War of the Chaotic Worlds II by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Castle Publishing, LLC
Published: 2022-06-24T15:09:01+00:00

Chapter Thirteen - The Rulers’ Confessions - (Alexandria)

It was four in the afternoon, approximately twelve hours after Lilith’s death. Eric, Eileen, and I had had lunch with the other Elders at noon and were now in the library of the palace, pretending that today was like any other day. None of us had recovered from the horrible events of last night, but we were all acting like nothing unusual had occurred as if we could wash away the traumatizing memory and fool ourselves into oblivion by doing so.

I had never before seen a library so magnificent, so cavernous, so splendid. It had four stories, each packed with hundreds of polished wooden bookshelves that held thousands of books. Comfortable velvet couches and squashy armchairs were arranged in groups in the atrium, little lamps of warm yellow light perched on the end tables. Purple and gold pillars surrounded us, connected by white balustrades that lined the balconies of each story. On our left side was an enormous window that stretched from the ceiling to the floor, sprawling down a huge wall. A spiral staircase coiled up to the top floor like a snake. I had followed it all the way up to the fourth floor quite a few times, not to explore it but rather to get a good view of the library from there. It was close to the domed ceiling, where colorful paintings of bearnixes, unibirds, kittenpillars, and dogfishes dwelled. I also enjoyed looking at the intricate patterns and shapes of the ornate carvings that curled and curved around the creatures. The chandelier, a giant of glittering crystalline teardrops, was only a few feet away from the balcony. I liked it the most in the early mornings when the sunlight slanted through the huge window and flowed through the beads, creating an iridescent rainbow of white light.

Eric and Eileen shared a couch by a corner, and I claimed the armchair beside them. Eric was immersed in a thick atlas of the Otherworld, and Eileen was poring over a romance novel titled Emerald Sparks, the first book of a tetralogy about a kittenpillar falling in love with a dogfish. The cover showed a leaf carved from emerald and a river of green sparkles emitting from it, glistening against the dark, olive-green background. I stole a glance at the author’s name: Xavier S. Morris. Of course, it had to be him. Eileen had been bustling upstairs and downstairs in the library all morning, determined to hunt down every single book he’d penned. Ever since she had read Cerulean Skies, she was madly in love with Morris’s writing style. “Simple, elegant, but touching, with aesthetically pleasing similes and metaphors,” was her assessment of his prose. The second, third, and fourth books of the Emerald Sparks tetralogy, titled Turquoise Longing, Verdant Love, and Jade Memories, were stacked on the end table beside her.

I, on the other hand, was flipping through an eight-hundred-page book about the history of the Underworld that had all the important events and dates recorded.

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