Chapter 8: Secrets in the Stacks

Chapter 8: Secrets in the Stacks

The hunt had changed. It was no longer about chasing psychic echoes through rain-slicked streets or bracing against the wind on a desolate cliff. The new battlefield was quiet, climate-controlled, and smelled of aging paper and floor polish. Kael had led me to the Dunedin Public Library.

Walking through the bright, airy atrium, surrounded by students hunched over laptops and children giggling in the reading corner, felt surreal. The ordinary, mundane world I had once exclusively inhabited was now a thin veneer over a reality of shadows and monsters. Every person I passed was a potential victim, their vibrant emotional auras—bright sparks of curiosity, dull grey blankets of boredom, sharp yellow spikes of stress—a buffet I was now acutely aware of. I kept my new shield clamped down tight, a mirrored sphere around my mind, though the effort still gave me a low-grade headache.

Kael moved through the building with a quiet familiarity, his imposing presence drawing a few nervous glances. He ignored them, leading me past the main circulation desk and towards the rear of the building, to a section marked ‘Archival Storage – Staff Only’. He didn’t pause. He simply pushed the door open as if he owned the place. Perhaps, in a way, he did.

The corridor beyond was sterile and fluorescent-lit. He stopped at an unmarked metal door at the very end of the hall. There was no keyhole, no handle, only a small, dark brass plate set at eye level. Kael placed his palm flat against it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the plate glowed with a faint, white light—the same clean energy I’d seen in his amulet—and with a deep, grinding thud that vibrated through the floor, the door slid silently into the wall.

The air that greeted us was a world away from the public library. It was cool and dry, heavy with the scent of ancient leather, brittle paper, and that sharp, clean tang of ozone I now associated with Warden magic. This was no simple archive. This was a vault.

The room was circular, far larger than the exterior dimensions would suggest. Bookshelves curved from floor to ceiling, crammed not just with books, but with leather-bound ledgers, scrolls tied with faded ribbons, and countless rows of grey, metal filing boxes, each marked with a date and location in a severe, spidery script. A single, heavy oak table sat in the center of the room under a low-hanging lamp that cast a warm pool of light, leaving the peripheries in shadow.

“Welcome to the Stacks,” Kael said, his voice low in the profound silence. “The collective memory of the Dunedin Wardens for the last four hundred years.”

I stared, overwhelmed. This was the proof of his words in the safehouse. Centuries of hunting. Centuries of fighting things like the Marrow Leech. The weight of that history was a palpable presence in the room.

“Does the library know this is here?” I whispered, running a hand over the spine of a massive, leather-bound tome.

“The library is the Stacks’ best camouflage,” he replied, moving towards a specific section of shelves. “Our agreement with the city is older than the city charter itself.”

He began pulling down ledgers and file boxes, his movements economical and certain. “The Leech, or variants of it, has appeared in Otago before. It’s rare. Once a generation, sometimes longer. I’ve read the reports, but I’ve always been looking for tactical weaknesses. Never for a grand pattern.”

He placed a heavy stack of material on the oak table. “You look for patterns. Find one.”

For hours, we worked under the solitary lamp. The unwilling alliance, forged in a cellar and tested on a clifftop, found a new rhythm here. Kael was the historian, pulling reports based on his knowledge of Warden lore, his grim face illuminated by the lamplight. He’d unroll a brittle scroll or open a ledger, summarizing the contents in his clipped, concise manner.

“Dunedin, 1881. Three workmen at the new university clocktower found ‘hollowed’. Report filed by Warden MacLeod. Sighting corresponds with a public festival celebrating the tower’s completion.”

“Port Chalmers, 1924. A sailor returning from voyage. Found in his boarding house. Warden Gray notes a local surge in ‘spiritualist fervor’ and séances.”

“Waitomo, North Island, 1965. A tourist group. Mass hysteria. Five hollowed. This one’s an outlier; the location is wrong.”

I was the analyst. I took the information, my laptop open beside the ancient texts, a jarring island of modernity. I created a new kind of map, a timeline, cross-referencing the dates and locations he gave me. The old pattern, the one I’d discovered in my office, held true. Each appearance coincided with a spike of intense, collective emotion. It was confirmation, but it wasn't a solution. It told us how it hunted, not when it would reach the peak of its power.

My fingers drummed on the table. “It’s not enough. This is all reactive. We need to get ahead of it. There’s a variable we’re missing.”

My gaze fell on the outlier report. “Waitomo, 1965. Why there? What was the emotional catalyst?” I scanned Kael’s summary. “It doesn’t say. Just… ‘tourist group’.”

I pulled up a web browser, the glowing screen a stark contrast to the yellowed page. I typed in the date and location. My search results were filled with geological data, but then I saw it. A minor astronomical journal entry.

“Of course,” I breathed. “The Waitomo caves are famous for their glow-worms. On that specific night in 1965, there was a total lunar eclipse. People weren’t just there for the caves; they were there for the eclipse. A nexus of wonder, awe, darkness…”

Kael looked up from his scroll, his eyes sharp. “An eclipse.”

A new path of inquiry exploded in my mind. It wasn’t just human emotion. It was bigger. I wasn’t just a market researcher anymore; I was correlating centuries of monster attacks with the cold, hard data of celestial mechanics.

“Give me all the dates,” I demanded, a new urgency in my voice. “Every confirmed Leech appearance. Not just here, all of them.”

For the next hour, he read out dates, and I fed them into an astronomical database, my fingers flying across the keyboard. A pattern, faint at first, then undeniable, began to emerge. The major attacks, the ones involving multiple victims or an exceptionally powerful Leech, didn't just happen during an emotional spike. They happened when that spike coincided with a rare celestial event. A solar flare. A meteor shower. The passing of a comet. An eclipse.

These events acted as amplifiers, creating a perfect storm for the creature to gorge itself, to grow immensely in power.

“Kael,” I said, my voice tight. I swiveled the laptop towards him. The screen showed a dozen dates from his archives, and next to each one, a corresponding celestial alignment. It was undeniable. “We’ve been looking at this wrong. The emotional hotspots are just its feeding grounds. The celestial events are its power source. It’s what lets it… level up.”

He stared at the screen, his face grim. The pieces were locking into place, forming a picture far more terrifying than we’d imagined.

“Check the coming weeks,” he commanded, his voice strained.

My heart hammered against my ribs as I ran the search. I prayed the next alignment was months, even years, away.

But the database returned a result almost instantly, flashing on the screen in stark, bold letters.

Upcoming Celestial Anomaly: Umbra Lunaris (Shadow Moon). Projected Date: Two days.

“Shadow Moon?” I whispered.

“It’s a Warden term,” Kael said, his voice heavy as granite. “A rare alignment where the moon’s psychic and gravitational influence is magnified tenfold. It creates… ripples. Thins the veil. It’s the perfect catalyst for a creature like the Leech.”

Two days.

The quiet of the Stacks was suddenly suffocating. The air grew thick with the weight of our discovery. We had found the pattern. We had found our answer. And the answer was a death sentence.

In two days, the Marrow Leech would be at the apex of its power, amplified by forces we couldn’t possibly comprehend. We weren’t just hunting a monster anymore. We were staring down the barrel of a ticking clock, aimed directly at the heart of our city.