Research in the Academy

[maeglhachel]

She let her feet guide her through the Alzarin library on their own and found the books she was looking for in the same spot they used to be.
If she closed her eyes to not see the fine blue and white tunic she bought from her Waterdhavian tailor, she could travel back in time and imagine herself to be still doing "Planar Lore II" and struggling with a gazillion of weird names of places and their relationships. Or with the incantations and rituals to gain more control over what creatures the Weave would bring at her bidding. A time when it seemed to be a sport among Slaadi to queue up for traveling to the the Prime Material to mock a human called Tarithel. In the end it had been easy, but then most things are once you know how to do them.

She reached out for two fancily decorated books and ran her fingers down their backs with a soft chuckle fading into a crooked, fond smile: D'Rhys' The Shape of This World and the Next and Our Unseen Neighbours from Beyond.
These two had been her downfall during her first attempt at the exam. Blame the others for D'Rhys being a so much more entertaining writer. It turned out that the bulk of what D'Rhys had written was just sloppily paraphrased content of the now outdated former classic Turning Wheels (ironically by a scholar called Wainwright). Where he really shone, though, was where he completely made things up, like the story about the Solar Ty'Nar, who was supposedly caught and abducted to Baator to be tortured and subverted into service to the Lord of Nessus. Her tears, however, ran like a river into the Styx and when that burst it's banks, its waters turned out to cause devils severe pain. When the tears of the poor, tortured Solar threatened to flood all of Hell and disable significant portions of its fiendish armies, Asmodeus finally had no choice but to set Ty'Nar free. Of course, Tarithel's teachers had immediately recognized that her knowledge was mostly derived from such sources and made their discontent very clear.

So, D'Rhys hadn't cut it back then and she had a feeling he wouldn't this time around.
Instead, she started to pull books from the shelf like Krantz's Cosmology, the fairly recent An Ecology of the Planes by a Suzailian scholar, A Glimpse into the Abyss by the Mad Seer of Manshaka, or the notorious Crowley's Diabolicon. The original copy of the latter was supposedly bound in the author's very own skin after he penned down the content as dictated by a devil the unlucky mage had summoned but failed to properly protect against. This was just a copy, of course, though it was remarkable enough the academy had one and even the copy looked quite ominous in its black leather binding with dark red runes of warding all over it.
It looked about as ominous as the feeling she had felt when that little bell inside her rang out, struck by what Vlaric had said, by him making her remember some of Snipe's words. It felt like some puzzle pieces were about to fall in place, only those puzzle pieces were like giant rocks each weighing about a ton and if they fell, they would fall with a crash. And whatever the puzzle was going to show, she had a feeling it wouldn't be something good. But if ignorance was bliss, it was too late for that, now. So, she carried her pile of books over to one of the tables and started to read, and would be returning to pore over her books for hours over the next days.

[mycophobia]

*A black haired scarred man wanders into the public library of the academy*

*he stays for a while and reads many of the books, seemingly a voracious read of all off the material on enchanting*

*books about the enchanting of jewelry are read through twice*

[maeglhachel]

Late at night, in the Masters' library of the Alizarin Academy, high above the city, somebody is still awake. You can tell by the shadows erratically jumping around the walls and shelves of the dimly lit room, whenever the short-haired, redheaded woman moves to turn a page of the book in her lap or bend over the tray of crafting utensils on the anvil next to her.

The large and comfortable looking, dark red velvet armchair seems a bit out of place in front of the huge anvil and the obviously magical forge that is constantly aglow with a white fire burning inside. But not more so than the woman herself, sitting there in her long, silken night-gown and pristinely white, fluffy bathrobes, bare feet pulled up onto the seat, and hunched over her work.

For hours she is melting small amounts of gold in a little melting pot, trying to work the gold into a fine thread while chanting incantations over it from the book in her lap. She sorts through the various small gems strewn around the tray, sparkling in the light of the forge, and tries to sew them to the rim of a glove. However, though she keeps trying for what appears like aeons in the quiet gloom, she never seems to get it right. Molten gold turns black at a mispronounced incantation, golden threads snap, gems fall from the glove they have been sewn to, or the glove seems to disappoint upon being tried on. Eventually and without warning, the woman was just leaning forward to work on another golden thread, she picks up the entire tray and throws it against the stone wall with all her might and a shriek of fury and frustration that would have made any harpy proud but is drowned in the noise of her crafting project crashing to the floor.

"Gods, I wish you were here," she whispers to herself as she sinks into a corner of the armchair.

[maeglhachel]

// Can this thread be moved to the Alizarin sub-forum, now that that's no longer
// a guild thing, mebbe?