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Avicularia
02-02-15, 09:50 PM
The problem with traveling by boat was that it was nothing at all like she had imagined. Somehow when she had first stepped onto the small clipper, she had imagined the hull cutting a swath across the sea, wake flying behind them and a smooth jolt hurtling them forward. However, the boat churned forward laboriously until it finally crawled into the dock. Her first sight of Corone was the murky waters tossing about beneath her as she vomited into the ocean froth. Somehow, she felt as if nothing here would be as she expected. It was good that she didn't have many expectations to begin with.

The village she’d grown up in was mostly human but the architecture was mostly elven. She’d lived her whole life with human touches and traditions being none too in vogue, but when she could finally navigate the docks upright and push past the warehouses, her eyes lit up with glee. A professor of hers had once pointed out that dwarves built homes that felt like the mountains while elves built homes that felt like the woods. The natural world was just simple a part of their worlds in ways that humans couldn’t understand. Here was the proof that maybe he had been right. Homes and businesses were strapped together from steel, wood, and stone. She stared at a slate apothecary with beams of wood that slashed across the second floor walls, framing windows and zig zagging away. She marveled at shingles, and how they looked like dragon’s scale. She was taken away by the thatching some roofs had, and how different it was from the braided branches that crowned her own childhood home.

It didn’t take her long to figure out the way the inns were spaced through the city. The cheapest rooms were circled around the docks with the accommodations growing quieter and more expensive as they spread outward to the outskirts of the city. She chose something reasonably in between. The cobbles outside of the small hostel weren’t terribly worn, perhaps having been replaced relatively recently. The rooms had a small wood burning stove and a water pump, as well as a small desk whose single drawer was stocked well with candles. For ten gold she could stay the month. After settling the account and pulling her small trunk into the room she washed and changed, grateful for a way to make the hot herbal tea she washed her mouth out with. The taste of sickness was gone, and in clean clothes she felt refreshed.

“Now, “ she said to herself, plucking at a tangle in the mass of curls on her head, “I need to find myself a library.” She felt something in herself spark at the idea of accessing tomes upon tomes of local history. She didn’t feel much like the slip of a student she’d been for the last 7 years. She felt more like an adventurer. Although, she supposed, most adventurers might not start their days and their tales by stepping out of their rooms to ask for directions.

Avicularia
02-04-15, 10:40 PM
By the time she'd made it to the library, a rudimentary map had crafted itself in her hands. It focused mostly on the path she'd taken from her room to the marbled steps. Here and there she'd made notations - a bath house here, a place to get a meal there. She decided on the way that she wouldn't eat until she'd finished, as the thought of grease on her fingers as she paged through sewn parchment journals or brittle scrolls was too much to bear. Just thinking about the wear and tear her carelessness might inflict on leather bound tomes made her unconsciously rub her fingers together in an anxious gesture.

Her boots scuffled down aisle after aisle as she made her way past cabinets and shelves. She wasn't sure where she was going - she hadn't even stopped at the reference desk to find out where the folklore section was. She simple felt from the tips of her boots to the top of her spun cotton hair that she would know what she was looking for. A collection of dark books finally beckoned her to stop, brown eyes narrowed as she scanned the titles. The script engraved in the cracked leather was illegible now, but she could work with that. She liked old things, after all. She chose one and absconded with it to a reasonably bright table and set to work. Adelia put a scrap of paper and her chalks to work, gently making rubbings of the titles, waiting to pore over the contents inside. This had been her method of study as a student - to know and understand the words that authors had felt important enough to press into leather and hide before she ever looked upon the parchment.

A Treatise on the Immediate Razing of Concordiae Forest

She paused, a dark brow cocked and retraced over the letters again making sure that she didn't mistake an 'f' for an 's'. Why would a forest need to be burned down? Had the treatise been a successful, convincing one? She was at least intrigued, though she knew from experience that the sensational stories a title promised could often be boring and couched in legal jargon. Still "immediate razing" sounded like something in the book could possibly be at least amusing and at most a good start on her discovery of Coronian lore. She carefully opened the book, noting with dismay the dust that had settled along the top and in the corners of the pages. The library looked well kept and the librarians had been working dutifully when she walked in. Why then was this book neglected?

After the publishing information, the next page was a large woodcut of a naked couple, dark batlike wings curled around the sides of their bodies. While their bodies had been illustrated in exquisite detail that belied the time and effort the wooden stamp must have taken, their faces were smudged. The background and flowers around them were similarly rendered in poor detail but not the same cloudy emptiness that their faces held. Something about the image made the hair stand on the back of her neck and she pulled the woven woolen drape she wore more tightly around her body and leaned in closer. The people depicted had claws like wild animals and within the non-faces she could have sworn she felt they were smiling with fanged grins. When she finally flipped the page, leaving the couple behind, she found herself staring at a table of contents that seemed to list names, dates, and times. As she flipped to the first entry, Adelia realized quickly that she wasn't reading a formal treatise as much as she had a log of demonic sightings.