The entrance to the library was more difficult to find than Zeke expected. He roved the streets looking down at the charcoal smudged on his arm for reference and finding it wholly unhelpful. A shopkeeper chided him for walking straight into his cart while he was trying to figure out where he was. Finally Zeke took his sleeve and rubbed the charcoal off his skin in frustration. Maps just didn’t get you anywhere in Alvadas.
After he pestered the annoyed shopkeep for some direction, Zeke headed down a narrow alley covered in what looked like thick yellow moss, then took a right into a wider street full of people. Then he closed his eyes and began to turn himself around and around, disorienting himself in hopes that this state would help him find what he was looking for. It was a ridiculous plan, but he was hungry and apples were delicious.
With his eyes still closed Zeke fumbled his way forward, with no idea of what direction he was off to. He heard the scuffle of feet moving to avoid the stumbling blind minstrel as he just kept walking. The ridiculous plan ended when he slammed face first into a brick wall. Zeke grabbed his face and swore in pain, opening his eyes on reflex. He turned around from the wall, rubbing his nose, to see a cluster of people watching him.
“Oh, thanks for letting me know about that wall there,” he spat sarcastically. The cluster just dispersed with a few strange looks sent his way. Heh. You’d think that this was their first time in this city. Stranger things have happened.
He spent a moment trying to pull apart the scowl that so rarely found his face and bring himself back to calm, basic smile again. Eh. At least it wasn’t raining.
Zeke finally found the Sunken Conundrum Library almost half an hour later. He trudged up the stone steps of the entrance, dusted himself off and reached for the door handle, but when he opened the door he was greeted by a wall of water! He jumped backwards, expecting all the water to crash down on him, but it just....stayed in. Zeke slowly crept back up to the giant rippling wall and stuck a finger into it. Through some spelled ward the water was somehow contained in the building, and from the looks of it the entire library was filled wall to wall with the stuff. If this was the case, how was he supposed to...He glanced at the inside of the door and found a big, clearly lettered sign:
Please Remember to Breathe
Ah. Of course. This was all just a fascinating illusion. Zeke wondered for a moment how it was done. Something that utilized light refraction perhaps? He chuckled and stepped right in...to a large body of water. The door swung shut behind him.
Not an illusion! NOT an illusion! He panicked, bubbles coming out of his mouth and his feet kicking into action. Then he remembered the sign and suddenly choked as he felt a strange tickling, burny sensation on his chest. He looked down inside his shirt and discovered that apparently his ribcage had grown gills. Zeke finally let out the breath he’d been trying to hold and took an uncomfortable gasp of water. Ugh. He shuddered and took stock of his surroundings. The place was like any other library really, with the exception that he was floating delicately on his feet and his clothes were rippling around him. Oh, and he was breathing water.
“Can I help you?’ The voice was unfiltered by the dissonant underwater sounds in his ears. He looked up and saw that an older woman in a very distinguished outfit was staring down at him through her spectacles. He just stared at her curiously. She sighed and grumbled something under her...gill breath. (Zeke was having trouble with this concept)
“You may speak freely, child, that’s what the magic’s there for,” she snapped.
“Oh, of course, sorry,” Zeke said, surprised to find that no bubbles were leaving his mouth. Oh great. He was now in a state of constant drowning. He haltingly began to speak.
“I’m looking for some books on early fables, maybe some adventure stories-- swashbuckling, chaos-sewing, damsel-chasing, the like.”
“Of course,” she drawled. “But first, the fee.”
Zeke gulped. “Fee?”
The scary underwater librarian reached out an open palm to Zeke and clarified,
“1 gold miza for entry.”
He took a moment to review his options: Without a good story to tell at the fire, Micah would be cross with him, and the patrons that came for his stories would be unsatisfied. If he paid to find some good material, he’d have to skip dinner and a few more breakfasts, but he’d be more successful in the long run. Sighing, he took out the coin and gave it to the librarian. She tapped it suspiciously with a fingernail, then nodded and gestured to a nearby shelf with some colorfully bound books and some thicker tomes at the nearly mile-high top.
“Check the bottom first, I’m sure those will match your reading level,” the librarian said disdainfully, looking him up and down before returning to her book behind the desk. Zeke found himself gritting his teeth behind a smirk and clumsily doggy-paddled his way towards the shelf. He slid out the first brightly bound book he laid his hands on and opened it to a random page.
There he found the tale of Sir Ghadriel of Sylrias, a brave fighter who took on a battalion of men to defend the underprivileged serfs of old from a terrible king. Meh, too black and white. He tossed the book---ahem--carefully placed the book back in the exact position he found it in, and took out another one. This one was more interesting. A crew of vagabonds led by a particularly nasty brigand ride around pillaging until they’re all gruesomely devoured by a huge bear for their trouble. There was another story in the book about a little girl who ‘s distracted and tricked by a wolf and then made to do questionable things...and be gruesomely devoured. Eugh. Too creepy, Zeke thought, putting that one down almost immediately.
Each story he found he thought a little about, trying to find out the major themes of each one, the motivations of the characters and how they went about solving their problems. He studied the protagonists and antagonists of each and what conflicts they had to go through to emerge victorious. Zeke found he liked the barely-palatable happy endings where you weren’t sure who to trust, or someone you thought was the hero turns out to be the villain. Now that made for good writing. He also liked the illustrations.
Maybe he should’ve become an artist. It seemed a hell of a lot easier than storytelling these days. He idly turned the page of the huge storybook in his hand while he floated underwater, and his eyes alit on a particularly colorful page...
Five Bells Later...
“Ive got it!”, Zeke shouted, bursting into the tavern at half past 6, delighted with himself.
Micah scowled and chucked a very hard piece of baguette at his head while nearby patrons ducked.
“Where the hell have you been, you lazy minstrel?”
“I’ve been thinking, Micah, and researching, and breathing underwater--Ooh, not too much dust on this...”
“Don’t you eat that.”
“It’s been on the ground, no one’s going to buy it now.”
“Allright, you’ve got a few bells to play before your research pays off. I hope for your sake your trip turned out well.” Micah threw down the mug-cleaning towel and stomped upstairs to refresh the guest beds with linens while Zeke grabbed his lute from behind the counter and settled on his bench to play.
He rushed through tonight’s set a little, excited about the new story he had in mind, but the audience didn’t seem to care too much that there were few breaks between songs. It seemed the practice of playing each song directly after another wasn’t too distracting, but Zeke soon found that his fingers ached. Once Micah lit the fire, Zeke made a beeline for the chair closest to the pit, sat himself down, and began.
“Once in a great castle, there lived a motley fool. Now this fool was handsomely paid for his service to a lord of stature and standing. But the seemingly loopy and friendly jester had a deadly secret...” Zeke widened his eyes as usual to get the people excited, “He was actually an expertly trained and stealthy assassin!” Micah groaned quietly and shook her head from her place behind the counter, vowing to give the blissfully ignorant bard a smack in the head later.
“The jester assassin had been paid by a different lordship nearby to worm his way into the castle grounds and infiltrate the close circle of his enemy, only to swiftly and efficiently slice his throat at the signing of a very important treaty, so that the other lord could seize this one’s lands for himself.
However, this jester saw the evil that his employer was doing to his people and lands, and knew that the minute he took over, they would all be doomed.
The motley fool also had prowled the castle of the evil lord before while awaiting instructions, and in the past few weeks he had become infatuated with the man’s beautiful, bodacious daughter.” Zeke waggled his eyebrows and a man in the back let out an appreciative whistle.
Zeke grinned at his meagre audience, delighted that he was getting somewhere, and he became more animated as he was wont to do, but tried to refrain from punching and kicking at the air like last time. That...didn’t go well.
He went on to tell the story of how the fickle fool came to kill the evil lord Bumpershmidt in his bed, but was foiled when Bumpershmidt awoke and grabbed his knife from him, and then delivered the intense monologue he thought up on the way back (about morality and betrayal and some other big words Zeke read about) that the evil lord recites before the fool overpowers him, accidentally knocking over a candle and setting aflame the four poster bed therefore barbecuing the man to grisly prolonged death. Zeke had no trouble holding his face at a safe distance from the fire and enacting the villain’s gruesome, screamy demise. After he fell to his knees on the stone floor gurgling and choking dramatically, he grabbed a man’s pant leg and whispered hoarsely,
“Tell...my daughter...I never... loved her...” He then “died” a few different times on the floor before getting back up to tell the rest of the story like nothing happened.
The way Zeke saw it, the crowd was either incredibly annoyed or somewhat impressed. So he finished off the tale with the jester dashing into the fancy wench’s chambers, grabbing her round the generous waist and rappelling out of the burning castle by shooting a makeshift crossbow rope out of a window and swinging away as the castle crumbles behind them. Zeke sat back in his seat and flashed Micah a smug grin.
Yeah, he was on top of things. |
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by Ruzekiel Soren on July 25th, 2014, 5:26 am 
