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Expanded so did the so-called society itself. Every 10 years, a new class of potential initiates was chosen to spend one year in training, learning the functions of the archives and what would eventually become a lifelong craft. For one year, each individual selected for the society lived, ate, slept and breathed the archives and their contents. At the end of that year, five of these six potential candidates were inducted. They would rigorously pursue an independent course of study for an additional year at the library before being presented with the opportunity to stay and continue their work as researchers or more likely to accept a new offer of employment.

Alexandrians typically went on to be political leaders, patrons ceos and laureates what awaited an alexandrian after initiation was wealth, power, prestige and knowledge beyond their wildest dreams, and thus to be chosen to sit for initiation was the first in a lifetime of endless possibility. This was what dalton ellery relayed to the most recent class of candidates, none of whom had been informed, why they were there or what they would be competing for likely. They did not yet grasp that by virtue of standing in that room, dalton ellery was himself a uniquely skilled median, the likes of which they would not encounter again for generations. He would chosen this path over the many others he might have taken. He like them, had once discarded the person he might have been and the life he might have lived, which would have been ordinary by comparison most likely he would have had a profession of some sort, perhaps even a lucrative one, folding into the mortal economy in some Useful way, but witnessing nothing like what he’d seen by virtue of his acceptance of the society’s offer alone, he might have done exceptional magic, but would have fallen shy of the extraordinary.

Inevitably, he would have succumbed to mundanity to struggle to board him as all humans eventually did, but now, because of this, he wouldn’t the pittances of a small existence would count among the many things he would never again risk since he took his seat in this room. 10 years prior dalton looked out at their faces and imagined again the life he might have lived the lives they all might have lived. Had they never been offered such riches eternal glory, unparalleled wisdom. Here they would unlock the secrets. The world had kept from itself for centuries for millennia, things that no ordinary eyes would ever see and that no lesser minds could possibly understand here at the library their lives would change here.

Their former selves would be destroyed, like the library itself, only to be built back up again and hidden in the shadows, never to be seen, except by the caretakers, by the alexandrians and by the ghosts of lives, uncrossed and paths. Untaken greatness isn’t easy, dalton didn’t say, nor did he add that greatness was never offered to anyone who couldn’t stand to bear it. He merely told them of the library of their paths to initiation and of what stood within reach. If they only had the courage to reach out and grasp it, they were entranced as well. They should be dalton was very good at breathing life into things.

Ideas objects. It was a subtle skill, so subtle it did not appear to be magic at all which made him an exceptional academic. In fact, it made him the perfect face for the new class of alexandrians. He knew even before he started talking that they would all accept the offer. It was a formality.

Really, nobody turned down the alexandrian society. Even those pretending disinterest would be unable to resist. They would fight. He knew tooth and nail to survive the next year of their lives and if they were as steadfast and talented as the society presumed them to be, most of them would most of them. The moral of the story is this: beware, the man who faces you unarmed.

If in his eyes you are not the target, then you can be sure you are the weapon one weapons.

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