The Living Tower

Chapter Two: The Iron Library

Salestia Witrose had always suspected the moon was more beautiful from Earth.

The Iron Citadel wasn't a small city by any means, but it did stand alone on the moon's surface. Its metal spires and imposing walls and black skies were all Salestia had ever known; any memory of her brief few years on Earth as a child had long abandoned her. Now, all she had of her true home was the sight of the ringed planet suspended in the void outside.

That, and books.

Reading was the easiest way to spend her time at the Iron Library's front desk while she waited for visitors. Under the violet glow of the building's burning lamps, mixed with the golden soulspeaker-crafted light spilling in through the windows, Salestia browsed books written by Earth's most daring explorers, its brilliant historians, its naturalists and academics and cartographers.

Around her, narrow iron staircases spiraled up columns of books. Black shelves and walkways intersected at the upper levels. Maps of the solar system's planets and moons and distant constellations painted the ceilings. The library was a beautiful piece of architecture that had become a prison to Salestia.

Today, she kept herself distracted with the pages of a book on soulspeakers—human wielders of elemental magic. The book's artist clearly favored the most powerful. The soulspeakers whose magic had fundamentally altered their appearance.

Among those in the order of earthspeakers—the most diverse order, by far—were plantspeakers with vines tangled in their hair and thorns sprouting from their skin, jewelspeakers with gems embedded in their bodies, metalspeakers with limbs and claws of iron. Steel. Gold. Waterspeakers with drenched hair and ocean eyes, icespeakers with frosted lips. Soilspeakers, sandspeakers, stonespeakers, woodspeakers... They shaped the world.

Most specialties could be narrowed. Refined. Some plantspeakers learned to cultivate a single flower to perfection and grow them for royal palaces, rosespeakers and lilyspeakers and the like. Jewelspeakers could get rich growing a specific gemstone. Salestia had even heard of a glasspeaker queen in the Yanjenese desert.

Skyspeakers were close behind the earth order in diversity of magic, boasting lightningspeakers whose hair stood on end as they lit up the sky, airspeakers with a perpetual windswept appearance, starspeakers with the cosmos glittering in their eyes. Meteorspeakers brought fiery space debris raining down on battlefields, while spacespeakers closed the distance that ships had to cover to reach the moon and Mars.

The other two elementally opposed orders were the moonspeakers and the sunspeakers. Wielders of darkness and light. For the sunspeakers, that meant firespeakers and lightspeakers.

Salestia lifted her hand and studied her palm. Powerful lightspeakers often had a glow to them, or their eyes, or at the very least a radiating warmth. However, while it was exhausting and required an ongoing redirection of their magical energy, a talented soulspeaker could prevent their magic from altering their appearance.

But the more likely reason for a soulspeaker to appear as an ordinary human was that they were weak. Or unpracticed.

Footsteps hurried down the grand staircase behind Salestia, pulling her from her thoughts. She threw a glance over her shoulder and frowned. "Aza?"

Azadorna Asterades was one of the library assistants. And the governor's younger sister. Working here seemed to be the governor's idea more than hers, but she did a fine enough job.

Her expression was twisted with worry as she approached Salestia's desk. She halted next to Salestia and wiped her dark brown hands on the sapphire skirt of her dress. The top half of her hair was pulled up in its usual twin buns, while the rest of her dark curls were free to fall around her neck.