After saying goodbye to Tara, who sweetly wished that her day would get better, Willow detoured back to the library. The Will-Be-Done spell wasn't working as well as she had expected, and she wanted to try looking up what she had done wrong. If it was a wrong ingredient or a missing part to the chant, she could fix that and then recast it. Granted, she wasn't feeling half as hopeless now as she had yesterday, but that was probably just the aftereffects of the mocha and the friendly conversation. To really feel better long-term, she needed to get her heart healed— really healed— which required magic.
She entered the college library with a slight smile. It wasn't anything like the high school library where she and Xander and Buffy had spent the majority of their high school career, but it was still a beautiful old building that was filled with books, and that was enough to make it wonderful in Willow's eyes. And because it was Sunnydale, it had an impressive collection of rare and magical texts. She wended the familiar path back to the occult shelf, tucked back into a dim corner of the library, hidden away from the more popular sections.
After scanning the titles on the shelf, she selected a few promising-looking texts and pulled them down. She had probably looked at them before, but not related to this spell, so it was worth at least another cursory flipping-through. Carrying the heavy books awkwardly in one arm, she finally found her way to an empty table and sat down, spreading the books in front of her and setting her backpack on the floor by her chair.
In preparation for her note-taking, she pulled out a notebook, and started to reach for her special color-coding pens before remembering that the entire front pocket of her backpack was currently drenched in ink. Frowning, she dug deeper into the main compartment of her backpack, hoping that a stray pencil might have fallen there, trapped under the textbooks. As she shifted the backpack to give herself a better viewing angle, something under her chair caught her eye, and she leaned over for a better look.
"Well hello there. Where did you come from?" she murmured. Blinking down in keen interest, she fished a stray book out from under her chair. It was an ancient-looking and obviously well-loved book. The front cover, made of leather so softened from years of handling that it could have been fabric, bore the title A Compendium of Witchcraft. Eyebrows raised, Willow checked the spine, but there was no library label. It had to be someone's personal copy.
She briefly debated whether flipping through it would be a breach of its owner's privacy, but it was a short debate. She was burning with curiosity, and she rationalized to herself that the book may have its owner's name inside, which would make it far easier to return once she had finished looking at it.
Eagerly, she flipped it open, and on the inside, on the front page, there was a mark like a family crest. Willow kept turning pages, and the paper, heavy with age but softened by use, was almost silent. The book, like many magical tomes Willow had seen (mostly from Giles's collection) was handwritten, but not only by one hand. Generations of witches (and perhaps warlocks) had contributed to the tome. Notes littered the margins, adding clarifications, corrections, and questions to the main text. There were journal-like pages where the writers would give their opinions about the spells or potions or charms, or else record what had happened when they cast it. Occasionally, there were even scraps of paper— new and old— index cards, and post-it notes continuing the addenda.
Willow was completely absorbed. There were spells, rituals, and potions she had never heard of in her life, and even the ones she recognized had little notes in the margins about how to improve or alter the casting. Some seemed to be religious or spiritual in nature, but others were practical. A ritual for blessing a sacred space sat on the page opposite a spell recommended for mending socks
She still had her eyes glued to it when the lights flickered a ten-minute warning to mark the building's closing. She looked up in surprise, her head swimming as she remembered she was still in the library. Before she could talk herself out of it, she tucked the book into her backpack for safekeeping and returned the library books— none of which had been touched since she took them down— to the nearest shelving cart. If no one had come looking for A Compendium of Witchcraft yet, they might not know it was missing, and it was clearly the priceless work of generations of accomplished spellcasters. Not everyone would realize its value, and in the wrong hands, it could be damaged or lost or even worse. She told herself that she would have to make a flyer for it, or tell one of the library workers, or maybe ask around that Wicca group on campus she had been avoiding since the less-than-impressive orientation.
She could feel the weight of it on her shoulders as she walked back to Stevenson, and as soon as she got back to her room, she unloaded the book, checked its condition, and gave it a place of honor on her desk. She would look at it more in the morning. She had already learned more from it than she had from the past five witchcraft books combined, and there was still plenty more to be read.
As she emptied the remaining contents of her backpack, she was confronted once again with the fact that the front pocket of her backpack was drenched in ink. With a sigh, she decided that she finally had mustered the emotional fortitude to check on the damage of her exploded pens. She had briefly considered trying to wish the mess to clean itself up, but something stopped her, and she reluctantly took her backpack into the dorm bathroom and upended the entire contents of the front pocket into the sink there. No less than three of the pens appeared to have burst, which struck Willow as extremely odd. One pen breaking was bad enough, but three? It seemed wildly unlikely.
Frowning, she rinsed the pens off, salvaged the ones that could be saved, and did her best to scrub the blue-black mess from the inside of the pocket, making a mental note to invest in a protective pencil case in the future. When she had gotten it as clean as it was likely to get, she stood back, sighing down at her newly ink-stained hands. She would let it dry overnight, and hopefully by morning, the remaining ink would be too dry to spread.
She returned to her room, cast a longing look at the grimoire on her desk, but reluctantly climbed into bed instead. Buffy would be out patrolling until late, and she wanted to think about everything that had happened that day. Casting the failed spell, meeting Tara, her pens exploding, that new fountain pen whose owner she still needed to find, running into Tara again, finding that witchcraft book… it had been quite a day, really. There was a nagging suspicion in her head that she was forgetting about something, but she shrugged it off and settled in for the night, wondering if she might run into Tara again sometime soon.