Hana let her body sink into the cushions of the armchair with a soft sigh, exhaustion visibly setting into her frame. She felt the slight crinkling of tear stains on her cheeks as she closed her eyes. She had teetered between so many different emotional states in the past few weeks, from hopeless optimism to desolation to what amounted to a fugue state, and then inexplicably all the way back to hopeless optimism.
But for a very brief moment when he spoke, everything seemed to still, and all the emotions she had been trying so hard to swallow with the blind faith that somehow things would work out—that they would have to work out—came flooding out of her. Hana turned over Karl's solemn speech in her mind repeatedly, like a scratchy record set on loop. Precious, he said. The thought made her smile, despite everything. It sweet and thoughtful and confusing and painful all at the same time. One moment he was shouting at her about not listening to him, the next he was gently reasoning with her to stay, and the very next he was shaking and asking her to leave. Maybe she really did say something wrong. Her mind drew up the unmistakable terror etched into his features, and she almost winced.
It was probably best that they separated for a while. Hopefully, the timeout would provide him some respite. All she really could do in the meantime was wait for him to come find her again and decide her fate. She felt a bit like a girl holding a flower with its petals in her lap, whispering to herself, "Will he? Will he not?" and if it weren't for the fact she felt too tired to move, she would've asked the house for a daisy.
==
A little while after, Hana woke in the chair with a dull ache extending from her forehead to the back of her skull. She drew in a sharp breath, reaching her hand up to clasp the nape of her neck. The blanket bunched at the bend of her torso as she sat up groggily. Besides the sobbing-induced headache, she actually felt a little better after the nap; the feeling of having a weight lifted from her chest hadn't gone away yet and her body appreciated the bit of rest she afforded it.
For moment, she debated simply burrowing back in bed until Karl came to find her, but decided that hibernating indefinitely again probably wouldn't do much good. If there wasn't anything she could do in the way of pestering him for an answer, then surely there was something else she could do. With a mild sigh, Hana stood and puttered to the nearest wall of the library. She fingered through a few spines for a while, but found that many were written in a script she either couldn't read or barely even recognized. Karl spoke about a billion different languages, and could conversationally vacillate between them with frightening speed. It made perfect sense that many of his books would be in any other language besides English.
"Hey, House?" Hana leaned back against the wall, knitting her brow. "Could you pretty please bring me books about, umm…" She paused to think, glancing at her bag. "Soul binding, black magic, and/or abys—abyssal artifacts? Anything really, as long as it's in English." She moved to sit on the sofa in front of the coffee table, where a few moments later, a number of books and papers floated upon to rest. She voiced a small "Thank you," before picking up the first text.
Hana scanned through the first few pages and quickly came to the realization that it wasn't so much of a book as it was a series of letters all clipped together. Many of them dated back to the 1840s, and accordingly, were written in a prose similar to that of Becker's journals. Ploughing through almost a whole seven of those had given her enough familiarity with 19th century archaic language to be able to read the letters with somewhat ease.
Each of them was signed off as "your faithful Ernest," and addressed to someone he called Rose, whom she presumed to be his lover, given his rather affectionate writing. The main issue she faced with the letters, besides the prose, was the complete lack of context that necessarily came with reading something of this nature. She was essentially dropped into their lives in media res without backstory, so she had to assume a lot of things about their lives through context.
Much of the content of the letters was what she imagined love letters of the 19th century to be like—sweet musings interspersed with mundane sorts of life updates. After the course of a year's worth of letters, she was able to piece together a working story. Ernest was journeying somewhere in the rainforests of South America as a collector of cursed artifacts, while Rose was working with Karl in some kind of relief effort for Native Americans driven off their lands by white settlers who employed some type of poisonous artifact. Her collaboration with Karl at the time was probably why he was still in possession of the letters, though Hana wondered why she left them behind afterwards.
In the later letters, Ernest would start to mention something about an angel feather he was in search of. Evidently, it's very easy to become the target of a curse if you regularly deal in cursed artifacts, and while many of them can very well be undone with the right expertise, Ernest feared that sooner or later, one might attach to his soul. His natural solution was to find an artifact that would protect his soul from such a curse if he had the misfortune of encountering one, namely the angel's feather. Apparently, it would purify his soul, giving it saintly qualities and subsequently allowing it to protect itself from damage or erosion, such as the kind a curse could cause. Eventually, he did end up finding one, and was able to follow through with binding it to his soul.
The very last letter ended with a promise to meet once again soon, and Hana wondered if they ever did. Despite his ostensibly flowery writing, she doubted Ernest's travels weren't heavily ladened with the many perils that come with his line of work. Still, she was sure that he made it back to her; he seemed a careful man, and unlike Becker, Ernest had something to lose.
Hana played with the edges of the papers for a few more moments before she leaned back into the chair, allowing the stack of letters to sit quietly in her lap. She didn't realize that there were artifacts that could actually protect your soul instead of destroy it, and she felt the knot in her chest twist a little bit more. At the same time, the angel feather gave Ernest something that Hana seemed to naturally possess, for reasons unknown to her to both her and Karl. He explained her soul's saintly nature as the product of being touched by divine energy, and whatever that meant, it was probably what allowed her to continue living like this, despite her soul being bound to something so dangerous and corrosive. Perhaps, in spite of everything, her situation wasn't all bad. If she hadn't been in possession of those yellow wisps of sainthood, her chances of making it through this were probably zero to none.
But, all of that begged the question… why did she have it in the first place? What did it even mean? Sainthood? Saintly qualities? Divine energy? Was she born with it, or did she attain it at some point in the course of her life? Hana's entire life up until that point had been wholly untouched by the realm of magic and artifacts, so it seemed strange that she could've somehow had a magical encounter before this. If it really was that rare like Karl said… then why, out of apparently millions of people, would she be marked with something so valuable?
"Ugh!!" Hana groaned loudly, throwing her head back into the cushions of the chair. "This is exhausting. Mystery after mystery—why can't this be easier?" She let out a frustrated sigh and tossed the letters to the far corner the of the table. There was no use worrying about this now. If it ever came up again, she'd ask Karl, but for now, it didn't matter. With a few more huffs and puffs, the girl pressed on with her original intent.
The letters, she discovered, were the only text of its kind among the others that the House had gathered for her. To her chagrin, the rest of the materials read like highly complex, specialized academic papers, likely meant for people who were much more knowledgeable in artifacts than her. Even though everything was written in English, it was filled with so much magical jargon and old English that couldn't understand even a shred of what was being said. One was a loose-leaf paper titled "Parametric Analysis of Optimal Human Usage of Black Magic," and another was an eighty page handbook on "Adverse Effects of Artifact-Binding on Morality and Morbidity." The closest thing to a handbook she knew of were Becker's journals, so she summoned those from the House to use as some kind of reference, but it helped little to none.
When she finally heard a knock on the door, she was struggling with "The Nature of Inferno," and had at that point moved to sit on the floor, surrounded by a mess of open books and papers strewn across the coffee table and rug. The sound of the knock roused her out of her arguably distraught state, and when she turned her head to look at the source of the sound, she was met with Karl's weary figure standing in the doorway.
