Koia was unhappy.
This was not a normal state of mind for Koia, for whom ‘meditative’ was an adjective that didn’t go nearly far enough. She would be hard-pressed to remember the last time she felt angry or upset - and that meant something for Koia, who prided herself on her memory. She had, in her living quarters, what basically amounted to the total of all mortal knowledge, scattered between books, scrolls, pieces of art, and even, in one case, a used napkin on which Octavius Esry had scrawled a few drunken notes.
Koia was familiar with the concept of unhappiness, of course - in her book Emotions and How You Deal, Mavra Delegna spent several pages describing how unhappy she felt after her pet lochlag ran away - but that did little to console her. She’d planned a busy day of transcribing information into the Archives, the same as every day as far back as she could remember, and feeling unhappy was really cutting into her schedule.
The cause of her unhappiness was at once simple and baffling. The broken mirror in the library was showing an image, which wasn’t the weird part. Unlike normal, though, when the mirror would display indistinct faces all whirled together, this time the mirror was showing a landscape.
Specifically, it was the Rasaka Desert, with the Phantom Pyramid in sharp focus. The Phantom Pyramid got its name for its inconvenient habit of simply disappearing whenever it felt like it, much to the dismay of would-be explorers, who tended to get as far as the front door before being ejected ignobly back onto the desert sands. Nobody knew what hid within the very top floor, but those that made it partway into the Pyramid reported that it was filled with vicious monsters and insidious traps, not to mention the ghostly laughter that seemed to seep out of the walls. The logic was that whatever awaited past all the deterrents must have been pretty fantastic, and so people kept trying.
Koia didn’t like uncertainty, and she didn’t like not knowing things. The Pyramid appearing in the mirror ticked both of those boxes.
Oh well, she figured. She could at least watch the thief who was currently trying to break into the main entrance.