Chapter 33

Summary

• Evar exits a so-called "pool" only to be approached by Livira, a woman he seemingly knew as a dirty young child, who now appears as a nearly fourteen-year-old girl.
• They both agree there is a discrepancy in the amount of time it feels has passed, revealing each person's experience in these pools, which function as doorways, can be wildly different.
• Evar explains he is using the pools to try to find a woman from a book he treasures.
• Livira and Evar discover that they perceive completely different realities when they are at the pools. For instance, Evar sees trees while Livira sees towering tap woods.
• Evar tells Livira about his sister Clovis, her unshared romantic history with him, and her main concern, which is killing their enemies, the sabbers.
• Livira also shares a common hate for the sabbers and reveals that they are getting closer to her city.
• Evar expresses his new-found desire to fight the sabbers, after witnessing their atrocities against his people.
• Evar explains his complicated non-blood relationship with his siblings to Livira and how they were all children trapped for hundreds of years in a chamber of the library with their people, periodically losing a child to the Mechanism.
• Livira advises Evar to understand the system of the 'pools' better before jumping into them randomly in his search for his unknown woman, speculating that the system was probably designed by librarians.