Fine furniture, rich paintings, tall statues, even a few aurichalcum and some more dark-purple ornaments of hepatizon, all added to the splendor of the library, thus vindicating its name.

  Marble relief tondi and oil paintings of the same circur nature decorate the sides of pedestals upon which smooth polished pilrs stand. Every second pilr is carved into a dark-purple, helical shape—while the ring-like base and ornate capital of each are drenched with pure gold.

  Archangels of Empyrean, these glistening pilrs all stretch until the very limit of even my enhanced vision—lining the distant walls, hugging the corners, and marking the sides of shelves. Many of them support the balconies that are caking the higher-level spaces above.

  High above, there are different chairs and ledges for winged kindred to do their reading, marked with crystal-holding sconces.

  Fire is, of course, forbidden. Crystals are used for light during night readings or in those rare pces that receive little to no sunlight; such as in isoted reading alcoves and other small reading rooms.

  The ceiling has frescoes portraying blue skies, winged beasts, human-shaped kindred, long-gone schors and warriors of note, and many, many optical illusions of domes with circur windows framing the eternal blue.

  The real windows, set along the sides of the building, are mostly narrow but numerous and very tall. The library lets an immense amount of sunlight in.

  With the pale light of the day and the might of the crystal light, the Pace has brightness aplenty.

  Chiaroscuro is used to give the ceiling frescoes depth, a life frozen in time. Powerful contrasts of light and dark do to my eyes what a noble-grape wine of over fifty summers—rich in acidity and sugar, and aged in oak casks—does to a tongue.

  The greatest artists are those who know when to sacrifice logic for the sake of creating a magnum opus. For example, maybe the colors of some ndscape painting do not belong to the natural world, yet they work on canvas, creating a pleasing effect for the eye. Maybe the proportions of some statue are completely wrong, yet pce that same statue somewhere high and the eye will be pleased.

  Art is about sacrificing the truth for that glorious end result of causing a powerful emotional reaction—raw, primeval, visceral—inside the beholder's mind.

  A brisk wind cutting through a rich forest, I walk onward without pause.

  Like a fountain of some...grand pza, an eborate armilry sphere stands in the center of an intersection, giving life to the space. It is a meeting pce, a joining of four long and wide walkways, each fnked by ten-story bookcases packed with countless texts.

  There are several spheres like it in the Pace, but this one before me is the rgest, at about three times my height.

  High above the sphere, thick gss panels form a skylight, bathing the space with natural light. I have designed the library to let in much of the dim daylight, greatly diminishing the need for crystal light.