-- Her spell connects with Fifth Eye, who's struggling with the hint of Lantry's sepia in his system, in the moment his cone of twisting colors is about to reach out, forcing frenetic adjustment, adjustment that sweeps a fourth body that Fifth Eye wants anywhere but where he's going into the cone --
An Archon's servant's magic fights the unspoken corollary of an Edict. Both of them win, from a certain point of view.
Hooray.
(She recovers the pitcher that used to be full of icewater and sets it aside for cleaning.)
Really, she feels vaguely silly about delivering an entire letter when she's indubitably going to talk to the man soon enough, but she thinks it's something that ought to be a latter.
Nothing surprising happens as she does this, she hopes? She'll check the post office and see if anything else has come in. ...Then she'll go eat dinner whether or not there is anything because she shouldn't risk getting the food on her paperwork, and if there is something she can come back afterwards.
She has a few questions for the barkeep, anyway. Like where the food comes from and who actually runs the town.
Nothing at the post office, and she can get dinner for another two pence.
"There's fish, and some people have small gardens, but we do mostly rely on nearby town for food. I think the House has its own gardens, though those Bureau brutes didn't care much about them."
"We don't really have any official mayor or anything like that, if people can't agree on something they may ask the Rector, or maybe Mr. Kille."
She nods. "I'm going to want to get those gardens back up and running; I have some practical experience with farming, but I am already short of hands with just the Library itself on my plate. Anyone you'd recommend? Preferably with the inclination to - if not learn themself, then still deal with the use of magic, because I intend to be speeding the crops along as best I can."
"Nobody I'd know offhand, might have to wait until some gardener visits us, and agrees to stay."
Mm. That's unfortunate.
"...Mm. That's unfortunate. My ability to trust people who are not long-term residents of Brancrug is...minimal; I simply do not know enough of the people there, to know what sorts of enemies that I simply cannot assume that I do not already have. Let alone what they might try to do to me, and how I would or would not be able to respond thereto."
"I thank you, nonetheless. Do put the word out, about the gardens, if you would?"
She'll spend this evening working out an organizational system's theoretical framework, she thinks. That, and reading Dewulf's journal, in the hopes that it will reveal something about the more esoteric incoming problems.
Unfortunately, Thomas wasn't the kind to write down the entirety of his life in a journal, the records are sparse, and mostly utilitarian - reminders to himself about various events, local, social and astrological. Two consecutive entries separated by a year read "Giles ran away" and "Giles has returned".
At one point, the entries become much denser, and appearr to be construction logs for the observatory in the Watchman's tower. There are intricate diagrams of lenses, and also a few notes regarding how all lensmakers are incompetent.
The construction is finished in 1576. Entries from 1577 are notably more animated:
"A Great Comet hath visited our Sky Above, a smoking star, a dazzling cloud."
"Wind, Moon, and Shell in the Heavens Inferior were known to Thomas of the Black Dove. My predecessor knew this Truth - three Blossoms hath the Watchman's Tree: Paper; Ink; and Flame. The Great Comet, I now aver, is that Flame. I shall call the Dream of a Star to me tonight, shall the night permit me."
The excited tone slowly fades, returning to the style similar to earliest ones.
What the fuck is he on about.
She presumes that whatever the fuck it is he tried, he probably failed, because he was present to recount it. But still, what the fuck. Who the fuck, even. Thomas of the Black Dove? Why the pretentious --
Mystery cults!
She is positively tearing her hair out over all this bullshit.
...Well, not literally. But still. This is just absurd. She's going to have to make a classification system robust to arbitrary Archon-shaped surprises coming out of her shelves. She hopes Rector Timothy has relevant knowledge in this field, because things just keep being confusing.
She's going to crack open On The White and see if it's just as obtuse, and then she's going to go to sleep, because she is very done with this.
On the White, by Solomon Husher, epigraphed "Sunset at Noon", doesn't prove to be a very clear book either, intermixing an allegorical 'long slow doomed romance of Winter and the Sun', various theories of aesthetics, and Husher's own rather depressive thoughts. There's a set of recurring phrases, which Husher claims contain "secret words of Winter", focusing around the theme of slience, but greater meaning not immediately apparent.
Does the morning bring anything that is straightforward to her door?
The Keeper's Lodge is around her, and nothing seems to have come to her door overnight, straightforward or not.
...She'll take it.
Alright, it's time to start compiling everything that could possibly be a thing into the natal state of an actual reference book on occult subjects. Especially things that have capital letters attached.
She probably has to make her way to the tower, because there definetely isn't enough paper in Keeper's lodge for this, but there's some in the desk, and she can probably be done in a couple hours, if she sticks to the books she has already skimmed.
Oh, hardly. She wants at least a representative sample of the Library. This means she's going to set out to skim a couple hundred random books, or at least twelve dozen, write down every unique term - especially terms of art - and start counting occurrences. She's not doing any definitions, yet. That comes later, when she has an idea of what she might be defining.
...She is promptly going to retire this plan when she encounters The Stairs And Their Weird Bullshit again.
Sure, the books seem randomly sorted in the one room she's tested. But were they? She doesn't know, because this library was run by fucking mystery cultists!
She...is going to wait for literally anyone else to be here, in case the wards try to kill her before she pokes them. But she needs to do that at some point. For fuck's sake...
She may as well sample the books in the one room she's been in, though, while she waits. So she'll spend most of her time in that room, and check for visitors at the Lodge in between skimming, tallying, and hopefully starting to sort books.
Some time later, somebody knocks at the door of the lodge.
"Ophelia?" It's Timothy's voice.
"Timothy, it's good to hear from you. I'm trying to get an idea of where I could possibly begin organizing these books and finding that that poses about as much of a problem as wrangling Archons. And this is only one-and-a-fraction's rooms worth of books, so far, which, speaking of, could you do me a favor and help make sure I don't die if I poke the wards and they decide they don't like me?"
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