While it wasn't loathsome work, Faustite found the repetition rather boring. It was a needful task, he told himself, as he shifted the next stack of dusty old tomes onto the table that he had commandeered. It was a matter of keeping him occupied, keeping him away from the White Moon and their other adversaries that the Queen did not want needlessly spooked, and it let him look into their libraries for anything about the serpent in the sky that many of them were coming to dread.

The problem, however, was that he wasn't finding s**t. It was rather demotivating.

Still, he told himself to persist. Faustite sat with a dissatisfied sigh in the old, stiff wooden chair and began leafing through another incunabulum that wheezed dust for all its disuse. A better part of the table had been covered in sooty sneezes from that precise incident. He tried to tell himself that all of these books were collected here because they served a purpose, but he was starting to suspect that they were old inheritances from when their castle was under previous ownership. If not that, then perhaps some of the rank and file thought the library a fitting place to abandon their old books. He'd come across a few abandoned young adult novels that supported that theory, anyway.

It had taken him roughly a month to comb the majority of the library, leaving no book behind, regardless of how unrelated the title seemed. Still, none of them mentioned anything about the stormy serpent they saw or the cage of spikes that once trapped it. The closest he had gotten was the serpent in Paradise Lost (which he had, admittedly, read cover to cover over the span of a few days as 'research'). Still, there was nothing in that book to tie the serpent in the garden to the serpent in the sky, beyond the fact that they were both snake-shaped.

As weeks passed, Faustite struggled to maintain focus on what he was reading. This particular dusty folio was a book on mythologies, penned by someone centuries dead. Faustite found the backwards sentence structure reminded him uncannily of his old General, for which he struggled against reading its words in her voice. He had hoped that some part of it might reward him for stymying his fear, even with a single mention of some world-eating thing. Perhaps nothing so grand as an exhaustive bestiary, but —

Even as he paged through the last of it, there was nothing. Just some scattered information on Jormungandr the World Serpent, and that thing was more of a time traveler than a space traveler.

Thus did the hours pass and the cups of tea accumulate on his table. Eventually, he moved a stack of books to the floor where they might support the carafe of tea that he often emptied. One by one, he whittled down the last shelf of the last bookcase, until he reached the very last, and perhaps most punishing book of them all: a chemistry book.

Or, more accurately, an alchemy book. Faustite blanched for the smell that wafted off of it as he cracked it open, his disgust deepening as he realized that some of the pages were sticking together. From what he could flip through, the author only concentrated on transmuting other metals into gold. Evidently, he studied purported methods from western cultures as well as China and India, though a good half of the book was completely unintelligible to Faustite.

Finally he shut it, feeling utterly none the wiser for this undertaking. <******** me, he mouthed to the air as he slouched against his chair in defeat. Something ventured, nothing gained.

Still, there were some old files and books slated for resorting elsewhere. And perhaps their Mauvians pulled something useful off the database in the Transverse Workshop. But the more he considered hauling his dusty carcass to either of those tasks, the more he'd rather dig out his own eyes.

Tomorrow, then. He'd do it tomorrow.