You are sitting on the third-floor balcony facing the beach when you see it breach the water. It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there. You know because water that close to the coast never drops below fifty feet and this thing, breathing heavily in the ocean air and stretching its toothy jaw, must be all head and no body, but there it is.

Finch’s dad always said a book could neither plow the earth nor feed a mare, so Finch wasn’t surprised when his secret bestiary turned out to be alive. He inherited it upon his father’s death in the summer of Finch’s fifteenth year. After burying his father in the meadow near his favorite horse’s grave, Finch read the handwritten will that wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of Law, but was good enough for them.

The desert is full of bones. Sometimes, if you listen, the bones will speak. From a distance, the Bone-Gatherer may look like he is wandering, with his basket made of dried hyssop on his back and his arms and legs and head all covered in black-blue feathers that flicker like tongues of lightless fire. He may look as if he is merely roving—a nomadic traveler stretching his lanky legs, with no singular destination in mind.

I rang the Academy bell the first time, when both it and I were new-penny bright, and I rang it at the end, when it was gray-green with the centuries. I was the school’s mascot and its totem and its faithful servant. By night I cleaned the halls and read the chalkboard ghosts before consigning them to oblivion. In the library, I gently laid sleeping heads on tables and reshelved the books they’d used as pillows. It may be hubris for a soulless thing of brass to say so, but if the Academy belonged to anyone, it belonged to me.

The butterfly sword of chaos is never the same twice. But then, neither is its wielder. The sword changes those who bear it, transforming, transfiguring. The temple where you found it was a ruin, roof caved in, snow-covered floor. When you took it from the statue of the smiling god in the temple, it didn’t look like a sword at all. It perched on that stone hand, a frozen butterfly, its forlorn wings outstretched.