Turns out, the Healing Church did have a library. It was built off the back of the Cathedral, inhabiting only a single floor of a fairly large tower-like structure.

When Astral had entered a mere few hours earlier, she'd been struck by just how small the area dedicated to the cumulative knowledge of the Church was, and then she'd realized just how full they'd crammed their library. Shelves covered every spare inch of ground space, each one filled to bursting with books, parchments and scrolls so as to leave only a small route between them. At the back of the library sat two desks; one for a reader and one for the librarian, Mary, who had left and gone home for the evening after an hour or two. Candles lit the space, although Astral found the combination of cramped library and open flame quite stressful.

Currently, she sat at the reader's desk, which was without coincidence the larger of the two, skimming books she'd selected from the many shelves for references and clues to her situation or evidence of her hypothesis. At the moment she was reading a book that dealt with the history of the Healing Church and, in fact, had been reading quite a few such books recently.

That also happened to not be a coincidence.

Yvonne, the servant from the Research Hall, had insisted on coming with her as a guide while she regained her memory of Yharnam and her time there. She'd already answered quite a few questions, such as her purpose and rank within the Church, both answers coming as quite the surprise. Apparently, she was the acting Director of the Research Hall, and had taken over some seventy years prior from the last Director, Maria, who had died in office. According to Yvonne, the last Director had shunned the use of her office as an honorific, instead favoring the title 'Lady' Maria, a trend Astral had followed.

The Director, according to Yvonne, held the second highest bureaucratic office in the Healing Church, below Vicar. They organized and made final decisions on the Research Hall's operations, as well as occasionally getting personally involved with certain important experiments. What those 'operations' or 'experiments' tended to be or entail, Yvonne wouldn't or couldn't say.

Naturally, she'd been skeptical and slightly wary of that knowledge. Originally she'd planned to read up on the Healing Church just to, hopefully, have a quick answer to the "where" and "when" parts of the puzzle of her situation by placing either the Church or Yharnam somewhere within her understanding of the historical timeline. However, Yvonne's information had also added another goal to her choice of reading material: confirm Yvonne's statements.

So far, things were checking out, an unhappy occurrence for Astral.

While having political clout was useful, especially in as hierocratic of an organisation as the Healing Church seemed to be, it also meant that she'd likely already modified the timestream, which meant that time just got a whole lot more problematic. Either her existence in Yharnam was now required in the future for the presence of any number of prerequisites needed for the existence of Celestia and therefore herself and Twilight, or her existence in Yharnam wasn't required by the future because she left with them now, so that she wouldn't be in the future, or past of the future, when anything important happened that affected the existence of Celestia or herself or Twilight. If she made a wrong decision...

Astral gently closed her current book, cradling her head while her anxiety spiked.

And this was why she hated time magic.

She managed to quell her anxiety after a moment, levitating the book on top of her ever increasing stack of 'empty' books that had, unfortunately, turned into more of a mountain at some point. Nearly the entire table, which was big enough to seat a half dozen ponies, was covered in discarded books that she'd, mostly, only given cursory glances. To be fair, many of them were exceedingly insipid texts that dragged out her mission more than helped it, so she felt little about discarding them.

Many of the books were, indeed, history regarding the Healing Church. Much of it was useless, being only fluff – dates, deeds, places and ponies that mattered little and told her even less, but from amongst the tedious recollections and worthless trivia came a few highly interesting keywords, one in particular catching her eye more than all the others.

Byrgenwerth.

Everywhere she'd looked, there were references to Byrgenwerth College and its influence on the Healing Church. The Old Blood supposedly was first studied at Byrgenwerth, alongside the study of the arcane, and Vicar Laurence and his followers were apparently all scholars at Byrgenwerth, each of them deeply involved with blood science and the arcane. Quite upsetting, though, was the fact that no matter where she looked, be it dusty tome, new book or faded scroll she could find nothing substantial about Byrgenwerth or its experiments. History, location, even contributions beyond blood science were completely elusive. The arcane was mentioned nowhere but in insubstantial snippets, blood science was described only as a 'holy medium' or sacred art, and information about the first Vicar and his followers was also lacking, save in the typical reverent way one talked of gods, or saints.

Astral considered herself a scholar above all else, and to her this sudden, utter lack of information where before the life of a 'particularly pious Cleric' had been noted in excruciating detail reeked of whitewash, especially when every scrap of knowledge about Byrgenwerth she could find was mindless drivel or utterly uninformative, most likely designed to confuse rather than inform.

It had all the makings of a good mystery, and Astral was terribleat leaving mysteries alone.

She lifted her head from between her hooves, having left it there while she mulled everything over. She looked outside the only window in the room, seeing sunlight still, if barely, shining on the mountains that reached up into the sky far behind the Cathedral. Eustace had promised her that he'd return them around sunset, but that, she'd later realized, would only be under the best of circumstances. A map she'd discovered had told her just how big Yharnam actually was, and that map had been two decades old. She didn't know how severe Yharnam's hunts were, but she hoped 'Tia and her student would return soon, and safe.

She couldn't help them now, as much as she might want to. What she could do, though, was sate her curiosity about the mysterious Byrgenwerth College using whatever material she could get her hooves on here…

Author's Note

Part 2 plotlines set. Take a guess as to what they are and which one is the main plotline, I want to know how conspicuous I'm being :P

As a side note, Astral is weaker now than when she fought Celestia. The reason will become very clear some point in the future. I say it here since it isn't massively important to the story nor will there be anywhere good to explain it before there isn't a point in doing so anyways.

As always, criticism and praise is welcome. Feel free to ask questions you think up as well, I like answering them.