15th of Fall, 510 A.V. “Abase,” Azilis muttered, squinting at the piece of wood she held clenched in her palm. “Beginning. Life. That which moves.” With a penknife clasped in her hand, she was painstakingly attempting to scratch out the corresponding glyph upon the rough surface of the bark. Had she been more practical, she might have chosen the more obvious path of using a quill and parchment, but the idea had struck her as she was rambling through the streets of Zeltiva. After finding a small scrap of wood in between the cobbles of the street, she had searched her pockets for some sort of writing implement and came up with a penknife. Well, one had to make do with what one could find, didn't one? At least she was innovative. Impractical, but innovative. After a brief spat of early autumnal rain and cold, the weather in Zeltiva had turned unseasonably warm, driving her out of the house she shared with her father and brother. Heat made her fidgety and restless, and she had taken to the streets around the University, where a salt-scented breeze blown off the sea had calmed her. The capriciousness of the wind always seemed to help the cogs in her brain turn, and in this case her thoughts had drifted back to the classes on auristics she was now taking at the University. Her mind lit on one word, one of the few she knew in the Ancient Tongue: abase. Life. And wasn't that what an aura was, a manifestation of life, of being? Immediately her thoughts turned to glyphing, and whether her meager experience with it would be enough for her to draw the one glyph she held in her mind, then use it to help her with her auristics. Seized with the desire to see if her idea would come to fruition, she had immediately halted her jaunt through the city to scratch out the glyph on a bit of wood. Without warning, the blade of the penknife slipped off the bark and bit into her finger. She yelped, more out of surprise than pain, and dropped the small scrap. It skittered over the uneven stone cobbles, driven by the temperamental wind to land on the other side of the street. “Oh, petch it all,” she muttered a bit louder than she meant to, earning her some stares from passersby. Licking off the one bright bead of scarlet on her finger, Azilis started over to the other side of the road to retrieve her errant project. |