Many of these creatures live on the outskirts of the five regions, where conditions are harsher and human cities are few and far between. Witches and wizards who live far from The Halwood, Singing Mountains, and other primitive areas will rarely see any in their lifetime. This allows our society to form opinions that are categorically false.
Most of the creatures I speak of have human levels of intelligence and could live among us if not for their deformities.
I cringed. Deformities? Being something other than human or mage was not a deformity. I’d figured out why the tone rubbed me the wrong way. The author noted the ‘creatures’ had human levels of intelligence… but still called them creatures. Every bit of language indicated witches and wizards were greater than, while anyone else was less than.
From the first sentence, I’d assumed they were going to explain how most other races are just like us. That didn’t appear to be the case anymore.
I kept reading.
However, they live separate. Not supporting our society, while we simultaneously don’t support theirs. My belief is that there would be significant benefit to living together and supporting each other. Orcs can do manual labour more easily than our human counterparts. Shifters are better hunters than the hunting dogs we use.
The author went on, detailing jobs that the ‘inhuman creatures’ would be better at. I slammed the book shut instead of reading through. Comparing orcs to workhorses and shifters to dogs? Whoever wrote this book was supporting slavery of the other races and trying to sell the arrangement as collaboration.
Somehow, I doubted they’d cared to ask the orc society whether they wanted to work for mages doing manual labour.
Placing the book on the side table, I glanced down at the author. Dex Moran. I’d never heard the name before, but I wouldn’t forget it now.
As I continued my search for unbiased, actually useful books, I came across another book by the same author. Then another. By the time I had a fourth book in my arms, I was too curious to avoid taking a peek. They were prolific, I would give them that.Improving Spell Efficacy by Using Uncommon Ingredients. Integrating Half-Breeds Into Society. A Study in Orc Intelligence.
Considering I’d hardly gotten through a quarter of the shelves in the library, I had to assume more books by this author existed. Was Uncle Felix a believer of this absolute bullshit? Maybe these beliefs were why my parents had always referred to him as a fanatic.
I sat down on the couch and cracked open the book on spell efficacy, only to slam it shut again with a gasp. Unfortunately, the image of a bloodied and cracked orc fang was emblazoned into my brain. I no longer wanted to look at anything else in this book, because I had to imagine there were much crueller ‘uncommon ingredients’, as if stealing a fang from an orc wasn’t cruel enough.
From what I knew, in their society fangs were a sign of status. The bigger the teeth, the stronger the orc. An orc without fangs? Where did that put them? Likely in the same place I was, with my low amounts of magic in the mage world. At the bottom of the ladder, denied opportunities and relegated to busywork. Not that I’d hated my busywork until they’d taken that from me as well.
Much more tentatively, I opened the book on half-breeds. No images. Yet, at least.
“This person is a raging cunt,” I muttered under my breath as I scanned the words on the first page.
They believed half-breeds should be allowed in our society — those rare people who were half mage and half demon, or half shifter, or any other mix. After all, they were witches and wizards in their own way, Moran claimed. However, they went on to say half-breeds would be beneficial for us because they provided valuable spell ingredients and physical traits mages didn’t possess.
I shuddered, the fang in the other book flashing through my mind.
This person treated the other races like they were projects to take apart and use for other things. Creatures, as they called them, werepeopledespite not being entirely humanoid in their appearance. I was regretting now how often I’d referred to the men in the house as creatures or beasts, if only in my head.
While they might have appearances capable of terrifying me at first glance, they were people. With hearts and souls and dreams like the rest of us. I’d do better if I remembered that and didn’t let my internalized biases influence my views.
Flipping the book in my hands, I glanced through the back index. It referenced plenty of the author’s other books, as well as a few other people I now knew to stay away from. Title, author, and MSBO # stared up at me from the neat cream pages.
Wait.
MSBO #.
Oh Ixaris, I’d been a goddamn idiot.
The Magical Standard Book Ordering Number was a string of numbers nine long. The first eight were the book’s unique identifier, with the ninth being the edition. Usually, the edition was a number from one through nine. Occasionally — so infrequently I’d been stupid enough to disregard the possibility — the edition number was two digits. That made the MSBO # a total of ten digits long, the same length as the number I had.
Considering I’d worked in a library for five years, it shouldn’t have taken me nearly two weeks to figure that out. Even if I’d never in my life encountered a book with 37 fucking editions.
Uncle Felix had placed the dashes purely to mess with me, making it look like a directory number when it was far from it.
Fucking red herring.
Chapter 10
Afterdaysofsearchingthe library, I still felt like an idiot.
An MSBO #. Uncle Felix knew I worked at a library. Waylon had warned me to consider all options. And yet, I’d still been caught in the web of the red herring. I’d been so focused on the number being a directory number that I hadn’t remembered the nuances of the standard book ordering system. The entire focus of my former job was categorizing nine or ten digit numbers.
