Aya emptied her workstation with a few hurried armfuls of scrolls, placing them on the shelf the junior librarian had cleared. After depositing her pack under the table, she sat down and, with great care, arranged the glowing scroll in front of her. It seemed like a miracle that out of the thousands of scrolls in the room, this precise one had chosen to fall to the ground with the slam of the door. Contrary to the flame-like glow, the paper felt crisp and cool to the touch. She analyzed the scroll from all angles and realized there were actually two separate sheets rolled together.
Part of her thought she should err on the side of caution and wait for Aizan or one of the other librarians to take a look at the irregular scroll. She didn’t need to antagonize them any further by defiling one of their rare and special scrolls. One day of scroll transcription did not make her the regional scroll-master, but the scroll definitely didn’t fit into the normal scroll category. If the cool flames that surrounded it weren’t enough proof of that, there was also the oddity of the velvet ribbon that held it together.
Almost all of the scrolls Aya came across either didn’t need any fastening or were held together by thin strips of leather. Every now and then, she would come across one that was tied in yarn or twine. On the other end of the spectrum were scrolls held together with ornate, metal badge-like clasps displaying the house crest of some noble family that was clearly compensating for something. Aya had learned to avoid these as they were often works of a wanna-be-scholar in the family.
The soft crimson ribbon in her hands was decorated in the same style as the border of many of the scrolls she had transcribed. Aya guessed it was a fad of a time period, though she didn’t know what time period and some really old transcripts cast doubt on her theory. The floral patterns were often a nice reprieve after a dozen or so bare scrolls. She greatly enjoyed the written information on the pages but every now and then, it was nice to give her artistic side a little freedom to doodle away the floral borders.
Seeing the border pattern stretched out on the half-inch ribbon stirred a certain familiarity in her. It was like a word on the tip of her tongue that she just couldn’t remember. Eventually, she decided it was just the oddity of seeing the pattern presented differently. By the time Aya remembered her cautious side that didn’t want to further anger the librarians, she was already undoing the ribbon and setting it aside. Her curiosity got the better of her and she justified it with the fact that she had tried to tell Aizan about it. It was not her fault if he chose not to listen.
The ribbon slipped smoothly aside and before Aya could touch the paper, it unfurled itself so it rested unnaturally flat on the table. As she suspected, there was another piece of paper curled inside, but unlike the outer one, it remained curled and bobbed from side to side after its parent abandoned him. The behavior of the paper unsettled Aya a bit. She had to remind herself that it was just a game before picking up the interior piece of paper that was displaying more natural, scroll-like behavior. Then again, perhaps she was the one going crazy in the small room. After all, wasn’t it she who had just personified and assigned a parent to a lifeless piece of parchment?
Sighing in resignation, she spread the interior piece out beside the other, using paperweights to keep it from curling back up. Side by side, she compared the contents of the scrolls and realized they were completely different. While the interior sheet contained the smallest and most cramped writing she had seen so far, filling every section of the page, the contents of the outside page were the real surprise. The page itself was almost completely blank, the right side particularly so. The surprising feature was the familiar runes on the document.
Instead of the circles upon circles of runes she had puzzled together, the document only had two. They were both on the left side, one inside the other. When Aya unconsciously leaned down to get a closer look, she was surprised to feel heat rising from the previously cool document. Holding her hand above the page, she noticed that only the left side felt warm. Directing her attention to the right, she tried to work out the strange empty, incomplete feeling she got from it.
It seemed that for all intents and purposes, runes were just randomly thrown about the page, but when she angled her head and looked closer, she realized that the right side was also a circle of runes, a very incomplete circle. By the time she noticed, Aya was holding the scroll in her hand while she analyzed the right side. It was disconcerting to feel the coolness of the back paired with the heat of the front left and neutral temperature of the front right part of the scroll.
Focused on the scroll, Aya didn’t notice when Henry began to rummage through the abandoned pile of scrolls on the ground. They were soon spread in disarray around the whole room and he eventually encountered the pack she had laid aside. Emboldened by her inattention, he rummaged for the viscous and addicting substance she kept hidden from him.
Aya was too busy trying to understand the scroll to notice when Henry succeeded in not only finding but pecking a hole into one of her blood-filled water bags. She could make out some of the runes, remembering the ones that had given her particular trouble during the manic creature challenge. It was one thing to recognize a rune and a completely different thing to understand them. Still puzzling over the runes and their potential importance, she transcribed them as she had so many other scrolls before.
Maybe it was a consequence of the runic puzzle she had solved, but Aya couldn’t help looking at the incomplete right side without feeling the urge to finish it. The interior notes she transcribed only fueled the need when she realized it contained instructions on how to decipher the runic circles. The scholar responsible for the notes explained how he came across an almost-complete, runic circle by accident, engraved in an ancient tomb. He went into detail about how he kept the rest of his research party from discovering any of the Forgotten Knowledge he uncovered. Although it was interesting that he went to such lengths to keep others from a couple of runes, especially since the scholar himself seemed to be drawing various untested conclusions, she wished he had spent more time explaining the actual runes and their meanings.
It was vague and the scholar was not very clear with his words, but Aya eventually worked out that the two left circles were complete and had the power to capture a Corrupted Creature. Aya still remembered the initial explanation of how Era’s gates were being unlocked to allow Corrupted Creatures into the world, but she still hadn’t encountered any herself. The right circle, in turn, was meant to ‘free’ the captured creature. It was counterintuitive and Aya wondered why the man even bothered with the right runic circle. But later in the notes, he went into great detail on how he had worked out the positions of the few runes by discerning the ‘exact opposite’ rune on the right circle. She figured there was something she wasn’t quite understanding, some piece of information the man thought so basic he hadn’t included it. Aya really wished he had.
Even more curious as to the effect of the right circle, she couldn’t help just staring at it, wishing she had the knowledge to complete it. The scholar’s notes described months of work to place only the dozen or so runes of the circles on the right. There were two, one inside the other, just like the left ones. She sighed, knowing a couple of hours wouldn’t be nearly enough time to even make a dent into finding the answer.
Aya tried to roll the original scroll up as she had found it, but every time she rolled up the temperamental outside scroll, it would snap back open on the table. Needless to say, it was very strange behavior for a scroll and she considered trying force along with the ribbon, but decided against it since setting it aside coincided with her personal interests. She set it in the topmost right corner of the table and got up to find another scroll to transcribe.
Distracted by looking at the time and looking at the shelf of previously separated scrolls, Aya didn’t even notice the ever messier state of the ground. She would have been horrified to find a handful of scrolls seeping in the blood her much-beloved, and nearly extinct, blood-partner had spilled, but instead she just sat back down, ignorant of the ever-worsening disaster zone around her.
She had spent over thirty minutes investigating the scrolls and was very conscious of how much time she had left before the librarians showed up, if they showed up. Knowing she couldn’t give them any more reason to kick her out, especially after Aizan’s threat, she decided that too much time had already been wasted with the glowing scroll, regardless of how special and tempting it seemed.
Full of purpose and resolve, she opened the new scroll, only to find the familiar border on the edges of the page. Her eyes darted back to the still-glowing and beckoning scroll, but she forced them towards the task at hand and began the familiar process of transcription. As always, she began with the writing on the page. It was much easier to eye the positioning and sizing of letters than the floral pattern of the border, especially since the pattern was always slightly different. It even looked like it was added on as an afterthought.
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Happy with the distraction of the border, she was absent-mindedly doodling along when something clicked into place. Her hand froze. The runic puzzle, the ribbon, the border patterns and the glowing scroll, all the clues finally fit together and she was able to remember her forgotten word. Not sure if she should trust her instincts, she leaned over the scroll she was transcribing to get a closer look.
Her eyes widened involuntarily along with the grin on her face; it was there. In the page’s floral border there were hidden runes. She recognized a few from memory and after bringing the glowing scroll closer, she recognized a couple more. Aya could barely contain her excitement as she rifled through her notebook, happy she had decided to copy the borders of the scrolls after all.
At first, she had wondered if she should waste time on it, but eventually, she had decided to draw them out as well. There weren’t many of the bordered scrolls, it was a nice break from the monotonous work and her entrepreneurial self couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Having exact copies of library documents might be useful in the future.
The smile dominating her face when she found the borders soon gave way to a concentrated frown. She could work out where the runes were, though some were tricky to find, and she wondered if she’d found them all, but what good were they to her? Aya’s excitement ebbed.
The only page that gave the runes any meaning were the cramped notes of the scholar. In them, he gave the definition of over a hundred runes. Most of them were used in the complete left circle of runes on the glowing scroll. Their meanings centered around ties, purity, balance, neutralization and containment. After all, its purpose was to capture a Corrupted Creature.
The runes used on the incomplete right circle were of the opposite nature. They related to choice, freedom, peace and movement. Using the meanings available to her, Aya scanned the borders once again. She took a couple minutes to write out all of the runes that she could find, though she kept re-checking the borders in case she missed any. She missed a lot.
In the end, she had meanings for less than a fifth of the runes. Flipping through the pages, she considered her next move. All of the borders were different with different runes, but to what end? The information was being hidden from someone, but from who and why? These questions were running through her mind when she stopped to look at the scroll she had the most deciphered runes for.
With only about a quarter of the runes, she couldn’t even begin to infer the rest of the meanings. Sighing, she turned her attention to the writing on the page, wondering if- really, just hoping - there was some sort of hidden key. But if there was a key, how would she know how to find it? Or what it would look like? After trying to read it sideways, backwards and even diagonally, she couldn’t find anything that made sense. She was about to take out another scroll so she could compare them side by side when she noticed the subject matter of the scroll. It described in detail how to catch, cage and tame a Rockyno.
A small inkling of an idea came to her and she quickly leafed to a different page to check if it could be true. It was a page about the great escape of Sylfia, the water princess that wanted to be with the fire prince. A real Romeo and Juliet story. But the subject didn’t matter; what mattered was that the runes for ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ were both in the border. It was a translation!
The new revelation brought another excited shiver. She smiled and leafed through the other scrolls just to be sure. Her theory confirmed, she set about trying to decipher the runes. If it was worth hiding in the margins, it was worth knowing. The scholar had called it the Forgotten Knowledge and had gone through all kinds of trouble to keep it hidden. If the man was willing to do all that, then the information was definitely worth something. Perhaps even enough to help her fix her Goldilocks player ranking. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad that she had ended up in jail after all.
Emboldened, she turned quill to a new page in her notebook and started making a list of all the distinct runes. It was a daunting task. With more than five hundred distinct runes, she doubted she would be able to work anything out. Aggravated, she wondered where to even start. Picking up a scroll, she wondered how the next person could make heads or tails from the scroll. The runes were all jumbled about in no particular order. As she thought about that, she realized she might be onto something, she leaned in closer.
At first she couldn’t see anything that pointed to an order of any kind. She even gave up on the first scroll and moved back to the one about Sylfia. It was there that she realized that each rune was connected to two other runes by the vines in the pattern, all with the exception of two: the head and the tail of the tale. She had never been happier over the standard format of a story. Without a beginning, a middle and an end, she doubted she would have worked it out.
Taking out a page of her notebook, she rewrote all of the runes in the order in which they appeared. Aya wasn’t quite sure what was the beginning and what was the end, but she figured she could work it out with the written original. By the time she made her last string of runes, they flowed much more easily from the quill.
Although more runes were already translated on the Rockyno scroll, she started with Sylfia’s simply because she knew which side was the beginning. It was slow going, but having the scholar’s definite meanings served as landmarks that she could use to gauge where in the translation she was supposed to be. The first time around, she left many blank, but as she caught rune repetitions, she was able to create even more landmarks. Every now and then, she guessed at a meaning and was completely off, forcing her to redo a lot of the work.
By the time she was translating the fourth document, she was noticeably better at it, guessing right more often than not. It helped to have the runes used in different scenarios throughout the different scrolls, as it allowed her to narrow down the possibilities of the meaning. She was so focused on the task that she didn’t even notice her hand beginning to cramp until her quill suddenly blotthed the whole paper with ink and tore a hole into the page.
Aya cursed under her breath while quickly dabbing at the ink with the bottom of her shirt.
“That’s the problem with short sleeves…” she muttered.
As the ink dried up, she sat back and sighed. She let her head sink back as she rolled her shoulders that were also cramped. Now that she was listening to her body, she realized she was pretty much hurting everywhere. Even her inactive legs felt like they weren’t getting enough circulation. She needed to stand up and move around a bit. Her progress excited her and she wanted to get right back to it, but she could spare a minute to let her virtual body rest. She almost chuckled at the fact that she was stretching a figment of her imagination. Why anyone would welcome the pain that was just as bad, if not worse than…
Both her chuckle and her thoughts died when her eyes registered the state of the room. Aya could feel the blood draining from her face as she took in the bloodied ground and crumpled scrolls. Her items were scattered all about the room and there were bird tracks everywhere. Literally everywhere. It was like the bird had purposefully walked into the puddle of blood like it was a ink-stamp cartridge, and then proceeded to find as many scrolls as possible to walk and leave his mark on.
The blood slowly, and then quickly returned to her face with a vengeance. She jumped to her feet, toppling the chair over. Aya cringed when she saw it land and crumple even more scrolls. The sight of Henry walking into a big puddle of drying blood redirected her attention.
“You little piece of…”
She was so angry, she could barely express herself. It was an anger drenched in fear and panic. Aya checked the time. There were only two hours left. Her heart thrummed in her throat as she thought of the consequences. If she didn’t find a way to clean the room before they returned she would be gone. And if she was gone she would never find the secrets of the scroll. She might need more scrolls to transcribe. She had to find more bordered scrolls. And after she filled out the right circle, if it was even possible, she needed the original.
Both her notebook copy and the copy she made for the library didn’t glow like the original. There was obviously something special about it, something inside it. She didn’t know if ‘freeing’ a Corrupted Creature was a good idea, but she had a feeling there was more to it. But if she was kicked out she would never find out and it was all because of the damn bird.
She balled her fists and marched toward him. Henry was looking away and didn’t notice her approach until she was almost upon him, but when he sensed her, he immediately took off. Aya scampered after him but was unable to even get close to him. In closed quarters, he had the advantage and he knew it. After wasting a whole minute on it, she decided it would be a waste of time. A gratifying waste of time, but a waste of time nonetheless. What she really needed to do was clean the place up and take stock of the situation.
Five minutes later she had her things repacked, the blood cleaned up and the scrolls sorted by damage. During her cleaning spree, Aya realized an additional problem: she hadn’t transcribed a single scroll. Well, she had transcribed one but after all the effort she put into the project, she didn’t want to give it away, especially since she would run the risk of them taking it away from her, unfinished.
Henry was still running freely about the room, but without blood and further ‘tools of disaster’ there was not that much damage to be done. She directed a glare at him filled with promises of later retribution. Before beginning, she put away the glowing scroll, hiding it amongst the thousands of other scrolls. Its glow had gone undetected for years; she hoped it would continue to do so for the next couple of hours. Her mind itched to tackle the translation again, but she forced herself to return to the workstation, cursing her previous transcription speed.
She would never be able to transcribe enough to satisfy Aizan in the two hours that were left. After his explicit statement concerning her skill’s function as her only saving grace, she knew that a failure to perform would be fatal in her case. Her library privileges, her game sentence, her player ranking, her real-life sentence, her entire future hinged on her performance during the next couple of hours.
Aya picked up her quill and started transcribing the first and most Henry-damaged scroll. Ignoring the splotches of blood and pecks at the parchment, she tried not to think about how Henry might have already decided her future for her.