Livira and Master Yute reach a staff entrance carved into the mountain, once a god’s mouth, now a cave guarded by owl-helmed Library Guards wielding steel tubes. Inside, orderly corridors bustle with blue- and white-robed staff. Yute jokes about sarcasm after a near-miss with a laden book cart and explains robe colors from blue through white to black.

Yute delivers Livira to Heeth Logaris, a broad-shouldered teacher overseeing a room of trainees. Before a watching class, Yute introduces Livira and bluntly states she must be taught to read and write, calling her a blank slate. He withdraws, leaving her in Logaris’s charge.

Logaris dubs her “Yuteling,” seats her with four of the youngest trainees, and launches into a lecture: language grows like a tree, libraries preserve ancient texts, and tongues branch across lands and even other worlds. He stresses that most volumes predate living memory and that librarians must wrestle with change and opacity to find needed knowledge.

Reining in Livira’s questions, Logaris assigns the four trainees to teach her literacy swiftly, warning that his displeasure will fall on all of them if they fail. As the class resumes, Livira feels abandoned to underlings and daunted by impossible expectations.