Page 103 of The Last Kelpie

I loved the Archive after midnight. I sat alone at the long oak table, surrounded by manuscripts Ethan and Áedán had recovered from beneath Skara Brae. The lamp beside me cast a small circle of golden light that barely reached the edges of the stacked books and scrolls.

I'd finished looking through the modern books. Now it was time to move on to the older texts. They'd obviously been written by people other than the Editor, and yet they all bore his mark. Or rather, the mark the Editor had taken from them. I needed to know why the Editor had chosen it, if the symbol was truly magical when combined with the words the Editor ended every revised story with, and who had written the older books.

I reached for the oldest-looking document. Not a book. A scroll, the parchment as perfect as the day it had been made, tied with a cord. The material felt wrong under my fingers—too smooth, too preserved. Something had kept this intact far longer than natural means allowed. The older authors had magic. Was it the same magic the Editor used?

I unrolled the scroll carefully. I'd expected to find Latin, but the script was Greek, and that greatly surprised me. Although Greek writing could be found in Scotland, it was virtually nonexistent during antiquity. Luckily, I knew Greek, but I had to read slowly, translating as I went, my finger hovering beneath each line.

The first words had me frowning. Roughly translated, they meant, “We are the Adaptors.” I read further:

Adapting is the only way forward. We swear to use the magic bestowed upon us by the great Goddess Mnemosyne to help those whom our imagination has birthed.

I sat back and stared at the words until they blurred. This wasn't like the other books. This wasn't folklore or legend or the kind of historical record we usually found. This first scroll was a declaration of purpose from a group that had existed—I checked the date at the top—over a thousand years before I was born.

My hands were shaking, but I kept translating:

The world changes. Humans change. The stories we tell must change with us, or the myths we have created will crumble beneath the weight of time. We have seen it happen. We have watched myths dissolve with the memories of the people. If their stories aren't told, they will be forgotten. If their stories don't change, they won't be told.

The scroll described their methods in careful detail. In it were techniques for identifying myths in danger of dying and rewriting their stories. They focused on preserving the essence of the myth while allowing them to remain relevant to the humans who needed to believe in them. Then they spread the new stories through mind and paper with a spell. Specifically, they used a sigil and incantation given to them by the Goddess Mnemosyne, the Greek Goddess of Memory. They monitored myths, even those they had already adapted, and if needed, they'd adapt the myths again. That was the responsibility they passed to the next generation of Adaptors. Over and over again.

I thought of Ethan. This was exactly what he had proposed. It shamed me that I, who was a myth who founded the Velasca to save others like me, had not seen what was so obvious to a human. I should have remembered what Velas had done. But even without remembering his procedures, I should have noticed that mine weren't working. I had passed down my flawed design to the humans who worked with me. It had taken a fresh perspective to see what we had missed. Ethan had known what we needed to do without ever reading that scroll.

I kept reading, my chest tight. The Adaptors' symbol, the sigil granted to them by Mnemosyne, was called the Broken Spiral. The same spiral found on their books and the Editor's work. For them, it represented a story that continues but transforms. A narrative that breaks from its original path to find a new one. It could represent the same for the Editor. Except where the Adaptors transformed myths to help them survive, the Editor changed them so they'd die.

And the sigil had to be activated with an incantation: The truth yields to the tale most often told. Yes, it was an English translation of the original Greek, but it worked the same, awakening the Goddess's sigil to change what was already written. That was clear from the multiple languages used to write the books in the Adaptors' collection.

I pushed back from the table and stood. Mind churning, I walked to a window and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. Outside, Velas's oak swayed, and I wished desperately that he was here. He would know what to do with this knowledge.

But Velas had been gone for over five hundred years. I'd buried him under that oak and spent every day since trying to honor him through our work. And now I'd discovered that someone else had believed the same thing. Someone had built an entire organization around evolving myths to save them. Not just anyone, but a goddess. Mnemosyne had gathered her people and charged them with this task long before Velas was even born, and the Adaptors had performed it better than us. I supposed it helped to have a goddess aiding you.

I returned to the table. There were more scrolls, more books to read. I opened them one by one, tracking the Adaptors' work through the centuries. They were meticulous, and their efforts never failed. Every myth had its own chapters, with adaptations written beneath the original story. Every new adaptation bore a date and a sentence about its successful implementation. And they all ended with the incantation, written in the that time's language. Truth yields to the tale most often told—the same words the Editor wrote at the end of his adaptations.

But these early adaptations were beautiful. Compassionate. Exactly what myths needed. And they continued for centuries. I found records that overlapped with the earliest years of the Velasca. There were even mentions of “the new preservation society” that approached myths differently but shared their ideals. The Adaptors had known about us. They had watched us and apparently approved.

Then, in the eighteenth century, the records stopped. Not gradually. Not with a slow decline or a note about disbanding. They just ended. One year there were detailed accounts of helping a Scottish brownie adapt to life in a changing household. The next year, 1742, there was nothing.

The Adaptors had vanished.

I searched through the remaining manuscripts, looking for any explanation. There was none. Then I returned to the modern books, those written by the Editor. I read for hours, going back and forth between the Editor's work and the older books. I didn't think the Editor was an Adaptor. It seemed more likely that the Editor happened across the scriptorium beneath Skara Brae, found this very scroll, and they'd realized something the Adaptors never had. If myths could be shaped, then whoever shaped them could influence the humans who believed in them.

In other words, whoever wrote the story controlled the world.

Change the story, change the belief. Change the belief, change the world. The Adaptors had used their knowledge to help myths survive, and their work built a world of hope and imagination. The Editor was using their knowledge to destroy myths. To destroy imagination? To make the world more vulnerable? I wasn't sure. But there had to be a goal. No one does something like this for kicks.

I sat back in my chair and stared out the window. Velas's oak had gone still, as if it were holding its breath. We'd thought we were fighting someone who'd discovered a new way to corrupt myths. Someone innovative and dangerous, but ultimately limited in scope.

We'd been so very wrong.

The Editor hadn't invented this magic. They'd stolen it. Corrupted it. Taken something divine, beautiful, and beneficial and then twisted it into a weapon. And the Adaptors' knowledge was older than me. Older than the Velasca. Older than any living myth I knew. Which meant the Editor was armed with magic I didn't fully understand. Magic from a goddess. Magic that had been refined over thousands of years. Magic powerful enough to systematically reshape belief itself.

I thought of Áedán. I thought of how close we'd come to losing him and how the Editor had nearly succeeded in transforming Áedán into a monster. I thought of all the other myths the Editor had corrupted. All the ones we hadn't saved. They had faded because their stories had been poisoned beyond recognition. And I hadn't noticed that it was all by design.

But dwelling on that wouldn't help. So, I thought about the future and the work ahead of us. We'd learned a better way to save myths. Ethan had shown us that. He'd figured out on his own what the Adaptors had learned from a goddess—that preservation wasn't about freezing myths in time, but about helping them grow to live in a changing world.

But it would be harder now than ever before. Because now our enemy wasn't just time and the fragility of human memory. It was someone armed with magic far older than me. Someone who understood the power of stories and was using them toward an unknown goal.

I closed the books carefully, turned off the lamp, and stood up. The Archive fell into darkness, but that only gave the moonlight a chance to shine. It came through the window and caught something within its light. I looked back at one of the Editor's books. The Broken Spiral shone silver on its cover.

I looked at it for a long moment. Then I walked out of the Archive, leaving the books behind but carrying their weight with me. We had so much work to do. And for the first time in five hundred years, I wasn't sure if we were prepared for what was to come.

Outside, I stared up at the moon. “Mnemosyne, I am not one of your people, but I work toward the same goal. If you are listening, if you haven't faded along with so many myths, please help us.”