The jitters in Jona's muscles didn't let up even as he went out during the afternoon and came back just as the moons replaced the darkened sun. Crozal's absence this particular day brought a sense of ease in his gut. Perhaps the Crimson Mother was willing to let them have their short glimpse of good luck. Or...maybe not.

Jona's head pounded with the revelation he had from stalking Eldan. When he and Rutoria met for the third time in the nearest town, he had to spill everything. Well...not everything. Just enough for Rutoria to get why he was so hopeful.

The Grand Queen was alive and maybe she's waiting for Jona to uncover the secret as to why she was trapped in Gandirk.

"It must have been elating," Rutoria had bobbed her head along with what Jona told her this afternoon. "What are you going to do now?"

Jona had never thought about it. He was beginning to see a pattern in himself now. He never really did think things through. That's a potential problem in the future, right? As a Grand Royal, he couldn't just take the leap in his decisions and let everyone suffer. He should have a bit more foresight than this.

Still, Jona tried to come up with something to pacify Rutoria's question. He recalled tapping his chin and blurting out, "I guess I have to figure out why my mother had to go to this secret place," he said. "I might visit it one day but I'm told it's off-limits."

"What if you break in?" Rutoria had said. It took a while for Jona to understand she was asking him a real question and not just thinking out loud on her own.

Jona scoffed. Never in a million years would he attempt to go against the Grand Monarch's rule. It would mean certain death for him, even though he was related to the head of the territory. Even his title wouldn't be able to save him.

Rutoria, bless her heart, didn't egg him on. Instead, she had bumped shoulders with him with a playful smirk plastered all over her face. If Jona wasn't thinking too hard about it, he might have guessed she was just in her early thirties or forties. She couldn't be more than a hundred years old...right?

"The thorns never prick those who do not hold them," Rutoria had said, her goofy smile never leaving her face. "Wouldn't it be better to let this go?"

Jona had never heard of such blasphemy in his life. "The fate of nature is in danger," he said, an unknown ball of fury uncurling inside his gut. "I can't just sit still and wait for the Decay to devour us. I must do something."

Rutoria nodded as she walked two steps further, going ahead of Jona. She turned to him, clasped her hands behind her, and began walking backwards. "All I'm saying is," she said. "Be careful out there. There are other ways around this problem."

Jona laughed without remorse. "If I find ever one, I'll tell you," he said.

And it's true. Everything he had done the past few weeks didn't reveal anything about the growing Decay ravaging Dwanzeig. Bits and pieces of truths about his mother were all he found and picked up after.

Thoughts raged in his mind as he strode towards the archives, hands tucked to his chest with his arms crossed. There was no one in the corridors save for the branches edging out of the walls to quench their thirst. Jona strode past them without a care and picked his way towards the only place he knew to contain at least a sliver of information about the Decay. His research was long overdue.

When the branches parted in front of him, the archive's spacious insides greeted him. There wasn't anything that changed since he had last been here. Shelves still lined the thorny walls, each one filled to the brim with tomes stacked upright. Tables and chairs dotted the grassy floor, their surfaces polished until they shone. The stack Jona had gathered before had already been put away so he had to gather them all back. He should have dropped a word to the keeper.

Jona wandered into the nearest shelf and peeked through the squiggles of Keijula glinting on the tomes' spines. There were some in the official koset while there were quite numerous ones in the Jolfela variant of the script. Not much varied except maybe some of the words contained different letters or a different way of spelling it, altogether.

Either way, Jona hadn't spent the rest of his scant life learning the regional, territorial, and racial differences of the same language for nothing. He plucked the first tome he thought would contain the knowledge he was seeking. Then, another. And another. Soon, he had a tall stack in his arms so high he had to lean over to the side just to see where he was stepping. The muscles in his arms strained and his breaths had become shallow. He was about to turn away from the shelf and find a table when something golden flashed in his periphery.

He paused and whipped towards whatever that was. His gaze landed on a tome sitting in the middle of two thicker ones. Its spine was embellished with shapes of thorns pressed with gold, making the pointy tips look less menacing. That's...strange. How come he had never seen this tome before? Was it one of the newer ones?

With a grunt, he set the stack he had gathered into the ground, parting the grass with his magic to avoid squashing them with the weight. When he drew up, his fingers closed around the thorny spine and pulled the tome free. More thorns cast with gold decorated the cover, swirling along the title printed in gold and in the official Keijula koset.

Soul Magic: Application of Rysteme Spells in Modern Soul Studies

Jona knitted his eyebrows, turning the book to its back cover. As expected, the thorns continued all the way there. There wasn't a hint of dust anywhere in the tome's dark red, leather bound, indicating it wasn't that old. There weren't any cracks or any signs of the leather peeling off, either. How in Satris's name did this book make it here?

Thorns only prick those who hold them. Rutoria's weird proverb echoed at the back of Jona's mind. What a strange coincidence that he was now holding a thorny book. What did that idiom mean, anyway? It wasn't something he had heard the older nature fairies say. Maybe it was a Peltran thing? Sure, Jona would believe that. For now.

His eyes went back to the tome in his hands. Unlike its companions on the shelf, it was severely thin, like there wasn't enough information in its pages. Well, he'd see about that.

He plopped to the ground, the grass catching his weight. He popped the tome open to the first page. What greeted him were paragraphs as long as his palm and whose letters were as small as an insect. Wow, that's...an eyesore.

Jona shook his head, blinking his eyes as an exercise for the amount of scary reading he was about to do. He could do this. It's just reading. He dug around his pockets and found the old piece of parchment inside. The names listed and crossed out unearthed fresh memories in his mind. Using the straight edge of the parchment, he placed it beneath the first line of the first page and began reading.

It looked like the tome talked about a branch of rysteme leistiva that dealt with the souls, in full. The banshees were the experts on this, with their synnavaim being necromancy—the art of summoning souls from the Land of Wonders. Soul magic, as he learned after the first paragraph, was magic applied to living souls, not the ones who passed on. With these sets of spells, one could do a variety of things to a soul, including transferring them, splitting them, and...binding them into things?

That's interesting. He stood up, the blades of grass crunching beneath his boots. The stack he gathered was now forgotten as he moved towards the archive's exit, his fingers flipping page after page. He didn't even need the parchment to guide him. His eyes somehow moved on their own, whizzing through passage after passage of spells, precautionary measures, and the unexplored possibilities of the incantations.

The more he read, the more the gears in his head turned, forming a plan and a back-up plan. Foresight, as he intended for himself earlier. The things this tome was saying magic was capable of was beyond extraordinary. Now that Jona was feeling hopeful, this could also be the answer to stopping the Decay once and for all.

Before he knew it, he was standing in front of his room, the tome still in his hands. He rolled his shoulders and looked around him. There was no one out so late into the night. All of the servants went home and the Natura wouldn't be doing their patrols so soon.

Outside, Samiri's rays turned the green leaves into a solemn shade of turquoise and the red flowers and fruits into a faint shade of purple. The air was cold and humid at the same time, as if it couldn't decide whether to comfort or agitate its consumers.

Giant migratory birds flew through the dark sky, cawing to their flock in bits of clicks and cries. Jona didn't take enough elika listris classes to know what kind of birds they were or where they were going so late in the migrating season.

Well, whatever. He raised the tome he pilfered from the records to his face. Thorns only prick those who hold them. Perhaps that meant he shouldn't play with things he knew to be thorns—dangerous, unfamiliar, and quite convoluted. Or maybe Rutoria was warning him about doing something which could hurt him because he kept on lodging into it?

Who knew? It wasn't like Rutoria was fond of explaining half the things she was saying. Jona learned that the hard way throughout all their talks in town after bumping into each other more often than not.

No matter. He had something that could help him now. A smile crept to his lips as he ducked inside his room with no one to witness him. Along with him came the key in unlocking the secrets of nature, and consequently, the world.

What would happen when one held too tight? They bleed. And with Jona, it wasn't like he was letting go anytime soon.