She turned yet another page of the book as she leaned her right elbow on the oakwood table and yawned, not bothering to cover it. Avyanna's eyes wandered lazily over the page, the words barely registering in her mind as she curled the edge of the paper between her index and thumb. The yellow spots of age over the print seemed to dance in her vision. Behind her, through the window, the sky was getting drained of its vitality as night began to fall around the high walls of the centre. The dimly lit, stone-walled library whose rhythmic wind flow pattern was lulling her eyes shut wasn't much help to Ava's spontaneous study session.

Avyanna let her bevvied gaze slide over to the two boys next to her, eyes shut and drooling over sixteenth-century semantic hunting techniques. She let a low chuckle that echoed hollowly through the dome structure of the archive. There were piles of books and parchments scattered around them, covering a vast spectrum of topics for Clarence hadn't been extremely specific about his 'hint'. That got Ava wondering whether they had just spent twelve hours over a wild goose chase, but brushing that thought away, she shut her own book, an anatomy of poisoned berries, and crossed over the table to wake up her very dedicatedly sleeping companions.

"Kingsley?" She whispered, lightly nudging the ash haired boy. He stirred a bit in his sleep but didn't wake up. From the angle of his head now exposed, Ava could see the dark ringlets under his eyes. He wasn't one to stay up too late but lately, he did look slightly less energetic than usual so she let them be.

Ace would definitely not mind, she thought to herself then instantly felt guilty for it. She cleared up the space as much as she could without making too much of a rustle. While she was stacking the books back into random shelves, she saw a peculiar looking page sticking out of a dusty book with a highly weathered spine, it's leather worn rough at multiple spots. Ava tried to push it back in without damaging the fragile binding any further when she caught a peculiar looking symbol on the corner. Pulling out the thick book, she blew at its cover so the dust concentrated on it would scatter just enough for the title to legible.

The Guild of the Wielders. 

Avyanna furrowed her brows at the name and after balancing the book carefully in her arms, flipped open to the page that was half torn out from the spine. It was in old Auxuri, the language of the original inhabitants of Earth, or as there endangered successors were called now, the Mages. Ava had learnt some Auxuri from her father but not enough to decipher cryptic texts from ancient references. However, the symbol rang a bell in her mind, heck it tolled gongs. But for the life of her, Avyanna couldn't remember where she had seen it or why it looked familiar. But the mask with a jewel hilted sword drawn through it remained on the precipice of her mind yet hopelessly out of reach of her memory.

 Avyanna's head was throbbing from the thinking and overthinking so she decided to give it a rest. Heading back to her room, she abandoned her boots in a dark corner of the archive, wanting to let her skin touch the cool stone. 

Her eyes wandered to a glass paned window, stretched out in landscape to her left. The shadows of the night crept from behind the monoliths and dark, vaulting pines and engulfed the Westbrook outskirts in a spasmodic silence, only to to be ruptured by the uneven chirps of the cricket and the low, haunting whistle of wind through crevices. The entire area was clawed by a sudden bout of stillness and that made Ava feel uneasy inside. 

It had been forty three suns since she left Spiritfalls and yet had never felt as alone as she did that night. Maybe it was the uncanny silence, as though the leaves were afraid to rustle, lest it should awaken some demon hiding outside, or perhaps the one inside. But at that moment, she wanted to will herself away back to her bland life and eat stolen bread from Bexley's bakery with the brunet himself under their tree. But Avyanna wasn't a quitter. No, she wouldn't leave so easy, not without going down with a bang.

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He kicked yet another pebble with the tip of his foot, and watched it bound off the bar wall. He gazed at the valley, and the cliff by which Ava and he had fallen asleep. The air around it was chilly, it seemed the sky itself would crack. The shrubbery lining the valley was heavily laden with dew from the off season fog. It reminded Bexley of the time he first saw the mist, the point in his life when things started going south. Avyanna had been gone over a month, he didn't know how long exactly because keeping count had begun to hurt so he abandoned the tally.

The hour hand of the clock on the exposed brick of the wall had long passed twelve and Bexley was running out of patience. The demeanor of the red head, Ethel, had annoyed him from the very start: overly excited, a bit too cheerful and a tad creepy.  Ava would have called her a nut case, and he smiled at that thought. Just as he made up his mind to leave, when he heard the faint tintinnabulation of the bell on the three-fourth doors of the bar. Aillard's head swivelled in that direction as he saw a pair of red-heads and a dark haired boy enter.

Ethel gave Bexley a huge smile which he responded to with a curt nod, however either she was terrible at picking up hints or was purposefully ignoring his shrewd behaviour, that didn't affect her in the least. The other two boys simply took a seat on her right, silently.

"I was beginning to think you wouldn't show-" Bexley began irritably, but thought the better of it and introduced themselves.

"I'm Beckett, that's 'Arry," He gestured to the red head behind him and continued in his thick  accent. "Look mate, Cennet pretends to be all angelic and saint-like but truth is, it's got  a shitload of nasty dealings under the table. Everybody knows that but we got no proof, nor is it gonna be easy to dig up dirt on the crown when they've sown a goddamn garden. The Masquerade is the one front they've screwed up in and that's the weak spot. We wanna find out about it as bad as you do, but we'll need all the help we can get."

Bexley was still slightly irritated at how the trio failed to apologise for their unpunctuality but was eager to know what they were on to. He looked at Beckett, who looked right back at him, radiating the sense of calm and pride one would expect from a lion baiting prey.When Bexley looked at Harry, the boy looked down into the depths of his drink that no one had seen him ordering, apparently nervous about the reliability of his own plan.

" What's your plan?" Bexley asked, the question clearly directed to the only one avoiding eye contact. Harry looked up from his glass, uncomfortable at being confronted. Nevertheless, he spoke. "They have an archive room back at the Council. All the important documents and files the Council receive from the centers of control. I've seen it during the Selection Ceremony, it's locked from the outside but if you look at it from down below, the window is always slightly ajar."

Bexley looked incredulously at Harry, his mouth slightly open as he tried to process what he was hearing. He turned ninety degrees in his seat and rested his  elbow on the table. "Are you suggesting we break into the record room, archive, whatever you want to call it, of the Council?" 

Harry nodded slowly. Before Bexley could interject to point out the immorality of it all, Beckett interrupted, "We aren't forcing you to come with us. But if you back out of this, you back out of our whole researching their background, you don't get to come back later. It's all about 'ow bad you wanna know." 

Bexley rolled the idea a bit in his head. Irvine. Jail. Irvine. Jail. But knowing there was only one thing worth risking it all for, he lifted his head slowly to look them in the eye, exhaled shakily then nodded.

"I'm in."

If Beckett was right, if Cennet was playing the Assassins like pawns on a much larger chess board, then they had to do something about it before it all came crashing down with a bang.

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