The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 463: Assignment

ERIS

The scent of the Mage Academy library was different from the sterile, imperial smell of Soren’s private study.

Here, it was a thick, intoxicating perfume of decaying parchment, dried linseed oil, and the sharp, metallic tang of magical residue.

It was a place where knowledge felt heavy, literally pressing down from the towering shelves that reached into a ceiling lost in gloom.

I moved through the stacks with Bjorn at my heels, his paws clicking softly on the stone floor. Led by the young man who called himself Ellyn.

He looked to be in his early twenties, possessing that particular, endearingly disheveled appearance of someone who spent more time with books than people.

His brown hair was a nest of chaotic curls, and his fingers were permanently stained with the ink of a thousand transcriptions. He wore the simple, indigo robes of a junior scribe, now slightly askew from his unceremonious descent from a nearby ladder.

"Dragon histories? The Primordials? Oh, bless the ink! No one asks for the Primordials anymore! They all want combat magic or defensive wards, but the source... the source is where the soul is!" Ellyn raved.

As we got to a more darker secluded corner where he gestured to a seat. He didn’t wait for me to respond. He spun on his heel and darted into a shadowy alcove, his voice drifting back to me in an excited mumble.

"Aenithra... yes, the Third Cycle accounts... and the Gilded Tome of Solmire... and perhaps the fragmented witness scrolls from the Ice-Crag Monasteries..."

He returned moments later, staggering under a stack of five massive tomes. He almost dropped them onto a nearby reading table, dusting the covers with a reverent, trembling hand. They were beautiful, ancient things... their bindings made of hardened drake-leather, embossed with gilt edges and intricate carvings of serpentine forms.

"Here," Ellyn panted, his eyes shining with nerd-like fervor. "The most complete collection in the northern hemisphere. Where do I even begin, Your Majesty? Should we start with the First Breath? Or the gifting of the Spark?"

He didn’t wait for me to choose. He flipped open the largest book, his fingers dancing over a beautiful illustration of two dragons circling a primitive world. "You see, Pyronox and Aenithra... they weren’t just creatures. They were the architects! Divine entities who looked at the cold, dead rock of our world and decided to give it a pulse. They gifted magic to the first humans not as a weapon, but as a conversation! But then the Great War happened... the clash of fire and ice... and then... they just disappeared."

He shook his head, his voice dropping into a tone of genuine lament. "Only a few people these days are interested in how magic came to be. Most only care about bringing it back... reclaiming lost power to win wars or secure borders. Which is so very ironic, don’t you think? How do you expect to revive something if you don’t understand its source?"

I nodded, watching the way he gestured animatedly, lost in his topic. "Exactly, Ellyn. You can’t fix a clock if you don’t know how the gears were forged."

"Yes! Exactly!" He beamed at me, clearly delighted to find a kindred spirit in the Empress.

"The older generations... the ones who lived during the actual shift... they saw the dragons. They left first-hand accounts, but they’re long dead. Their knowledge passed through stories, changing with every mouth that spoke them. Now, all we have are these drawings and stone carvings. Visual records passed down through generations. I’ve actually been trying... well, it’s a silly project, really..."

He trailed off, blushing a deep crimson.

"What project?" I asked, leaning forward.

"I’ve been trying to paint them," he whispered, looking at his ink-stained shoes. "To redraw them based on every description I can find. To see what the Primordials might have looked like in the early ages. I compare the descriptions from the southern fire-temples with the northern ice-scrolls and try to synthesize the truth." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"May I see them?"

Ellyn’s head snapped up. "Oh, they’re... they’re nothing! Just attempts! Not very good, really, just the scribblings of a bored scribe... "

"Ellyn," I interrupted gently but firmly, offering him an encouraging smile. "I’d like to see them anyway."

He stammered for a moment, then scurried off toward a back desk, his ears still glowing pink.

While he was gone, I turned back to the ancient tomes. I scanned the passages, my eyes flying over the familiar myths.

The dragons disappeared. No one knows how. They grew disappointed with humanity’s greed and retreated into the stars, or the earth, or the deep sea. It was the standard account. The official lie.

I looked at my own hands, feeling the hum of the dragon-fire beneath my skin. Solmire had lied.

They hadn’t watched Pyronox leave; they had hunted him down. They had trapped the god of fire in a cage of blood and iron for generations.

And if they had lied about the fire, was someone else lying about the ice? Did someone born of Nevareth know what had truly happened to Aenithra during that Great War?

I felt a strange shiver. As a character of this world, as someone who knew it was a story, I wondered about the ’Writer.’ Did the author of this reality have a backstory for these two gods? Was it written in some inaccessible Chapter, or was I currently standing in the middle of a plot twist I wasn’t prepared for?

Ellyn returned, carrying a large leather portfolio with the care one might afford a newborn child. He set it down hesitantly and opened it to reveal a series of detailed charcoal and ink drawings.

My breath caught. They were magnificent. He had an incredible eye for detail... the scales of Pyronox looked like individual tongues of flame, the wings spread wide in a terrifyingly majestic display of power.

Aenithra was equally massive, her scales depicted as crystalline shards, her body appearing as if it were frost made flesh. He had drawn the horns With curved, multiple points and ridges that looked like mountain peaks.

But it was the eyes that stopped my heart.