They were irreplaceable.

  They were books, tomes, histories, volumes of lore and learning and records and thoughts and biographies and philosophies and art and stories. Tens of thousands of years of Empyrean history, four distinct Empires represented among them, an archive of breadth and depth that would have kept the scholars among the Freeholder sages actively engaged for literally centuries going through it all.

  It burned. It burned hot, and it burned fast.

  But not before I read EVERYTHING.

  Reach Scholar’s Touch turned the instant-reading spell into a Short-Ranged spell. Spellwarping turned it into a Ray. Chain Spell made that Ray hit twenty additional books at a time.

  Scholar’s Touch made touching a book the equivalent of giving it a good solid read-through. With my Intellect, that meant I basically photographed the book and stored all details as interactive in my Visual File, while also digesting all the knowledge instantly and completely.

  The Spell nominally lasted one round (six seconds) per Caster Level, with one touch per round allowed.

  Thus, the Casting of the spell basically allowed me to read over twelve hundred books from cover to cover.

  The exceptions were those books that radiated fell energies, leaking evil intentions and dark, twisting powers just by what was written inside them, or by the energies that had been instilled into them.

  Those books went to Princess Kristie Rantha, who basically sat down there with a sneer and read every single damn one of them at speed, too.

  Ranthas were Hags, of one sort or another, and also Forsaken. The combination was very impressive in many ways, but one of the subtle ways was that Ranthas were connected to the Hag Akasha, not just the human one, and could potentially go dumpster-diving into the racial memory of beings that were huge traders of dark secrets and prime souls among the darkest planes, worlds, and beings of all Creation.

  Even mind-bending soul-sucking horrific knowledge just got dumped into that part of the Hag Akasha and didn’t affect her at all. It just became more Ranks in Dark Lore of the rather very worst sort, records of things Empyreans had done and dealt with that had damned entire races, cost uncounted souls, and helped pave them a road to travel out into the stars, discover and dominate numerous worlds, and play with the lives of so, so many beings that they deemed less than themselves.

  The worst stuff I read were basically sanitized versions of what Kris did, where instead of learning the True Name of the Shadow in the Void, the tales just referred to this bringer of devastation to the planet Qual’morr for resisting the coming of the Empyreans, reducing the planet with fire and shadow until nothing living walked its surface, but much that did not live, did.

  There were many stories of power and ambition, played out in intrigue and wars, conquest and exploration of forbidden places and even more forbidden secrets, brought back and turned into tools to advance one’s self and station, the most basic and elemental of which became the Isparian magicks… and which a great many more were involved in the higher Empyrean arts.

  The libraries of Prince Geraine were split between all three of his Dungeons, and accessing them required offing more than a few undead Librarians devoted to their protection, unraveling a lot of magical traps and sensors, neutralizing Wards and bound spells ready to destroy souls and unleash eldritch horrors upon trespassers, and doing it all without notifying the absent ruler of all the undead of Dereth that some mice were nibbling at his library.

  Twenty-six books every six seconds for me. 15,600 books an hour.

  Princess Kristie, let’s say a page per second of horrifying, mind-melting knowledge that she digested with ever-increasing scorn. Her biggest hold-up was the many languages that her books were written in, some of them bespoke and only found within that book and its derivatives… but I was reading all the derivatives.

  Did people know that the combination of approximately three hundred pages of writing, Comprehend Languages, and Scholar’s Touch suffices for the ‘one hour of exposure to a language’ for Polyglot? Sure they did, it’s not like it was hidden knowledge.

  A Comprehend Languages was a Valence I, but no spell would attach to a Forsaken for more than ten minutes before it would be forced off, ended early, or their Forsaken Field would simply start eroding it away until it grew weak enough to collapse.

  Ten minutes was six hundred pages to Kris. Or, if I Scholar Touch’ed my way through a derivative book, I could simply Visual File that over to her with full comprehension of every line and whorl of ink and exotic hides.

  Gerraine’s combined library was over two hundred thousand tomes in size. In sixteen hours, we obliterated it. It was all Burned in the Vivic Holy Eternal Flames from Kris’ Floating Forge, and then just to be sure I Disintegrated the ashes, as there were spells that could rebuild books from ashes.

  I never imagined I would be party to so much destruction of irreplaceable knowledge on a distant world, while at the same time being the sole preservation of such knowledge. Three of my thoughtstreams were already going through it all with the zeal of born obsessive-compulsive disorders looking for all the links and patterns and making spreadsheets and drawing graphs of links… and arranging some very, very dangerous knowledge in layers and lists as Kris fed me dribs and drabs that wouldn’t threaten my sanity.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  My Amulet, one of its primary functions Faithfulness, warned me against reading a lot of that heretical and blasphemous shit. It wasn’t so much that I’d be converted by what I read, Truth being marvelous at separating truth from lies, but my reaction to those that had spread such filth would probably be extreme in the very worst of ways.

  I wouldn’t be damned by being converted, but Damned by what I’d do to the things trying to spread such shit, and the lengths I’d go to in order to stop them.

  The fact I’d probably be right to go DO those things in order to save others only made it worse. It was the way Hell preferred to get the great and the Good, and I had to refuse repeatedly some of the things Kris was willing to give me as a result.

  …

  “Well, this has been an instructive day,” Kris murmured to me as I wiped black tears away from my face. “I don’t think I ever appreciated just how much the Rantha lineage insulates me against the utter shite of some of the stuff out there.”

  “I have the Words, and they help a lot, but I don’t have an active Heavenbound Pact to actively rage against this stuff,” I explained with a sigh, watching the very last of an utterly magnificent collection of tomes burn away with accelerated speed. The fact they preferred various kinds of hide, vellum, and animal products was helpful in powdering them, especially since everything undead authors associated with magic had to be on human skin… or the hide of something suitably magical, if not.

  Some of the books had been works of beauty, the soul of the author singing as they put themselves together. Some had basically been madness inspired by depravity or voices in the head, and some were as dry as reading housing codes, just lists of facts and numbers that might be mined to fuel some suitable grudge from ten thousand years ago.

  They were all ash and dust now.

  Nobody except the Prince or his personal librarians had handled any of these books for thousands of years. Their loss should infuriate the heck out of him.

  More when there was no sign of anyone being here, and all his minions were less than dust and impossible to recall.

  “I just watched you cry normal tears, tears of blood, and tears of attempted Corruption. My apologies for subjecting you to this kind of thing,” Kris said softly to me.

  I just sighed and waved it away. “The Karmic Reward was surprisingly high, given that this involved the destruction of so much pure knowledge.”

  “How much Karma?”

  “I can take Sixteen.”

  Kris regarded me coolly, looking at the single darkly-bound book in her hand. The hide on the cover was slithys tentacle. With a sneer of scorn on her face, she tossed it into the flames.

  There was an instant scream of outrage, and something shot up from the depths of the book, starting to manifest.

  The Floating Forge had many uses if you kept inscribing Patterns on it. The shrieking spirit, looking like the ghost of an ancient Empyrean woman in Falatacot robes, slammed right into the Binding Circle scribed at 45 QL or so on Kris’s Floating Forge, absolutely binding and preventing the ancient spirit from getting free.

  “Vermin!” she screeched at us in really old Falatacot, already starting to blaze gold and unwhite as Holy Vivus leap eagerly to the task. Whatever magic she was going to wield sizzled and sparked impotently on the fields of the diagram as she began to Burn. “You have destroyed it all, millennia of work! All the glory of the Empyreans, their grand works-!”

  “Your master put cognition traps across every single tome in this library,” I said softly back to her, shutting off her outraged rant as she stared at me. “Phrases, words, images concealed between the true writings and illustrations. Yes, I figured out what was happening, and anticipated similar cognition traps. That’s why all the really dangerous stuff was only read by my incredibly magically inert companion here.” I stared the shocked and outraged spirit right in her abyss-hollow eyes. “N’cthail’s work, seems like. Probably spent a lot of time on it, millennia of work, as you said, spreading spiritual corruption through these books, their other copies, and all those who read them.

  “The downfall of mortal Empires of nigh-eternal mages who thought themselves above such things.”

  A massive Karmic reward for destruction of knowledge. Heaven didn’t reward anyone for destroying great art, uplifting works, fine stories, true histories, and such things. The lessons of history were meant to be learned from, not burned in ash.

  Rewarding us for destroying this, book by book, without exception, indicated that something far vaster and very dangerous was happening.

  Thoughtstream #4 had been keeping busy looking at everything with Truth, and excising falsehoods and extraneous things in what I’d read right out of my memory, even as the others tracked how fact A from Book 11456 linked in with fact X from book 3133, and so forth, building an empty diagram that nevertheless was self-assembling in my memory.

  “You must be Eibhil, the one who wrote that Book. Well, all evil things come to bad ends, by definition, and this one is yours. I trust you had a very bad life and deserve everything that is coming to you that you probably fooled yourself into believing never would.”

  “Insolent barbarian! You do not know who or what you are dealing with!” she screamed at me, dashing up against the Barrier and causing it to spark and seethe as she tried to reach me, her spectral face distorting horribly.

  Kris’s fist smashed her right in that face, without even disrupting the Binding field, knocking her down and into the Flames in utter shock. “Fuck off, skank. You whored yourself off to an old god, and now you’re his next meal. En-fucking-joy,” she smiled, eight canines gleaming at the ghost, who was writhing madly as Holy Vivus covered her now, her screams louder, yet more feeble as her ectoplasm was consumed.

  When she collapsed into a point of darkness and vanished, just as the fully intact Book blazing with vivus likewise collapsed fully into powder, neither of us was much surprised.

  “Man, I so want you to blow these three places to dust and fill them in and let that fucker stew,” Kris said coolly.

  “That’s a known tactic for what I do to unwanted Dungeons. Let him wonder who acted against him, and curse them damn Gelidites who refuse to obey him when he blames them,” I sniffed, waving my hand. Green light flared, and the ashes of thousands of books vaporized into much, much less than dust.

  “Time to go, then.” Kris put her Null down, and Forsaken disruption wiped the place clean of any magical trace of us, even as I popped us away.

  ============================

  My Patreon can be found by a name search under ‘The Power of Ten’, or links from previous Novels.

  However, you can also support commissioning some art for use on the site!

  Ebook Series: The original Power of Ten: The First Day, The First Week, and finally The First Month, Vol Five and Six!