Last time, vision-guy died! Again.

10.13

We jump three days later to Emothan still obsessing over seeing his namesake die, despite the fact he already saw him die last vision anyway, and also no mention of all the shit he should have been in for skipping school.

I was having trouble getting over the death of this particular Confederate soldier. More like, Confederate deserter.

I know you and the book apparently think that’s a meaningful distinction but it really, really isn’t. Especially when his reasons for desertion are basically oh fuck this is effort and also we appear to be losing, I wasn’t that attached to owning slaves I guess screw it.

Here is the one and only acceptable backstory for a Confederate deserter:

“My family marched me into the recruitment office and I took off first chance I got because fighting for slavery is wrong.”

There. Did he do that? No? Then the fact he deserted doesn’t fucking matter! And when he actually did, he waited for the end of the war when it was completely obvious there was no more point in fighting. If anything I’d have more sympathy to someone who wrongly believed that fighting was the right thing to do than someone who knew it was a pile of shit and went anyway only to back out when it got too rough for him.

I thought about it during Algebra II, while Savannah choked on her equation in front of the class

Have I mentioned I hate this book? Hate.

It wasn’t that he was a Confederate.

Yes I fucking noticed your complete lack of shit-giving in that respect.

Everyone in Gatlin County was related to the wrong side in the War Between the States.

Nonwhites continue to not be an “everyone”. It’s not just black people here, they apparently have no immigrants whatsoever. Also I assume you’re calling it that sarcastically but you should maybe watch your word choice when barrelling down apologia lane.

It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes.

Notice every other example he pulls up involved a lot of people with no choice in the matter, unlike those assholes lining up to be a soldier.

You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters.

I guess this is what the book has been trying to express with that, it’s just been fucking it up.

The Sisters, for example. They show no sign of living in the past. They remember a lot about the past, because they’re old and they’ve lived a lot more of it to remember, but they don’t seem confused about when they are now. They still go out to church, they don’t seem to be holding Emothan to any weird old fashioned standard, there’s no mention of them not doing stuff because it’s that darn new-fangled technology. They just don’t drive, which is probably because they’re too old to do so safely. Maybe if black people existed, they’d grumble about the uppity colored folks, but that’d require there to be black people and this is obviously an alternate universe where instead cotton was harvested by unicorns and pixies.

The DAR and Historical Society might have issues of their own, but that’d require them to fucking FEATURE IN THE STORY. All we know about the DAR is that the busybody ladies belong to it and run the town through bitching, and as I said it sure does seem exclusionary in theory but since as Emothan has just explained, everybody is equal in their ancestry and current racial position, it isn’t actually doing that. There’s no sign the DAR is anything but a particular town women’s group that happens to pull double duty in meddling in local politics, and that’s normal – if everyone’s in both the knitting circle and the burn Harry Potter books circle, then the knitting circle starts discussing their latest book burning idea and the book burning circle starts bringing their knitting and before you know it it’s just one group. That doesn’t mean they’re living in the past, it means you’re in a small town where you don’t have the population for separate groups.

You want to show these people are living in the past? Make Emothan go to private school. Make private school the only school the town has – you know, everyone’s favorite response to forcing schools to be integrated. Let’s say they’re small enough and there’s another town that run a public school for the whole area, which would be be tying in to how being a small place lets you live in the past, and if you’re of proper breeding you go to the local private school. Or, since they don’t really seem small enough to get away with that, there is some hellhole public school that no one willingly goes to, and the private school is just the only halfway functional one.

And that’s why pushing Lena out of that school is possible and also relevant to this – it’s because she’s not one of the right people. She’s from an old family, but it’s a disgraced old family, and she’s not even one of those really, since she’s a niece, so she’s from the other, outsider bloodline. Then get into where their real issue with Ravenwood is – obviously, the guy didn’t go out to fight in the war, since he was there to do his deal with the devil or whatever, and so was his brother. Holding a grudge since back then over a war that was going to be lost anyway for a cause that was not only doomed but evil? That’s living in the past.

(As an important corollary, don’t have Lena blamed for breaking the window. Emothan and the book at large seem to think it’s incredibly unfair people are saying she punched it, but the fact is, she did break it, they’re just imagining a mundane reason for the action in place of the supernatural. The reason people don’t want their kid around someone who smashes windows when they get upset is not that punching windows is just so uncouth and it’d be okay if only they realized it was done with psychic powers. No. Have them rustling up excuses to push her out that are obviously petty bullshit because she was on thin ice from being that Ravenwood non-Confederate’s niece and now look at her, wearing the wrong clothes and saying the wrong things and not showing up at church on Sunday!)

And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena. Ethan Carter Wate hadn’t, and I couldn’t, either.

Evidence is pointing to your beloved slaveowning ancestor dying and accomplishing nothing in the process (not that he was trying to in the first place!). So you may not have to accept it, but your accepting or not is totally irrelevant to all that happening anyway.

He walks by his dad’s study, knowing his dad is currently upstairs having a shower. When he reaches for the doorknob, it unlocks.

This was Gatlin. Not the Gatlin I thought I knew, but some other Gatlin that had apparently been hiding in plain sight all along. A town where the girl I liked was from a long line of Casters, my housekeeper was a Seer who read chicken bones in the swamp and summoned the spirits of her dead ancestors, and even my dad acted like a vampire.

Everything but the first was already obvious fact before now. Okay, you didn’t know your housekeeper’s magic shit worked, but you mostly seemed to not give a shit rather than actively disbelieve. And the girl is from outside, so I don’t see why she’s counting as Gatlin. The only proper Gatlin revelation is that Ravenwood is a secret magic hideout, and you already believed he was a terrifying shut-in in an even more terrifying house and it’s only your obsession with a hot girl that made you so much as drive up to the place itself. Also, the town at large hates him, so he’s really more something near Gatlin than of Gatlin.

Also also, there’s the fact there’s always been more going on, you just ignored everything halfway interesting and then whined you were bored. You spend your weekends with three old ladies who apparently know everything in Gatlin ever, and you never so much as asked them what’s up with the spooky Ravenwood mansion, let alone all the other stuff! Your housekeeper/mommy does voodoo shit, and you don’t show the slightest interest. Your English teacher wants to actually discuss the book with you, and you sit in the back of the class so to avoid it.

He pushes the door slightly open and sees all his mom’s stuff, reminiscing about how his mom used to spend lots of time there. Okay, so both his parents hung out in a no-Ethan zone, I’m seeing why the housekeeper had to raise him. Then he reminds us that her books should answer his questions…but said housekeeper jumps him before he can get in.

“I’m not doing anything. The door just opened.”
“Shame on you. No ghost in Gatlin would dare set foot in your mamma and daddy’s study, except your mamma herself.” She looked up at me defiantly. There was something in her eyes that made me wonder if she was trying to tell me something, maybe even the truth. Maybe it was my mom, opening the door.

Naturally, saying he just wants a damn book isn’t an option. Instead, he heads off to the library, for real this time. He appears to get there by walking, theoretically, because he shows up to find Lena waiting. He reports the concrete’s shiny from rain, so he walked in the rain, maybe? She and the librarian are the only ones there.

There wasn’t much we wanted to know about any town but our own, and if your granddaddy or your great-granddaddy couldn’t tell you, chances were you didn’t need to know.

Because it is totally impossible for those people to be dead in anyone’s family, even though Emothan’s entire extended family appears to be missing. Also, no one reads trashy romance novels or crappy thrillers or anything else that adults have read since about five seconds after their invention.

She looked almost like a regular girl. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be a regular girl.

And god knows your opinion really, really matters here.

Note it’s not “I wasn’t sure I wanted a regular girl.” or anything. That would be him choosing who he wants to date based on his preferences. No, he wants to decide what this specific girl should be so she’ll be properly datable.

Also, earlier, she accused him of wanting someone different but not too different, which of course he denies, but it seems that’s exactly on the nose – he’s upset by the idea she’s really powerful and wishes she was a weak magic user instead, but doesn’t want her to be normal and ordinary looking either.

Incidentally, this adds something really unpleasant to his behavior earlier – he sees her dressed in a happy red sweater, not writing numbers on her hand, and he immediately tells her all the stuff that’ll get her upset again, which gets her back to her normal depressed different-but-not-too-different look.

The library itself was beautiful. I had spent so many hours in it as a kid, I’d inherited my mother’s belief that a library was sort of a temple.

The sort of temple where you bitch it has a card catalogue.

This just was not edited. It’s really obvious the opening was written before she’d thought of any of this and as the story developed, a lot of the sweeping, stupid generalizations turned out to be getting in the way of the plot, as stupid, sweeping generalizations oft do. So the author decided that no, his mom knew lots about history and hung out in the library constantly, and never went back to fix the stuff written without that in mind.

I mean, god, most serial fanfic hangs together better than this!

This particular library was one of the few buildings that had survived Sherman’s March and the Great Burning.

Let’s take a moment to remember that libraries burn pretty well, so I’d say it’s the sort of survived where people deliberately decided not to destroy it, so maybe you could tone down the bitching about the demon Sherman a tad.

Anyway, this appears to mean that all the old plantation houses around were built after the Civil War, which just further underlines that they’re a bunch of dicks who need to shut up about what a trial Sherman’s march was if they could afford to completely rebuild their mansions afterward.

“Marian was my mom’s best friend, and her research partner. She’s the only
other person who knows as much about Gatlin County as my mom, and she’s the
smartest person in Gatlin now.”
Lena looked at me, skeptically. “Smarter than Uncle Macon?”
“Okay. She’s the smartest Mortal in Gatlin.”

He’s been doing this smart person ranking thing. His mom > Marian > his dad > Pretty Suit. He does this instantly – as soon as Pretty Suit showed he had a brain, he ranked the guy as fourth smartest, apparently on the basis he’d already filled the first three slots. Now, he’s switched over to his racist forbearers’ roots- for no reason, there’s suddenly separate categories for smartest mortal and smartest caster. They probably also get separate baseball leagues.

When we walked into the empty library, Marian was wandering around the stacks in her stockings, wailing to herself like a crazy person from a Greek tragedy, which she was prone to reciting.

I am so fucking sick of quirky.

He claims no one comes into the place except women looking up genealogy. You know, what the fuck are men doing in this town? Do they even exist? It seems like it’s just his dad, her uncle, and the principal. Oh, and the policeman.

Lena identifies what she’s saying as Antigone.

When she smiled, she looked like she could have been on the cover of a magazine. She had white teeth and beautiful brown skin, and she looked more like a model than a librarian. She was that pretty and exotic-looking, a mix of so many bloodlines it was like looking at the history of the South itself, people from the West Indies, the Sugar Islands, England, Scotland, even America, all intermingling until it would take a whole forest of family trees to chart the course.

See? Black people officially do not exist. Brown people come from the West Indies and the savage wilds of Scotland.

Marian was no more Gatlin County than Lena

Sooo she is then? Lena’s got her crazy ancestor and/or reincarnation slaveowner lady and her current Ravenwood relative. Plus, you did just describe her as the history of the South itself.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Dr. Ashcroft.”
“Please. Marian.” I nearly dropped a book. Aside from my family, Marian was Dr. Ashcroft to nearly everyone around here. Lena was being offered instant access to the inner circle, and I had no idea why.

Either because she’s a caster or because she’s generally informal and everyone uses her last name just because they don’t usually talk to her, since you just got through claiming no one ever comes here.

Marian went to the door, and flipped the “Open” sign to “Closed.” She turned the bolt with a sharp click. It reminded me of the study.
“I thought the library was open till nine?” If it wasn’t I would lose a valuable excuse for sneaking out to Lena’s.

He is so amazingly dumb. She’s going on about how thrilled she is to see him, they just did all this hugging and stuff, and then she flips the sign closed – obviously the only answer is that this is actually when the library closes now, yup!

I’d never been in Marian’s private archive
…
Not even my dad was allowed in. I can remember Marian stopping him in the doorway, when my mother was examining a historical document inside. “Private means private.”
“It’s a library, Marian. Libraries were created to democratize knowledge and make it public.”

Man, what the fuck is with people in this town? It started with just his dad not wanting anyone to read the book while he was writing it, which, while not something I’m personally too twitchy with, I certainly understand. Now it’s gone all the way up to the public library being in fact her private collection.

The flashback argument is done with dumb quotes, because quotes mean you’re smart, including:

“‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.’”

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREEEEEEEEEEEE

You know, I know academia is kind of backbiting but seriously, you won’t let other people look at documents because then they’d know what you’d know?

They had churned out book after book, even once making the short-list for the Voice of the South Award, the Southern equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.

Um. Well that’s better than not getting on the list at all, but if the best she could do was one of the nominees for the “Southern equivalent of” anything, that’s not that impressive – why couldn’t the smartest and second smartest woman’s book collaborations (with help from the magic Ravenwood library) ever net any nationwide fame? And that’s before we get into the fact that in this book, “Southern equivalent of” is the shitty hidebound version.

Lena walked up to a wall of framed maps of Gatlin County, crumbling behind glass, old as the Sisters themselves.

…this book is just so damn weird about history.

There’s a map still in existence from over a thousand years before Jesus. Maps that predate the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, to say nothing of the date of the actual founding of the US, are all over the place. And you’re gaping at maps that are around a hundred measly years old?

An old Historical Society charter lay open, with circled names, a pencil still stuck in the spine. A map made out of tracing paper, tacked to a map of modern-day Gatlin, seemed like someone was trying to mentally excavate the old town from beneath the new.

So I guess this was the theme the book meant to be playing with all along and it just fucked it up really badly.

And lying on top of all of it was a photo of the painting in Macon Ravenwood’s entry. The woman with the locket.

Wait, does the photo of the painting have a locket? Or do you mean a photo of the painting that now happens to have the locket, but didn’t back then? I’d just like it to be clearer on if the photo changed like the painting did. The painting alone changing seems less of a big deal – maybe it’s sentient or whatever. But if the change in that painting is carried over to all other versions of it…that’s more worrying. It suggests things reaching a lot farther than you’d think, and working on a deeper level.

He wants to consult, she says this is a terrible idea, he says that dammit he knows more than she does about this. But then they dance around the question and just ask who she is,

“Genevieve Duchannes, but I expect you know that.”
“I didn’t, actually.”
“Hasn’t your uncle taught you anything about your genealogy?”

Continuing our incest theme, I’m going to now go with somehow, Ethan Carter the first and slaveownery, managed a kid with Genevieve, maybe with ghost sex or something, so she’s trying to bang her distant relative AND the reincarnation of her distant relative at once.

Lena’s family tree stared back at us, right next to Macon’s. I pointed to Lena’s family tree. “That’s weird. All the girls in your family have the last name Duchannes, even the ones who were married.”
“It’s just a thing in my family. The women keep the family name even after they’re married. It’s always been that way.”

Uh. That seems like something everyone else would’ve thought of as super weird, you know?

Although it does get into something I was thinking about, with all the talk of families. It’s (SURNAME) ARE ALWAYS (TRAIT) which is pretty weird given 50% of the kids of the surname will go on to marry and take on another surname. He’s made reference to all the people of a family line being X which doesn’t seem likely unless you’re making Egyptian pharaohs look reasonable. Even assuming that mundane traits can have the same sort of crazy infectious dominance that’s apparently going on with Lena’s caster family, you’d still have those women marrying in somewhere else, getting a new surname, and then having a bunch of babies with their stereotyped trait instead of the other one.

Marian then says “It’s often the case in bloodlines where the women are considered particularly powerful.” which is missing that it isn’t often the case anywhere in the US, let alone historically so. Also, this seems like a poor attempt at feminism. It should be the case in bloodlines that are powerful – I mean, the male members are presumably going to go on using the same surname, aren’t they? But instead it seems to be saying it’s happened because they’ve got some special women-only magic, as if, if the men had equal power, they’d dictate their daughters not keep their surname.

It’s also just an uncomfortable frame that so much of female empowerment is set up where they have to get some extra help. They can’t be strong, they have to be specifically in a setup where women are stronger than men or have access to a bunch of powers men can’t have, which ends up with the subtext that any woman who isn’t given a cheat to effortlessly surpass men should just give up now, since without that they’ll always be better than her.

Marian says they were looking into it to investigate Genevieve, of course. No one has yet considered that it sounds like his mom died during this investigation, which is pretty ominous.

She pointed to another photograph of Genevieve. In this one, she was wearing the locket.

…okay, so I guess the photo of the painting didn’t have it? But now there’s something else, which may be an actual photo (Civil War’s where the technology gets going) or a photo of another painting where the locket happened to be included at the time. This is such sloppy, sloppy writing. The author doesn’t care to be specific about this because it’s not actually important! The basic world of their story doesn’t matter.

Anyway she recaps what we already know, and then shows them a letter from Emothan’s slaveowner namesake which is apparently one of the oldest things around left in the town which I find interesting given Sherman explicitly did not burn the library, so I guess the inhabitants of the place destroyed most of the library sometime later.

“‘A Species Apart,’ he calls them. Her family is trying to keep them apart, and he’s gone to enlist, even though he doesn’t believe in the war, in the hope that fighting for the South will win him the approval of her family.” Marian closed her eyes, reciting: “I might as well be a monkey as a man, for all the good it does me at Greenbrier. Though merely Mortal, my heart breaks with such pain

They’re taking language that grew out of racism and making it all about how horrible it is for the white guy fighting for slavery to be thought of as a lesser being.

I wanted to rant about this but they’re taking language that grew out of racism and making it all about how horrible it is for the white guy fighting for slavery to be thought of as a lesser being and I don’t really know what more I can say there.

Marian opened her eyes again. “As if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
“It’s all so sad,” said Lena, looking at me.

Well, besides fuck this fucking book.

Anyway apparently the locket disappears when Emothan Prime disappeared but legend has it she was buried with it, and also she was forced to remarry so hey, maybe Lena isn’t related to Emothan.

He then remembers his plan about asking directly regarding the locket, she says that’s a terrible idea, he yanks the think out and grabs Marian’s hand in the hopes of triggering a vision and dragging her into it because that’s how YA protagonists roll.

“Come, Miss Genevieve, there’s nothin’ more we can do here.”
But Ivy was wrong. There was one thing.
“It’s not too late. It’s not too late.” Genevieve kept repeating the words.
“You’re talkin’ crazy, child.”
She looked at Ivy, desperate. “I need the book.”
Ivy backed away, shaking her head. “No. You can’t mess with that book. You don’t know what you doin’.”

Let’s all cling very, very hard to the hope that Ivy is Miss-ing and dialect-ing everywhere because she’s a poor white and not the more obvious option.

Anyway so Genevieve just orders her to do it and so Ivy leads her past what used to be her mother’s lemon grove. Genevieve had never been past that point. There was nothing out there but cotton fields, or at least that’s what she had always been told. And she had never had a reason to be in those fields

Right, because you worthless aristocratic parasites never needed to actually do the work of caring for that crop. Note slaves still don’t exist, but I guess it wasn’t unicorns or pixies or anything at all harvesting the crop either because that’d be too close to admitting harvesting was even a thing that happened. Cotton fields just existed in a general scenery sort of way.

They head off to the family cemetery, so I guess these non-mortals are still mortal in the relevant respect, and adds that at her great-grandmother’s death when she was a little kid, her mom said words in some other language, and dammit book, how do you expect secret magic languages to be preserved if the parents just secret it up all the time?

“It’s out here?”
Ivy stopped and looked at Genevieve, confused. “Where else would it be?”

This is a brief moment of acceptable weirdness marred by the fact they know each other well – if this made any sense given standard laws of magic, Genevieve wouldn’t be surprised, and if it didn’t, Ivy wouldn’t be baffled by her surprise. Inside is a lot of spell potion stuff and a box with a crescent moon because apparently that’s the symbol of magic.

“I’m not touchin’ it,” Ivy said quietly, as if she thought the box itself could hear her.
“Ivy, it’s just a book.”
“No such thing as just a book, ’specially in your family.”

So Ivy’s trusted with the family secrets even those she despises them god there is no way she’s not one of the invisible black people of the book. Maybe later she’ll weep at Genevieve’s feet about how the evil Union won’t let her stay a slave for her precious mistress.

Also, Ivy is Amma’s ancestor because she reads cards and tea leaves. And is super good at it so Genevieve’s mom would consult her about everything. Maybe Ivy was free and just spent all her time following around the white people because they’re so great.

That right there is The Book a Moons.”

God I hate this book.

The book is full of spells which are apparently in more than one language and the one she wants is in Latin and I’m sure not a moment will be spared to explaining how it makes sense there are multiple languages to cast spells in or how that works.

The Binding Spell. To Bind Death To Life.

Which sounds like it’s working differently from how binding’s been talked about so far – I mean, not so much as to be a plot hole, but just not quite right, you know? Binding has been a thing you do to keep something just generally bound and locked up, in the case of the locket, and in the case of Ravenwood it seemed like the binding was a supernatural restriction, an imposition of laws.

Ivy says she can’t because the moon’s wrong, and references that the no moon period is for some kind of magic that’s totally different than black or white and also doesn’t seem to have a standard name for no reason. When her beloved mistress points out, pretty reasonably I think, that it’s now or never, she switches to pointing out that also this is a horrible affront to the fabric of reality, which really seems like the sort of thing you’d lead with. Also, this is unnatural, unlike all that other magic, or, presumably, doing this exact magic on a half moon.

Genevieve knew Ivy was right. Her mother had warned her and Evangeline often enough about respecting the Natural Laws.

Except there’s also a type of caster called a Natural. Maybe their magic power is not having to follow the rules of all the other powers, which would definitely fit with being crazy overpowered.

“No!” Lena let go of our hands, breaking the circle. “She went Dark, don’t you get it? Genevieve, she was using Dark magic.”

Um, better point, she appears to have totally had the choice and not any claiming bullshit. (Indeed, the discussion about when you can do magic suggests that actually normal casters can use either form of magic.) Maybe this is where the curse on your line starts? If so you are a moron for not asking questions about something so basic, this is hardly long enough ago that no one would know when it started.

He naturally responds to her doing this by grabbing her hands again, then holding on when she tries to yank them away again.

Usually all I could feel from Lena was a sunny sort of warmth, but this time she felt more like a tornado.

Just a few minutes ago you were talking about the standard electric spark feeling. You’ve never had any warmth, just sparks.

Anyway, she’s decided that Lemony Mistress was the same as her and the locket is warning Lena to stay away from him so she doesn’t hurt him when she inevitably goes dark, because that is totally a reasonable interpretation of seeing someone going crazy as a result of their boyfriend getting killed, and also because apparently “dark talisman that everyone shits themselves over in horror” and “helpful advice to protect others” is totally the same thing.

Then Marian chimes in:

“You are not Claimed, Lena. You’re neither good nor bad. This is just what it feels like to be fifteen and a half, in the Duchannes family.

Okay, so this seems like more evidence the light siders are as unnatural as the dark ones. Lena seems like a perfectly good person, but apparently that registers as not good or bad on the Light/Dark scale.

Incidentally, people who actually didn’t have a real alignment and were stuck on neutral until they hit sixteen when they went good/evil might be kind of cool. Like imagine if Lena was actually neither good nor evil – that’d be a bit creepy! Most people tend toward good, you know? I mean, I guess it depends on how we’re doing alignment. I’m picturing pure neutral, with no natural preferences for good or bad, but there’s other kinds, most more boring or absurd or boringsurd. D&D had that whole thing where neutral people are just lazy/shortsighted good people and actually being amoral kicks you into neutral evil complete with a little thing about how in some ways the neutral evil are the most evil ever because they don’t care about anything but what they want, as opposed to the lawful evil next door who are ritually flaying people in their worship of the dark god of torture. I mean, I sympathize with the idea that true evil is selfish disregard for others, but when your setting involves literal demons and gods that are empowered by suffering, you really need to be working off a different scale.

Before they can ask how the fuck Marian knows that, she asks why they didn’t say they had the locket, and one of them, presumably Emothan, replies with “We don’t know what to do. Everyone tells us something different.” which is such fucking bullshit when the two of two people they consulted were completely in agreement.

Marian explains she’s mortal and also neutral, and the latter doesn’t get a capital letter so I guess it’s less formal, but still, she’s neutral on the light/dark axis which, to go back to D&D again, sounds like the bullshit true neutral, who act to preserve “balance” so if the forces of good are too successful at saving babies from the flaying, you have to rush over and help flay some babies, because obviously being neutral morally and not caring about law/chaos either makes you crazy devoted to a specific nonsense cause. Anyway, she’s a capital-K keeper who is the one chosen mortal who’s entrusted with the history and the secrets of a world we can never entirely
be a part of. There must always be one, and now that one is me

“And the reason for this is wait no I guess there’s no reason.”

So anyway, she’s the Caster Librarian. The Head Caster Librarian.” which, considering she used “the” for the first title means there’s probably only one in the first place. Lena decides maybe that moon book is there, despite it obviously being a family heirloom kept secret, to which Marian says she can’t help, There’s a balance between the Mortal world and the Caster world, between Light and Dark. The Keeper is part of that balance, part of the Order of Things. If I defy the laws by which I’m Bound, that balance is jeopardized.” which seems like yes, true neutral bullshit. (Also, seems like yet another version of what binding involves.) Luckily if stupidly, her refusal to help appears to just be referring to chatting about Lena’s speculation and if she wants to be let in to actually get the book that’s totally fine. They’ll just have to wait for the place to be open because the author wants to stretch things out a little more.