beneath them, Strohl and Will close the door behind them and look around. The black, wooden shelves with the Euchronia flag carved onto their sides hide the size of the store and the light coming through the half-elliptical windows.
Traversing the maze where abandoned cobwebs are as plentiful as the books, they discover the owner. She’s an elderly roussainte with radiant, black skin. Her dress is somehow grayer than the aged streaks in her black hair.
“Hello, dearies. How can I help you?” She’s polishing an emerald statue of a bass-adjacent fish on her desk.
“It’s an honor to meet you, miss.” Strohl steps closer to her with his hands wrapped around his own hips. “We’re looking to pass the time during our travels. You wouldn’t happen to have anything on early Euchronian history, would you?”
“I doubt anything I have can match seeing the world for yourself, sweetie.” She ambles past both men and starts dragging a lightly licked finger across the spines.
“Has it been hard finding books about the time before the king’s reign?” Will asks while swatting a frayed cobweb that’s fallen from the ceiling.
“Getting them wasn’t the issue.” She pulls a book from a shelf, flips ten pages at a time, and puts it back without looking.
“The Crown Theocracy, I take it?” Strohl analyzes his friend’s face.
“About ten years ago, they came in and burned at least a quarter of my collection.”
There are countless words waltzing in this space, but one mention of the Church forces Will to excuse himself from the party and its golden glow of literature. He dusts a part of the floor with his foot long after it’s clean.
Rubbing his friend’s windowpane coat, Strohl pulls himself closer to him. Will takes his foot away from the now scuffed stone and looks to him. He smiles at Strohl as he wraps his cravat around him, giving it a small tug to really grant Will a lion’s mane.
“Mm, I may still have some.” She hoddles past some red drapes behind her desk that are more dust than fabric. “Give me one minute, dearies! I’m certain there’s something back here!”
As they idle around the store, Will twiddles with the cravat. He smells sword polish and fancy salts from it. Looking through a book, the organized ink becomes more physical to him. Sight and smell serve one purpose.
Strohl picks up a book of children’s stories. One of them involves a child going around their town and solving their neighbors’ problems. At the end, the neighbors save the child from eating dinner alone and crying by helping them make the most delicious stew the world has ever seen. He transposes Will’s likeness onto the child when he rereads.
The roussainte woman steps back out from behind the drapes holding three books. Setting them down on her desk and huffing away the dust they send up, she claps and beckons the two men over.
“Each of these pulls from a different era before His Majesty’s reign.” She caresses their spines. “They don’t delve much into politics and such, but I hope you two dearies can get something out of them.”
“This is amazing! Thank you so much!” Coins covered in bone dust whine as Will steps forward with his bag open. “How much?”
“For all three? Four hundred fifty should suffice, sweetie.”
He’s spelunking for coins untainted by battle when Strohl grabs his shoulder. Pulling out a sun-yellow coin pouch with a white H stitched on, he shakes his own reeve.
“Save your money for our supplies.” He clicks open his pouch.
“Are you sure? I have plenty here.” He leans closer to him when Strohl holds his hand and guides him from the coins.
“Please, my friend, I’m more than happy to cover this.”
Will closes his bag and lets it fall back to his side. Strohl hasn’t stopped holding his hand; he also doesn’t let go. They each feel the flow of the other’s blood.
After pulling the children’s book from his coat and setting it beside the others, he organizes six hundred reeve across the desk. One of the coins cuddles into a small, eternally wet indent in the aged wood, which creaks even when still, as his book glides down the spines of the others to rest horizontally.
“Assuming my math is correct, that should cover the cost of all four, correct?” He keeps his pouch open and feels the rolling hills on the sides of his coins.
“Most of my customers can’t even spell.” She chuckles, tidies all the reeve into five equal piles, and pushes the books over to the men. “Thank you both so kindly for giving me and this old shop a visit.”
“Thank you for finding these for us” Will tucks them into his bag. There’s one book on each side of his coin purse, snuggling up to it. “I’ve been looking for these kinds of stories for months.”
“Then, this old place and body still serve a purpose.” She grabs an off-white rag with some blue foam on it and starts cleaning the fish again. Scratching for several moments that beat with the adrenaline of a near-death experience, she soon pulls away and relaxes. The cleaned spot is indistinguishable from the rest of the fish.
Strohl and Will wave her off, and then retackle the twisting, morphing shelves with cobwebs and books that the former swears weren’t there before.
Stepping outside, Will digs out his friend’s book. He whistles a malnourished note and wins his attention. Neither man can smell the raw, red meat from the barber shop-colored stall of the middle-aged Cclemar woman or hear the young rhoag boy screaming at non-customers with the patience and panic of a drowning toddler. All they can smell is the ink of the book they’re now both holding. All they can hear are the stories it must tell.
Strohl accepts it, immediately flipping to the story he read earlier. Its protagonist doesn’t get any descriptions besides being a child, so he sees them with blue hair; they have yellow and blue heterochromia. Their behavior and kindness need no altercations.
“You seem rather pleased with yourself, friend.” He looks down at Will while tapping his book against his own leg.
“Your smile just looks so free.” He holds Strohl’s wrist. “I’ve never seen you so comfortable before.”
He turns away from Will and toward the sun, reuniting the book with a much wider world and giving it life. But when his friend steps back up to his side and looks at him, Strohl shows him the open story.
“If you still have some time that you believe you can spare,” he creases the first page of the fable, “would you care to read with me back at the Gauntlet Runner?”
“I was thinking about going to the hot spring, but a book sounds much better.”
His hover sword keeps resting as they make their way back to the gauntlet runner; it groans when its owner’s movements occasionally toss it around.
When the pair is three turns away from Sunlumeo Street, they spot a teenage paripus girl with the sky in her hair laying white flowers along the edge of the sidewalk. There’s about a meter between each one. Letting the book and the gauntlet runner wait, they watch her beautify the street without ever asking for flowers. When she’s done, they simultaneously thank her for her work, which makes her squeak and ramble out her gratitude, before finally heading home.