That said, usually, when a letter for her came like this, it was addressed in impeccable calligraphy. This time, the address was written casually by hand in cursive, and the “Miss” that she was usually addressed by on these envelopes was missing, as it just read “Rosemary Corbin — Hemlock 920”. She wasn’t bothered by this omission — but she did notice that it was a bit out of the ordinary, as was the unusual handwriting.
She broke the seal and opened the parchment. The letter written on the inner side was scrawled in the same casual handwriting. Rosemary read it.
Rosemary,
The book you wanted to check out about Greek Mythology has arrived. Come to the library next chance you get if you’re still interested.
Madam Harvey
Rosemary put the letter in her book, put the book in her satchel, and headed out the door. As soon as she reached the crabapple orchard, she began running. It was just a few minutes till she reached the library, slightly out of breath.
“Did you run here?” asked Madam Harvey as soon as she saw Rosemary walk in, huffing.
“Yes,” said Rosemary, catching her breath. “You say you found it?”
“No such luck,” admitted Madam Harvey. “I had to re-order it, but it came in this morning. So you still want to check it out?”
She got out of one of her her desk drawers a large, thick, red, hard-cover book and put it on the table. Rosemary read the golden letters on the front cover: ‘Greek Mythology Told by the Magical and the Mundane — by Dr. Allen Andreas’.
Her whole body shook with excitement. “Yes!” she said, though she was barely able to get the word out.
“Okay then,” said Madam Harvey. She got out her wand and began moving it between Rosemary, the book, and her crystal ball, as she always did when checking out a book to Rosemary, and as she probably did whenever checking a book out to any student. As she did so, the ball emitted a glow that rhythmically alternated between red and green. When she finished, the glow held solidly green for a few seconds before fading.
Rosemary opened the book, and on the inner side of the back cover saw in liquid-colored letters: “Rosemary Corbin — Hemlock 920 — April 3, 2003 — Desk Return Only”.
“So I don’t have to return it till April?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Madam Harvey. “It’s a long book, and you’re the only one who’s tried to check it out in three years, so that qualifies it for extended loans.”
“And what does ‘Desk Return Only’ mean?” asked Rosemary.
“It means you can’t just toss it in the book drop,” explained Madam Harvey. “Since it is a replacement for a book that disappeared inexplicably, we have to insist that you hand it in to a librarian at this desk and wait while they check it back in.”
“That’s good,” said Rosemary, “because it looks like it will take me a little while to finish this book.”
“Well, if three weeks isn’t enough,” said Madam Harvey, “you just bring it back before the due date, and unless someone else’s waiting on it, you can renew it.”
* * *
Rosemary skipped all the way back to Hemlock Tower, eager to start reading the book. As soon as she got back to the Common Room, she got the book out of her satchel, opened it up, and took a look at the table of contents. She spent the better part of the next hour thumbing through the book, familiarizing herself with the table of contents and the format of the index. She then began reading the introduction, which spent quite a bit of time musing about why the version of Greek Mythology familiar to the magical world would vary somewhat from that familiar to the non-magical world before going on to explain how the book would highlight the differences in its narrative of the myths.
Before dinner, though, she closed the book, brought it to her room, and put it in her safe. It had taken her quite a while to get ahold of it, so she didn’t want to risk anything happening to it, and she certainly didn’t want to be the cause of Madam Harvey having to order it again.
It was a few days later, on Saturday, when Rosemary heard students gossiping about something disturbing in the Sorcery Times. It wasn’t until after lunch that Rosemary was finally able to get her hands on a copy of the paper, when Lacy pointed her to the article in question — an article titled, “Winged Serpent Sucked Dry”. Rosemary began to read the article.
Crossville, TN: Yesterday evening, at 10:24pm, BMEC officials confirmed that an Appalachian Miniature Winged Serpent was found dead in the vicinity of Byrd Creek. Upon being asked the cause of the creature’s death, a BMEC spokesperson said: “We do not know at this time. It’s as though someone just sucked out its vital essence.”
The local resident who alerted authorities to the carcass apparently noticed it on account of its noxious smell that was likened to “the smell of rotting garbage.”
Rosemary dropped the paper on the table.
“Like rotting garbage?” she exclaimed. “That’s just like those trees.”
“What?” asked Lacy. “You mean those trees you saw when you went to get your wand core?”
“Yes,” said Rosemary. “But then it was plants. Now it’s animals.”
“Well, maybe they’ll believe you now,” said Lacy, “now that BMEC’s confirmed it’s happening.”
“But that was to trees,” said Rosemary. “By the way, what’s an Appalachian Miniature Winged Serpent?”
“It’s a kind of a dragon,” said Lacy.
* * *
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That evening, as Rosemary sat in her room with the Greek Mythology book, she decided to see if there was anything she could find about dragons. Looking up dragons through the index, she quickly found a reference to the story of Cadmus. She had read versions of this story before in mundie books.
Cadmus was the founder of the city of Thebes. According to the story, he slew a dragon and used its teeth to grow from the ground a special team of soldiers. These soldiers, known as Spartoi, helped him build the city. The book went on to spiral into speculations of what kind of dragon it was, but in the end revealed that there was a fairly good consensus that it probably was a Boeotian Water Dragon, which had the distinctive ability to imprint the genetic material of primates in its teeth, and subsequently to generate from their teeth propriohomunculi — servants completely devoid of volition, obedient to the dragon, who were both physically and genetically identical to the species whose genetic material was embedded in the teeth. The book further reasoned that the violent in-fighting that the Spartoi initially exhibited was a result of the fact that the dragon whose teeth they were sown from was deceased at the time of their formation, and that otherwise they would have likely turned on and killed Cadmus. Finally, it suggested that this in-fighting only stopped because Cadmus must have found some way to redirect the allegiance of the unexpectedly masterless Spartoi to himself.
For a few minutes after reading this, Rosemary was lost in reflection. She thought of the idea of being devoured by a dragon, only to have her physical and genetic form resurrected, not as her, but as a robot obedient to the very creature that had destroyed her. Horrified, she wondered whether the Spartoi remained human enough to feel the constraints of their enslavement — and whether it would be worse if they did or if they didn’t.
As soon as she could, she continued reading. The book acknowledged that this explanation of the incident was inconsistent with Ovid’s account of the story on a number of counts, such as how he described the Spartoi emerging from the ground fully armored. However, it pointed to another version of this myth that was recorded by Demitrios of Orchomenus — a writer who had been completely forgotten by mundies along with his works since at least the late Middle Ages, but who lived a lot earlier than Ovid. In this version, the Spartoi emerged naked from the ground and only forged their armor after Cadmus had gained their allegiance.
Rosemary continued reading on the differences between Ovid’s account and that of Demitrios of Orchomenus.
“You going to get ready for bed?” she eventually heard Sarah ask.
“Oh, yes,” said Rosemary, coming only enough out of her distraction to be able to respond. She closed the book and put it in her safe. She then went and took a shower, before getting into her sleepwear and going to bed.
* * *
The thought of a dragon that could kill human beings and resurrect them as its slaves was a thought that Rosemary found disturbing — but disturbing in a way that made it impossible for her to completely put out of her mind, so the thought pestered her all night as she went to sleep. It also maintained a hold on her thoughts after she woke up the next morning.
After breakfast, she went straight to the library. Madam Harvey was generally not on duty on the weekends, but that was okay. Rosemary had been there more than enough times to easily find the reference section on her own.
She went straight to the Encyclopedia Avalonica and found the article on Boeotian Water Dragons. In it, she learned of experiments that had been done on the primate-cloning properties of its teeth back in the 1960s using marmosets. While she kept reading, she kept pausing, a part of her pondering the horrific fate of the marmosets used in the experiments. That said, the information she learned shocked her even more — especially when she read about the conclusion of some of those experiments:
The primate-replication achieved with the teeth of [Potamodracon] boeotus is well documented. Furthermore, it has been shown that how lifelike the resultant primate-duplicates appear is a function of the environment in which they are grown. If they are grown outdoors under natural sunlight, they are physically indistinguishable from the very primates whose biological samples are used to grow them. However, if grown under magical simulation of sunlight, how lifelike they are would depend on the quality of said magical simulation, and can range from barely distinguishable from the source primates to a semblance of living skeletons.
The mention of moving skeletons sparked a memory Rosemary had from her second week of school, when partying rock gremlins had forced her and a few of her friends to go off-course and pass through a place in the school where they were never supposed to go — the basement of Montrose Tower. There, they had encountered moving human skeletons armed with swords, who tried to kill them.
Now, Rosemary wondered if these skeletons had been grown in a similar manner. Then, she remembered that the day after her arrival at Misty Peaks, the day before classes started, Tom had showed her an article in the Sorcery Times about a dragon that had been found dead — and, if she recalled correctly, without its teeth.
After a moment’s thought, she decided to go and ask Tom if he remembered anything about this. She closed the volume of Encyclopedia Avalonica and put it back in its place in the shelf before heading out of the library. She went back to Hemlock Tower — but instead of heading up to the ninth floor where she lived, she instead headed to her old room, Hemlock 103.
She knocked on the door. “Coming,” she heard Ricky say. Moments later, the door opened and she saw Ricky face to face.
“You don’t live here anymore, Rosemary, remember?” said Ricky.
“I know,” said Rosemary, “but I need to talk to Tom. Is he in?”
“No,” said Ricky. “He’s in the workshop.”
“Workshop?” asked Rosemary.
“Yeah,” said Ricky, “near Lumière Tower. He goes there a lot on the weekends.”
“Thanks,” said Rosemary after a brief pause, and then turned and left.
* * *
The Northern Enclosure was the largest courtyard in all of Misty Peaks — possibly larger than any other two courtyards put together. Rosemary rarely went there except when she went to her check-ins at the infirmary and felt like taking a route that went outdoors as much as possible. Even then, she never went near the workshop. It was close to Lumière Tower, just as Ricky described, and connected to it by a small enclosed walkway.
Rosemary, of course, didn’t need Ricky to tell her where the workshop was. She already knew. Still, she felt somewhat intimidated approaching it. It was definitely well outside her comfort zone. Nonetheless, she went through the courtyard up to the front door. After a moment of hesitation, she pushed it open and went inside.
She stood for a moment watching various students, most of them guys, working on wood and other materials with all kinds of power tools, some of which could be found in the mundane world as well as the magical one, others of which were clearly magical.
None of these students were wearing their robes. Neither was she, as it was the weekend — but they also weren’t wearing jewel-decked jeans and a winter coat like she was. They were all wearing safety goggles, and most of them seemed to be wearing dirty jeans and dirty T-shirts — dirty from the shavings that flew through the air. Those shavings would have hit Rosemary if they weren’t stopped as though by an invisible wall a few feet away from her.
Between the shavings and the sweat, Rosemary was sure that these clothes would be showing signs of age if it weren’t for the fact that they probably got their regular cleaning in cauldrons with magical laundry spells rather than in mundie washing machines.
After a few minutes, a fourth-year student in a Whitesnake T-shirt came toward Rosemary. He passed through the wall that blocked the shavings that flew through the air, but apparently didn’t block the ones that had already stuck to him and his clothes. As soon as he had cleared that barrier, he lifted up his safety goggles. It was Andrew Collins, Lilith’s brother.
“You’re Lilith’s friend, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I am,” said Rosemary. “Is Tom Reynolds here?”
“One moment, I’ll get him,” said Andrew, as he slid his goggles back into place and went back through the barrier into the workshop.
“Stay there,” he said as Rosemary tried to follow him. “Nobody goes beyond that line unless they’re properly suited up.” He pointed to a line of blue tape on the floor that ran right below the invisible barrier.
It was a few minutes later that Tom came through the same barrier and lifted his goggles.
“Hey there, Rosemary,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering,” said Rosemary, “if you remember the article you showed me at the start of the school year.”
Tom looked at her, not saying anything.
“The one about the dragon?” prodded Rosemary. “The one that was found dead somewhere — without its teeth?”