[flashback] rare books (caelum & hadrian)

[Hadrian]

Hadrian nodded at the ethaefal's shared wisdom. He pilfered through some other books on that table, giving him a modicum of privacy while he perused Leth's Wounds, as if observing his research would be a breach of privacy. And perhaps it would be. He was learning all sorts of stuffy rules from academia at Zeltiva's university.

"I'm learning to be more precise," he mused aloud. Part of him would rather be learning from the Jamoura than the professors at university, but there was time enough for life, and he was learning.

Finally he closed his eyes, spun around a few times, stopped, and put his hands out to see what book Fate wanted him to peruse next.

[Caelum]

"Try this," Caelum interrupted the young man's book dowsing ritual. He watched with the squint of one eye and nudged a particularly heavy tomb on glyphing and divination in his general direction. "And take notes for me."

He figured: why not conscript?

[Hadrian]

It didn't seem right to contradict a holy avatar, cranky or otherwise, so he just hefted the big book with a grunt and nodded.

"D'you have vellum or parchment?" he asked. Then, "No matter if you don't. Phaleron has plenty for his ledgers and he won't begrudge us some."

Perhaps it was the student's instinct to impress a possible teacher, or just a recent child's to impress an adult, but he hurried away to secure the book seller's back room and some materials. In a minute, he returned to the ethaefal's side, motioning toward the little room.

"Come. I can take notes for you in there and you we can sit down. I'm Hadrian, by the way. Hadrian Aelius." Perhaps the avatar would return home and secure the gods' blessings for his family if he only knew the name. "At your service," he added with wry humor, "or so it would seem."

[Caelum]

"Caelum," he offered shortly, unraveling from his chair with a beleaguered grace. The heavy book was clutched to his chest as he maneuvered around the legs of the table and even went so far as to avoid stepping into the puddle of sunlight left on the floor by the shop window.

"We're studying several things," he went on, following Hadrian into the little back room. It's contents were surveyed with cynical eyes before he claimed a seat at the table here, books and already note-filled strips of paper tumbling down. "Herbs. Glyphing. Djed. Religious history and practices."

There was a connection, a binding topic that might have explained his varied focuses, but it was not spoken. It was yet a secret kept close to the hollow where his heart had been, that which drove him and, a certain pirate had once surmised, kept him standing.

"What I'm most interested in is where these subjects cross."

[Hadrian]

Leth's Wounds was only the tip of the iceberg. As their time in the little back room progressed, one or the other of them would run out to fetch a book, a scroll, a map, or, once, more writing material. Connections were made, questions leading to more questions more often than to answers, and while more and more threads appeared, the pattern only slowly came together.

Hadrian was aware of each chimed hour, but he forgot to keep count as he taxed his scholarly ability to make record of the connections in paper and ink. Though his stomach was empty, he paid no heed to it. Glyphs were deciphered, details uncovered. He kept the information as neat and intuitive as possible, though he half-imagined Caelum would disappear between one moment and the next like a desert spirit made of fire and air.

"...peyote is often utilized by desert mystics for entheogenic purposes, but also by herbalists for pain, fever, skin diseases, rheumatism, colds, and blindness..."

"...according to the demotic, this would be the glyph for 'roza' and this marker means you translate it as 'interruption' rather than its other meanings, but with the hieratic script..."

"...djed focused through a quartz prism will be clarified, while hematite amulets can absorb negativity from djed stores, but must be regularly cleaned themselves...

It went on and on, but this was Hadrian's element. When the expensive clock chimed the hour, he paused long enough to rub his hands together, crack his knuckles, and look to Caelum. The ethaefal had finally really paused, and his scribe pro tempore was eager to keep going.

"I still think you should consider the corpus hermeticum. Don't dismiss it out of hand. There have been hermeticists who studied the alchemy of herbs for medicinal purposes, and their lore has gradually become folk wisdom..."

[Caelum]

"Hermetics," he muttered and cleared his throat. It felt filled with the dust of ink and scholarship and the thin film of desperation that had never, truly, left him. The quill was laid quietly aside as he studied his own painstaking notes. They refused to be neat to the average eye, but to him his letters and squiggles constituting a private shorthand was more the work of a cartographer than a scribe.

His notes formed a map, of sorts, scattered but spiraling with all the tools of holistic medicine weighing down corners and catalytic points in what, did he dare begin drawing lines, would create a web. A vast, highly intricate web with references to an archaic religious ritual scrawled across the city of Sunberth and notes regarding the varied uses of quartz pebbling Avanthal, a combination of the runes naudiz and sowilo paired with a triggering glyph circled the place where the ancient city of Suva had once been.

"Maybe," he said, lost deep in the winds of his own thoughts, eyes scanning over his own notes while he reached for those of Hadrian's which were perused next. "Maybe.. I need an archaeowizard," his eyebrows began to draw together, "I need to learn more about dominion magic, the sort that manipulates space itself. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps hermetics does come into play.."

He trailed off as a fog, of sorts, began to encroach upon the edges of his consciousness. It left him blinking up, at Hadrian and then passed him, leaning far over the arm of his chair in an awkward act of balance in order to spy the window in the other room. It was darkening.

His comprehension of his own work, actively utilizing wisdom and broader comprehension gained before his fall, while walking the realm of Syna, beloved and adored, was fading with the light. He swallowed, thunking heavily back down in his chair, and eyed his conscripted scribe through tangles of embered hair.

"Don't stare."

[Hadrian]

Hadrian looked down at a map of pre-Valterrian Mizahar in front of him, glancing frequently to the map-like constellation of ideas and ideograms on Caelum's paper. He had his suspicions, but he realized that he was more tired than he thought. Time, mental exercise, and a lack of food had taken some out of him, but he would not give up on this experience until he had to.

"You might find an archaeowizard at the Zeltivan university if you're lucky enough to time your visit right. A few of them dabble but there are very few who can afford to immerse themselves full-time into an endeavor that rarely reaps results."

He was careful not to look at the ethaefal while he spoke.

"I've been thinking of focusing on magic since I took the advanced nader-canoch class," he said, then trailed off. This was proof that he would find his studies rewarding, but he was going to have to do some fast talking to get his parents to pay for a degree in magical studies.

[Caelum]

"Is there where you attend?" It was curiosity that spiked the question even as his eyes were closing in order not to have to watch the sunfire fade from his skin, leaving it pale as swirls of black ink trickled down.

The change, truly, was swift; but it felt interminable to him all the same. The celestial elegance of his horns shrunk and vanished even as the auburn drained out of his hair, leaving it dark as the spaces between the stars and knotted into heavy, complex braid work. Even his height altered, shifting until it was a shorter, more compact frame huddling in the chair and sun in his eyes shrunk, leaving black behind save in a thin, fading ring about his irises.

He blinked as if loosing stardust from his eyes and slowly exhaled.

[Hadrian]

"Yes," he said. "I was able to audit a class on basic magical theory, and... well... I think that's where I'm headed. Things like this..." He indicated their work. "It's fulfilling. I want to know so much. About everything. But magic is the foundation, the building block. It seems the natural course. For me."

He felt awkward now, talking about one thing and looking only at notes. He either wanted to start talking about what he was looking at, or look up at the person to whom he was talking. But Caelum's earlier interdiction had carried some invisible weight, and so he kept his eyes downcast like some demure maiden on her wedding night.

[Caelum]

"You can look now," came the resigned mutter. The drykas unwound from the chair, stretching up to his feet with shiver of weary muscles. His stomach was abruptly trying to wrap around his backbone with hunger; but he, as was typical, ignored it while prowling past Hadrian in a breath of incense and ink and into the exterior room of the shop. The light here had increased, tended to by silent servants of the shop owner, and he spun with a slow drag of broken book heels in the middle of the room.

"You ought do well," he allowed at length, nodding to himself. An intricate, needle-thin line of ink swirled about his right eye, spiking outward into sun rays. He could still remember the first time he had seen this face in a mirror, long ago in the City of the Dead. It was not a pleasant memory.

He paced towards the shelves, hands caught on the slant of hips and the frayed hems of dark leather trousers whispering against the scuffed toes of his boots. A tilt of his head took in the numerous titles anew. He was torturing himself. His mind, stripped of certain memories by the very moonlight, was incapable of fully comprehending his own notes taken during the daytime. He could, however, pursue other matters that might ultimately assist.

A book on cartography was selected, and next a scarred, worn looking text on lost magical disciplines.