Flashback The More You Know (Keene)

[Marion Kay]

52 Spring 513 AV
Wright Memorial Library

Eleven days had passed since Marion had arrived in the port city, scraping the Kabrin dirt from her boots, and there were eleven more days standing between her and the last leg of her journey. Sunberth awaited, and she hoped to the gods that it was everything she had been brought to expect. Few people she met ever wanted to discuss it, but when they did, they offered disparaging mutterings of chaos and unsolicited suggestions that a young lady like herself ought to stay away from such an abysmal place.

But how could she? It drew her in, less like a moth to flame and more like a child to honey. She wanted it, and that was all the incentive she needed. In any case, it certainly couldn't be any worse than Syliras. She'd been trapped in the citadel for all of winter, snared in its endless tedium, harassed by the constant clink clink clinking of knights' armor. Some would say it was the sound of freedom, of progress. She argued the very opposite -- or, at least, she would have if the knights had allowed her kind of fervent dissent, but it apparently did not align their opinion on what was considered "helpful, civilized, or polite".

Zeltiva wasn't much better, truth be told, but at least one could scratch their bum without having the action scrutinized by every guard in the vicinity. It smelled better too. Granted, there was a pervasive fishiness in the salty breeze, but at least she could feel the breeze, as opposed to the stagnant air of the City of Peace. She'd be lying if she said Zeltiva wasn't an improvement, but it still lacked what she wanted. More accurately, it still had too much of what she didn't want. Structure. Rules. Limitation.

At least this place had the good sense to keep the library open to the public. The knights hadn't, and perhaps that was what drove her maddest of all during her stay. It provided her with no escape. As a child, Alvadas's Sunken Conundrum had been her safe haven, her harbor in the storm. She would have been able to understand if Syliras simply had no such place within its walls. But to have an entire gallery of knowledge walled off to the common man? It was utterly cruel. So it was with some amount of relief that she had discovered Zeltiva had not only a rather impressive library, but that it was open to the public as well.

But it had taken her the better part of the last few bells to figure out why she couldn't shake the itch at the back of her mind, that sense that something was wrong -- or, at the very least, not quite right. There was a certain quietude about the place, though that certainly wasn't the problem. The library she'd grown up in was much the same. Perhaps more so. It was difficult to make much racket under water, after all. But there was something oddly maddening about this silence, as if it were imposed with a pressure greater than the simple weight of water. Expectation.

Expectation of peace and reticence. Expectation that certain protocols would be followed. Expectation of order, expectation that everything would be found in its proper place.

This realization had come to her quietly, slithering to the forefront of her mind with every step that wound her further into the jungle of stacks. It was no surprise. There was no escaping the heavy thumb of the Powers That Be, no matter how sick of it Marion was.

And she was quite sick of it.

So it was that now, nearly a bell after this thought had come to fruition, Marion found herself stalking through row upon row of books, gaze flicking from one spine to the next, arms already full of a collection of volumes ranging from proper goat care to the intricacies of sail positioning. There was a steely resolution in her eyes, tempered with the knowledge that what she did here would undoubtedly be undone as soon as it was discovered. She'd have to do what she could while she could.

She'd managed to commandeer a table near the back of the library from what she assumed to be a pair a students from the University, easily shooing them away in a cloud of annoyance with pestering questions and some too-loud page shuffling. Now it was a makeshift base of operations for this little mission, tucked away from plain view as she worked with a feverish kind of ardor. Her leather boots sat kicked under the table, discarded once she'd discovered she could work both quieter and quicker without them, and her coat lay draped haphazardly across the back of one of the chairs. Upon her return, the books she cradled were scattered across the wooden tabletop with hushed thuds. Marion would have liked to make more noise, certainly, but if she drew a librarian's suspicions (or, worse yet, if someone decided to report her to a librarian) then her task would go unfinished.

Still, an absentminded hum rose from her throat every now and again as she perused the various texts she gathered. It was a soft tune, neither happy nor sad, an Alvadan lullaby her mother had sung often while doing busy work around the house. Marion would have recognized if she'd been paying attention, though it would have immediately fallen dead on her lips if she had.

On the table, she arranged the books she'd gathered, placing in pairs those topics she felt to be the most distinctly different. A History of Human Anatomical Studies with The Laughter Effect, a captain's journal of trade routes to cities near Zeltiva with a report of a Kelvic breeding experiment, Everyday Mathematics vol. VI with a collection of popular Syliran children's stories. Once finished, she grabbed the pairs and began to make her way through the stacks once again, searching for a section that had as much in common with the first pair of works as they had with each other.

It was an easier task than she would have thought, and she quickly decided that anatomy and laughter have little to do with geography. Neither did math or tall tales, for that matter, and she assuredly slid both pairs onto the shelf, withdrawing another book to rearrange later as she did so.

[Keene Ward]

The library was, as it always was, a silent temple of knowledge that he had yet to find the limit of. There were few things Keene knew on an intimate level, and while the potential to expand his knowledge far behind his limited proclivities existed in numbers far out reaching the thousands, there was something to be said for relevancy. He knew what he knew and he knew no more, so to speak. Thus, his near daily trips to the library to peruse through the journals of old sailors or recounts of strange weather patterns from centuries ago was always something that sparked what was as close to excited anticipation as Keene ever got after his initiation. There was simply so much to learn, to read, to understand, and to think about, that it was rare for him to ever truly finish a book.

So it was in the way he conducted himself that day. He'd begun with a small novella of a poet from the city of Riverfall, the blank verse structure translating poorly into Common, though the strange tongue from which it was taken seemed attractive enough. A certain phrase - "With lights of purple fury descending from the skies like fire" - was quick to draw his interest away from the literary mess and onto a search for anything regarding the meteorological subject of lightning. There was something about the nature of the poem, the manner in which it had described the angular bolts as fire that had set his mind ablaze. He had located several more books, and was on his way back to his table that he had frequented so much and so often an occasion that its ownership seemed to have shifted into his hands, whether by intent or not, when he spotted a sight strange enough for his grey-green gaze to pause and watch with a curious frown.

She moved quietly, her bare feet padding across the polished, worn floor of the establishment as if she were within her own home - if her home had been a place to inspire such a strange fire within her gaze as she scanned the shelves she so furtively passed. Books were stacked in her arms, their titles obscured by distance and position, but it seemed she was returning them to their place. The manner in which she conducted herself, however, was suspicious, in that each time a book was placed, a smile of the utmost satisfaction curled her hips, often complimenting the muted melody she so quietly hummed.

Trailing behind her as she whisked herself away, Keene inspected the books she'd replaced, his brow raising in confusion as he found two very different volumes in what seemed to be a section dedicated to history upon further inspection. It had taken him a while to realize that the librarians categorized the books in such a way as to group them by subject matter (and from there, author if it was available) so that the tomes could be more easily located. What the stunning young blonde had done, however, was something that Keene didn't understand in the slightest. She had replaced the order with chaos and had done so gleefully. Having little experience with people outside of what he knew from them in his books and journals, Keene was unaware of the purpose of pranks. He removed the two books before following behind the woman, his own footsteps soft and quiet.

He tried to keep several shelf's worth of distance from the happy grin of disorder, as it wasn't difficult to follow in the wake of her rearrangement. It was curious how different the books were from those around them, certainly something planned and not haphazard, though again, the question of "why" was hardly answered. There were books missing from the collections as well; where the shelves should have been tightly packed, there would be a leaning volume or a gap in the natural order. It seemed the woman intended to spread her work throughout the stacks, infecting - as it were - the library with her own personalized disease. Rather than collect the books to preserve the proper order, Keene began to replace those already in his hands in an arbitrary manner, an attempt to understand the psychology behind the woman's actions.

He felt little more than the simple relief of a release from the menial weight of the books he'd been carrying. There was no inclination to smile, nor did the act of random shelving give him any sort of pleasure. Whatever her reasons, they seemed personal. Eventually, she had paused long enough that his presence would be noted, and Keene stepped forward, preemptively addressing the fact he'd been following her. It had happened to him several years ago, and he had found Matthew's candid explanation to be marginally helpful in assuaging some of his misgivings about the man. Some.

His voice was soft and cool, like a steady winter's breeze that floated gently, void of little else beyond a hint of inquisitiveness. "May I ask you a question?" As he did so, Keene removed a book to his right, replacing it with one of the three he'd gathered on his journey - The Cry of a Wolf in substitution for The Crystals of the Sylira Region - though his eyes were fixed upon the woman's face, only glancing away to perform his task. "What does this accomplish?" There was no undercurrent of accusation, no haughty condescension of her efforts, only a curiosity, a faint desire to understand the method to her madness. Keene's eyes blinked blankly at her as he waited for what she might say. Rudeness was not something he understood well, nor was politeness. He had a question he wanted an answer to, and the only one who might provide it was right in front of him. He'd done his investigations in the hope that such things would reveal the nature of the mystery to him, but the only thing he'd discovered was how little he understood about her actions. They were strange, but they were methodical. It was a combination he had yet to run into, which made the blue-eyed feline of a human to be all the more interesting to him.

[Marion Kay]

Leather and paper rustled in her hand and against her shirt as she cupped them close -- not out of any sense of reverence, but it wouldn't do for Marion to lose her grip and send the books clattering across the floor. For every two she sorted away, two more were withdrawn from somewhere else, her fingers flitting across shelves and spines, eyes dancing across long titles, short titles, simple titles, artistic titles, and some with no titles at all.

Those intrigued her the most, the nameless ones, and as she worked she found herself pulling them most often, sometimes only to put them back a tick later once she realized it was nothing more than some farmer's scribblings about the crop harvest that summer or a student's outdated notes (or, more often, doodles) taken during class. A few did make it into her current selection though, leaving empty gaps in otherwise neat rows, and she took small delights in leaving those fractures in her wake.

Someone had once told her, in a fit of horror, that she broke everything she touched. Marion knew the truth, of course, that with every crooked page and leaning tome, with every skip of her pale feet on the floors here, and with every twist of her flesh and echoed scream that bore like a wave through her mind, she was fixing. She was repairing a world already broken, carving a new reality from one that had been allowed to grow too twisted and too ravenous, hungry, like a parasite, to devour the very forces that had borne it.

That was her purpose, she knew; to see the world remade anew. And a grand purpose at that. But the Valterrian didn't end in a day, and though Marion had little patience to speak of, she was content to start small here and now. Small actions built upon one another over time. She, above all, knew the truth in that concept. She was a product of it. And later, everyone in this world who reveled in their limitation would all be staring into the maw of some great nightmare and left wondering where it had all gone wrong.

So for now she wove her way through knowledge so precisely stacked, and so enraptured was she in this task that Marion was entirely unaware of the shadow that tagged along in her wake. It wasn't until she was forced to pause and adjust the gradually sliding books in her arms, shifting them before their corners bit bruises into her skin, that she became acutely aware of the other presence in the aisle. She turned slightly on her feet to peer at the person through a mask of cool blue eyes, her subtle humming dying off in the middle of a note. A boy, it seemed. Or perhaps a man. She couldn't tell, and his pasty skin and feminine lips did little in they way of helping her, though she estimated he couldn't have been much older than she was herself. That frown, however, would certainly give him wrinkles before his time, and the thought brought a self-amused smirk to her face.

Marion was still trying to determine whether or not he was one of the library attendants and what she should do if he was, when his voice cut the dead air between them. A question to ask a question. This, too, amused her. "You already have," she might have said, if he had waited for her answer, "So you might as well." But the ticks were piddling away and the volumes she carried grew heavier in her arms, and she was just as inclined to skirt away from the intruder as she was to field whatever question he had for her.

In another lifetime, she was sure that the boy would have unnerved to her some degree. His gaze was too intent, too prying, too calculating, too cold. Colder even than her own, which more often found itself chilled with anger than... whatever it was she saw in his eyes. They weren't dispassionate, not entirely, for there was a peculiar inquisitiveness about them, though it was less of a childlike curiosity and more like the analytical gaze of a scientist. It reminded her of when the Alvadan boys sliced open the mice they would catch from time to time, dissecting first with their blades, then with their minds. Of course, they would always wind up flicking guts around soon after, and that didn't seem like the kind of pastime in which this boy, with his calm tones and measured movements, would engage. It didn't surprise Marion that he failed to grasp her purpose here.

"What does it accomplish," she repeated sportively with a dramatic wiggle of her eyebrows. A sly grin edged its way onto her face as if she were dangling a secret before his very eyes. She was fully prepared to tell him the answer (she was not yet compelled to lie in these situations -- that would come later, when the indiscriminate chaos of Sunberth began to wear on even her nerves) but she was in no position to do so at the moment, with texts stacked to her collar threatening to spill from her embrace whenever she turned too sharply or breathed too heavily.

He'd already proven he was up to the task of following, so with an incline of her head she bid him follow once more, padding to the end of the aisle and taking the walkway there back to the table she'd captured, talking as she did so. "It accomplishes chaos, of course," she began simply, and in a tone that would have paired nicely with a dismissive wave of the hand if she'd had one free to spare. "But what's more..." She reached the table in short order, and gingerly bent to release the books into two clumsy stacks. A couple fell from the top of one pile with soft thumps. "... It breaks expectation."

She turned to face him at that, blonde hair whirling, but rather than advancing towards him she leaned backwards against the table, tapping knowingly at her temple before bracing both her hands against the wooden edge. Her voice was a purr as she continued, quietly delighted. It was a rare thing in this region, to come across someone interested in her crusade without persecuting her for them, or so that had been her experience. "And expectation is a nasty beast. Imagine, people come in here every day, find precisely what they're looking for, and leave. There's no real thought involved, nothing to give them pause, nothing to cause them to consider why they're doing what they're doing and why they're being told to do it." There was an obvious contempt creeping into her tone, and she waved it away, tossing her right hand loftily. "But if people find something they weren't expecting... Well, maybe it will make them consider." She neglected telling him the particulars and sentimental significance of her methods -- like how she made sure to place the books in pairs because she didn't want them to be alone in a strange place -- because they were ultimately unimportant to the grand scheme. "Anyway, there's a whole big philosophy around it that I'm hesitant to waste time explaining.

"But --" she paused to reach behind her, a hint of a cheshire grin playing at the corners of her mouth as she plucked a book from the top of the pile. It was thin and bound in leather that had perhaps once been softened by touch but had since hardened through years of neglect. No title graced its outside face. After a tick of turning it over in her own fingers, she tossed it at the boy's chest, relying on him to catch it but altogether unconcerned with whether or not he actually managed to do so. "Feel free to help out."

[Keene Ward]

The improper echo of his question was enough for Keene to partially mirror the movement of the woman's brows with a slight raise of his own as she spoke. Her smile seemed prompted from internal stimuli, as Keene doubted his own words had been something to spark such a reaction, and as his grey-green eyes scanned the enigmatic curl of her pink lips and playful blue of her own gaze, Keene found little to answer his question in physiognomy alone. He remained in his place, books in arm, as he continued to wait for whatever the true response was that seemed to be lurking just shy of a verbal exchange. At he beckon, Keene followed. He was well learned in the ways of attending to the commands of others, and the blonde was no different from those he'd met before. And, as was almost always the case, she let words pass over her shoulder to drift back to him, carried on the gentle sway of her hips that still managed to move in spite of the bookish burden.

He stopped short of the table, eyes slowly moving over the features and details of the scene that unfolded before him as she gave her cryptic explanation. Chaos could be accomplished through an infinite number of different manners, all for the end goal of the original sake. To act in such as manner as she for the simple outcome of chaos seemed strange to him, not necessarily frivolous or foolish, but certainly strange. As a few books found their ways from the tops and middles of their stacks down to the age polished wood of the table below, Keene's eyes followed the trajectories, his face impassive. He saw little practical use for breaking expectations. Expectations existed to streamline both interactions with others and life around them. If one expected something to be there and it was, it cut out the time of wondering whether it would be there or not. Keene expected food to fill him, rain to fall when the clouds grew dark, and Mella to shout and scream if he were to do something inane and foolish. Without those expectations, life suddenly became an uncertain and messy place. To invite such disorder in was to shoo out that which made life function on a most basic level. If it were her desire to snuff out the simplicity of life, however, he supposed it was a steady step in that direction.

When she turned to fully address him, her hands and arms free of the burdens of discarded and decategorized knowledge, Keene stared back at her, his frown stayed for the moment as he listened to her reasonings. Much to his undeclared surprise, the woman thought of expectation in a completely different manner from which he had imagined it. It streamlined, yes, but in that process, she seemed to think that the swiftness of execution passed over things that were, in essence, as important or perhaps more so. It was unreasonable, and the more Keene thought about it, the more sound it seemed to him. Knowledge was gained through exposure to new materials. While Keene tended to avoid going out of his way to meet new faces, he rarely ever read a book upon a single subject at a time during any of his visits to the library. There was so much to learn, to understand, that to methodically go through each and every tome with the intent of reading within each predetermined category was just as efficient as picking up a random journal each day and moving on from there. It also provided a bit more interest.

So, as the woman concluded, she did not do so for the sake of chaos, but rather for the higher order. Whether she intended it in such a way or not, Keene found rhyme and reason to her methods and ideology. It was an exercise in edification. By placing things to be found by those looking for other things, those things found would lead to discoveries that would have otherwise remained undiscovered. It was an intervention into the potential of man, a game - of sorts - to find and declare those dogged enough to take part a place unwonted but, perhaps, far greater than they might have ever imagined. In a way, Keene found it to be surprisingly philanthropic, though he said nothing on the matter. It was difficult to truly know what the woman's intentions were beyond the words she spoke and the manner in which he understood them. If he were wrong about her, it made little difference, as the end result of her efforts would be unchanged by intent.

As she tossed the book at him, Keene calmly watched it arch through the air. It landed with a sharp thunk slightly off center of his sternum, the corner of the spine digging into his thinly protected chest before dropping down into his waiting hands. Though the impact had been startling, Keene keep his features steady as he looked down at the physical invitation. He supposed there was plenty more to learn from the woman, and as he'd never seen her before that he could remember, it was quite possible he only had a limited window during which he could learn from her. Barring a disaster of proportions unlikely to occur, the library would remain for him until he was no longer able to make use of it. The feline creature of professed chaos was far more likely to disappear beneath the heavy weave of time. With a few, short steps, Keene moved over to the table, gathering up several more before turning his gaze to meet her own. "Where should we begin then?"