The Last Guardian by Jeff Grubb

perfunctory update as to his progress (which the castellan, as well as Cook never gave any indication of curiosity about), then buried himself away within the vault.
    Lunch and supper were brought to him, and he often worked into the night by the soft bluish light from the glowing balls.
    He adjusted to the nature of the tower as well. There were often images that hung at the corner of his eye, just a twinkling of a figure in a tattered cloak that would evaporate when he turned to look at it. A
    half-finished word that drifted on the air. A sudden coldness as if a door or window had been left open, or a sudden change of pressure, as if a hidden entrance had suddenly appeared.
    Sometimes the tower groaned in the wind, the ancient stones shifting on each other after centuries of construction.
    Slowly, he learned the nature, if not the exact contents, of the books that were within the library, foiling the traps that were placed around the most valuable tomes. His research served him well in the last case.
    He soon became as expert at foiling spell mechanisms and weighted traps as he had been with locked
    doors and hidden secrets in Dalaran. The trick for most of them was to convince the locking mechanism
    (whether magical or mechanical in nature) that the lock had not been foiled when in reality it had been.
    Determining what set the particular trap off, whether it was weight, or a shifting bit of metal or even exposure to the sun or fresh air, was half the battle to defeating it.
    There were books that were beyond him, whose locks foiled even his modified picks and dexterous knife. Those went to the highest level, toward the back, and Khadgar resolved to find out what was within them, either on his own or by threading the knowledge out of Medivh.
    He doubted the latter, and wondered if the master mage had used the library as anything else than a dumping ground for inherited texts and old letters. Most mages of the Kirin Tor had at least some semblance of order to their archives, with their most valuable tomes hidden away.
    But Medivh had everything in a hodgepodge, as if he didn’t really need it.
    Except as a test,thought Khadgar. A test to keep would-be apprentices at bay.
    Now the books were on the shelves, the most valuable (and unreadable) ones secured with chains on the upper level, while the more common military histories, almanacs, and diaries were on the lower floor.
    Here were the scrolls as well, ranging from mundane listing of items bought and sold in Page 23

    Stormwind to recordings of epic poems. The last were particularly interesting since a few of them were about
    Aegwynn, Medivh’s claimed mother.
    If she lived over eight hundred years, she must have been a powerful mage indeed,thought Khadgar.
    More information about her would likely be in the protected books in the back. So far these tomes had resisted every common entreaty and physical attempt to sidestep their locks and traps, and the detecting cricket practically mewled in horror whenever he attempted to unlock them.
    Still, there was more than enough to do, with categorizing the loose pieces, reassembling those volumes which age had almost destroyed, and sorting (or at least reading) most of the correspondence. Some of the later was in elven script, and even more of it, from a variety of sources, was in some sort of cipher.
    The latter type came with a variety of seals upon it, from both Azeroth, Khaz Modan, and Lordaeron, as well as places that Khadgar could not locate in the atlas. A large group communicated in cipher with each other, and with Medivh himself.
    There were several ancient grimoires on codes, most of them dealing with letter replacement and cant.
    Nothing compared to the code used in these ciphers. Perhaps they used a combination of methods to create their own.
    As a result, Khadgar had the grimoires on codes, along with primers in elven and dwarven languages, open on the table the evening that Medivh suddenly returned to the