Birthright-The Technomage Archive Read Online Free PDF Page A

initiative unnerved him a little, but he didn’t know why.
    Thankfully, Ceril was able to find the showers quickly. Every student at Ennd’s had to be immaculate for Presentation. Hair, teeth, breath, nails, clothes—everything about them had to be perfect. Or at least that’s the way it was during Phase I. Ceril assumed nothing had changed for Phase II.

    ***

    He had assumed wrong. Everything had changed.
    Stepping into the Phase II Library sent Ceril reeling. He followed the crowd of other returning students through the doorway to Presentation and felt a soft wafting of air as he crossed the threshold, which made his skin tingle and his ears pop. His eyes even began to water from the harsh light beaming from the center of the room.
    Ceril found himself standing on a narrow metal platform overlooking a gigantic, upright cylinder of a room. The cylinder continued up and down as far as Ceril could see—miles above and below ground. The center of the room was a pulsing beam of light that shifted color almost imperceptibly. One moment it was green, then while Ceril watched, it became orange and blue and yellow without him ever actually seeing it shift.
    The metal platform Ceril was standing on connected to a spiral ramp, which followed the outside walls of the cylinder like the threading on a screw. Bookshelves lined the walls too, and paralleled the ramp up and down. As the students filed into the Library, some of Ceril’s classmates paused for a second to acknowledge that they were in a new place, then kept on moving either up or down, taking a spot in line and waiting for Presentation to start.
    Ceril, though, couldn’t just write this off. This wasn’t just some new place, some new Library. There was something completely different about this room from anything he had experienced during Phase I—maybe his entire life. He just couldn’t quite place what it was.
    Stepping out of line so he didn’t cause a fifteen-student pile-up at the doorway, Ceril leaned over the guardrail in front of him to see if he could spot the top or the bottom of the room.
    Not even close.
    Now, the Library at Ennd’s Academy—for all phases, I through III—was part of the central spire, a tower easily ten times as large as the one his and Swarley’s dormitory was in. But even it wasn’t large enough to hold this.
    Which meant there was only one explanation for how this room could even exist: Instancing.
    There had always been talk among the students at Ennd’s that most of the school was Instanced; that different wings and sections of the campus were actually in the same space, overlapping and right on top of one another. They just couldn’t see, feel, touch, sense, or interact with anything not in their own Instance.
    It sounded crazy, but it was a story that had to do with the technomages, so Ceril had to hope there was at least a little truth in it. Now, seeing the vastness and physical impossibility of the room he found himself in, crazy didn’t seem so…well, crazy.
    Ceril knew that two entirely separate buildings like the Phase I and II Libraries could not very well be in the same place at the same time any more than Swarley could put his feet right where Ceril’s were without pushing him out of the way. It was impossible.
    Except for how Ceril was standing in a monstrous well of proof that it wasn’t. His heart began to beat faster as he accepted what was going on. For the first time, he was undoubtedly in contact with a technomage artifact. If it had not been Presentation, he would have squealed in delight.
    He couldn’t wait to tell Gramps that his stories were actually true. There were technomages! There were Charons!
    That thought led to another, and eventually Ceril forgot entirely that he was in the Library for Presentation. His mind raced from the sword he had found in the garden, to the video Swarley had shown him the night before, to the implication this Library held about all the wonderful artifacts and