Lady Parhelion and Kida had searched the floor for hours to no avail, and the sun was just about to crest above the horizon. Bleary-eyed and fingers full of papercuts, they continued their search.
“Do you two require any further assistance?”
Lady Parhelion looked up at their host, a large fox demon lounging on one of the chairs nearby. Despite her illusion, the fox seemed to have little trouble flipping through the pages of her own book.
“No, thank you for the offer though,” Lady Parhelion sighed. “You’ve done more than enough in letting us check through this library as well.”
The demon nodded nonchalantly, stretching her long limbs before settling back down into the comfy seat. “My apologies for not sorting through the library. I’m afraid I lack a desire to stay organized, especially when welcome visitors are so few and far between.”
With a sweet smile, Lady Parhelion tried her best to return back to perusing the texts. They were clearly stolen from back home, though it was difficult to tell whether the fox demon was the culprit or not. Regardless of where the books had come from, the knowledge within was proving to be surprisingly useful.
Kida had sorted through the arcana and engineering texts rather quickly, seperating them out into two piles. While the engineering books seemed like the more interesting of the two, with several being authored by Anastasia herself, the arcana was what they had hoped to find. The next task had been seperating out between the types of arcana, narrowing it down until they only had two categories: clerical magic, and necromancy bindings.
They’d managed out the sorting by about midnight, and then the “fun” part had begun. Kida kept his eyes glued to all the cleric texts, while Lady Parhelion tried to make odds and ends out of the necromancy books.
“I don’t understand why the scholars kept an entire book on resurrecting plants,” she hissed under her breath, flipping through the pages of her current book. “Of all the things to seal away in a tome, why seal black magic that just resurrects ivy?”
“Clearly you’ve never worked on a farm,” Kida snorted, gingerly picking through his book as well. “I know family who would kill for spells like that. Put it on the list of books we’re keeping.”
Lady Parhelion began to set it aside into its own pile when she saw the fox demon watching out of the corner of her eye with a dissapproving glare.
“We should only take the texts we need to resurrect Preston.”
Kida’s face drew back in a grimace, but he continued reading and making notes without complaining.
“And what happens if you can’t?”
Lady Parhelion looked over in surprise at the fox demon as she spoke up. The fox’s head tilted to the side, considering it on behalf of her two guests.
“Say there is no such thing as resurrection in the sense which you imagine, have you thought this through? Allow me to be the first to say your quest is admirable, to go through such lengths to save but a demon, but-“
“We’ll find a way,” Kida huffed, slamming his book shut and picking up the next.
The fox demon looked dissapprovingly at him, and then curiously at Lady Parhelion. The young girl looked over at Kida sadly, but turned back to the fox demon with a reassuring smile and a nod.
“We’ll find a way.”
The fox demon held her gaze for a moment, unsure of how else to warn the two of them of the danger. But, seeing the resolve in the girl’s eyes, the fox demon simply nodded back.
“In that case, allow me to fetch you some food and drink.”