A Change of Heart

Tuesday March 2 to Wednesday March 3, 1490

"Cly!" I shrieked, "Cly! Stop it!"

"You know this woman, Marina?" Tel asked curiously. "Who is she? What's she doing here? And why's she burning your books?"

Our avatar herself answered his questions. "I am burning these books," she said sternly, "because they are full of lies. I am purging history of all falsehoods so we can transmit a pure version to posterity."

"No!" I cried. "You can't burn books just because you don't like what's written in them! And — is that the Historia?" Among the tomes tossed carelessly around Cly's feet, some half open, many scuffed and ripped, and all of them covered in dirt, were the three volumes Leona had lent me. The ones I'd only thought Sy had destroyed yesterday. I snatched them up and leafed through them frantically. Please be intact, please be intact. If I were Ghallim, I'd be praying like a madwoman. Please be intact. A partially torn page flapped at me. "Oh no, I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead Leona and Irene are going to skin me alive," I mumbled.

"But who is she?" Ynez repeated Tel's question.

I ran my fingers through my hair and gripped it until my scalp hurt, willing myself to calm down. "Tel," I said with wild laugh, "Tel, this is Cly. She's our avatar!"

"Our avatar?" Tel asked in utter confusion as Cly indignantly humphed, "I am most certainly not anyone's avatar. I don't know why you keep saying that, Marina." And she tossed another book into the fire.

Pounding footsteps heralded Ghallim's arrival. "I smelled burning...." His voice trailed off as he took in the scene — Cly, the bonfire of books, me in a state of shock, Ynez entirely perplexed, Tel curious and a little amused by the entire situation. "What eez going on 'ere?"

Before any of us could speak, Cly explained in a perfectly reasonable tone that she'd discovered that many of the historical texts had been corrupted by lies, starting from Herodotus and continuing through the centuries of writers who drew upon his works uncritically. "I'm correcting the situation," she explained. "Marina, pull yourself together. It's for the good of humanity."

"The good of humanity?" I cried wildly, brandishing the mutilated Historia at her. "What about this human? The one who's going to get skinned alive?"

"Who's getting skinned alive?" Ghallim demanded. "If anyone eez getting skinned alive, that eez a crime and I am obligated to prevent eet."

"Me!" "No one." Cly and I spoke at the same time.

While we argued about whether Irene would be glad that her book had undergone purification by fire, Tel disappeared for a few moments, Ynez traipsing after him like a puppy and ogling his back, to return with two large buckets of water that he tossed on the flames. With an angry hiss, the bonfire died, leaving behind charred corpses of books.

Cly glared at him in frustration. "Now why did you do that?" But she couldn't help but give his figure an admiring examination.

So accustomed to the female gaze that it probably didn't even register, Tel ignored her and poked cautiously at some blackened pages. "So that's our avatar?" he asked me. "That's the thing Astera was going on about that one time, right — the thing that allows us to do magic?"

"Thing!" cried Cly indignantly.

"Marina, you can have her. I think I want a different one."

"You and me both!" Still kneeling on the ground, I stacked the Criamon library books into a tidy pile and pulled Volume Two of De Historia Artium Magicarum into my lap, tenderly probing the damaged binding. An Ars Essentiae Effect should glue it back together nicely, but how could I reconstruct the original pages? Perhaps I could ask Ghallim to pray to restore an older version of the books, although Astera had stressed over and over that using magic to fix Paradox backlashes was akin to taking more hallucinogenic herbs to try to exit a trance. (No matter how tempting, it just didn't work.)