𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕘𝕖𝕥 {𝕍𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕟 𝕩 ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣}

-Chapter Fourteen- She Doesn't Sleep

/she doesn't sleep/ she's waging a war on the weak/ she's opened the door to your dreams and turned them into nightmares/ a life she's gonna keep/

-she doesn't sleep, anthony amorim

The library was on the way out of the palace, so Y/n briefly stepped inside. It was empty due to the chaos, and no one was there to see Y/n as she made a beeline for the section on alchemy.

She scanned the titles of the books, but there was nothing there she didn't already know, or that related to their problem at all.

Y/n sighed. Is this really necessary... ugh, whatever, fine. She reluctantly walked over to the section on magical studies with a groan.

Her aversion wasn't to magic in general, just to... a certain item. And, considering the kingdom that Y/n lived in, this section really only contained one topic.

The Sundrop.

The reason that everyone will always love Rapunzel more than you.

She ran her fingers along the spines of the books, and her fingers had a thin coat of dust when she pulled them away.

One book caught Y/n's eye- Studies of the Sundrop. Despite having exactly the same subject as nearly every book in this section, this one... stood out somehow. For no particular reason, she pulled the book out and brushed the dust off of its cover with one gloved hand before pulling it open.

Y/n nearly dropped the book. There was a massive, gaping hole carved into the pages. Y/n's first thought was, Who would do such a thing to a book?

Her second thought was to question what exactly was inside.

Inside the book lay a small... graphtyc? Y/n had never seen one, but she knew of them from her books. It had rings of ornately carved bronze on the sides, with wooden plating on the middle and a stunning crystal on one end, the other end containing a small hole.

Just as Y/n was about to set the book back and investigate further, a matching bronze key tumbled from another hole in the pages, and Y/n managed to catch it in her hands.

She wanted to investigate it now, but loud crashes and shouts from the dining hall dissuaded her. She assured herself that she could investigate it when she got back to Varian's house- for now, she just needed to get out.

As she placed both the graphtyc and its key inside the hole in the book, tucking it under her arm, Y/n wondered what the significance of this book was- why it had been chosen, and why she had decided to pick it up.

While Y/n and Varian both shared an aversion to this type of magic, Y/n was still intrigued by the concept- specifically how it intertwined with science. As Xavier had said by the fire, before things had spiraled downhill- all legends are born of truth. For every feat of magic in a legend, there was typically just a scientific explanation which storytellers had deemed too "boring". Y/n was reminded of the woman from the Expo, the one who had unfairly taken the first prize- making magnets fly and calling it magic.

Perhaps the graphtyc had some explanation as to why it was placed where it was, but that really wasn't Y/n's primary focus. She was more concerned with the effects of the compound she had seen- Y/n had taken to calling it a "mood potion", for lack of a better term, and what it could do. The possibilities swirled around in her head as Y/n left the palace, beginning her long journey back.

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

As she walked back to Old Corona, Y/n contemplated why she was so intrigued by the potion. It probably wouldn't help at all with the amber, so why was she so drawn to it?