Oh, aye. An elf may live in stone, and a giant in a tree, but a poor Irishman must dwell in mud and sh.. shh offal.
He grumbled again, craning his staff over his shoulder, proving the only scant illumination hed dare allow near his new treasure. Turning the book over in his hands, he inspected the binding of the ancient tome, its leathern covering pale and almost transparent, looking the entire world for human skin. Rolzt shrugged, hoping the unfortunate tannery victim was a Viking or other barbarian outworlder, and tried to decipher the scrawling script sprawled across the expanse of the front cover. He pursed his lips in a frown, not able to make anything of the cursive, alien script. He carefully opened the tome with his fingertips, the ancient, long unused glues and bindings cracking and creaking under the strain.
He had not known exactly what had driven him to this spot on the Cliffs of Moher, to this glowing granite orb staring out like a baleful eye upon the endless horizon of the Sea of Endings Or what had driven him to inspect the book immediately, like a child receiving his Saintseve gift. Of course, these sudden urges stopped worrying him a long time ago, when he first started getting these strange urges to uncover the ancient lost artifacts and possessions of the Dae past. The calling could come to the Mentalist from any god-forsaken and forgotten corner of the realm, caring little for inconsequential trivia such as Rolzt actually being busy doing something else at the time. Indeed, he had been vanquishing the evil of Silvermine Mountain Erebugs only an hour before, before the strange keening noise awakened to him yet again, like an unseen pressure in his eardrums. He had only hoped that Ewan and Rhiannon would explain to Sooja his abrupt, unspoken departure. The unheard whistling in his mind drove him to this spot, dozens of leagues to the north, and would not let him rest until he had dug up beside the glowing stones with his bare hands and staff, and would not finally dissapear until he had set up his tent here against the oncoming storm and read the book at once..
Of course, it would have helped had he actually been able to read the thing. For the sixtieth time in as many minutes, he sighed. He had examined the ancient, yellowed pages for well over an hour, his scholarly diligence rewarded with page after infuriating page of the illegible, scrawling script. As if the disappointment of the intelligible, meandering lettering were not frustrating enough, he found a growing headache building in the back of his head, a pressure in the back of his skull like a glowing hot ember. Finally, realizing a thin line of drool and blood coursed from his chin where his teeth were biting into his lip in effort, Rolzt slammed the book shut, almost ready to throw the accursed thing into the ocean depth below. Surely no member of the Dae would want to possess, not to mention write such an oppressive, almost tangibly evil tome, would they? Rolzt muttered, reaching around blindly for his packs to put away the book when he noticed sticking from the book a parchment, a page between the pages, apparently rustled from its hiding place by his ministrations. The keening awakened again in his ears as he opened the book to this foreign page, reverently slipping it from its resting place with almost sacred respect. For the first time today, he smiled.
He turned the parchment over and over in his hands, his fingertips gliding over its surface a lover, grinning broadly at his discovery. This was of the Dae, unmistakable, it radiated and resonated in a way that only he could see and feel, a chord striking in him from some lost and ancient song. The Celt unfolded the paper with great care, not wanting to rip the ancient document on its crease, spreading it out against the tomes ancient tanned binding.
This handwriting was legible, and obviously written in a different, far steadier font and hand. Although the language itself was of an ancient age, it was itself not lost to time like the book had been. Indeed, the manuscripts handwriting seemed familiar to Rozt, as he was sure he had seen this mans writing before. The language was called Naratheen to those of this age, and while the Mentalist did not have much formal training in the tongue, he could make out enough of the original writers prose to grasp the his meaning, and a bit of his own meanderings of the book itself.
It had seemed that even the author of this missive had not been able to decipher the meaning of the book, even going so far as to hire a translator native to the tongue. The word Tierdal appeared not infrequently, a people that Rolzt remembered from stories of the Dae long past, a race of elves bent upon themselves by hate, somehow turned so evil their very appearance changed, their pale skin turned as dark and cold as their hearts. Rolzt smirked sardonically, wondering what would be worse, a race of racist, arrogant, oppressive elves, or a few that merely wanted to toss your children in a stewpot.
He studied over the page a few more times, gaining more comprehension into the writers thoughts with each reading, although not nearly enough to explain exactly why this book was so strange to the writer, or why he deemed it so important to keep safely hidden away. All he could gather was that the book had somehow resisted all attempts to translate it from its native tongue, that some magical ward or rune placed upon it caused even a dictation of the contents to become twisted and incomprehensible as the book itself. Finally, the writer mentioned something of a gift, of a life saved hidden in the spine of the very book itself. Puzzled, Rolzt examined the space between the leather binding of the book and the twining that held the pages together, of the narrow gap between leather and spine. In it he saw a glint of.. of something . Tentatively, he reached a finger inside...
And yanked it back, with a yell and a curse that would make even a Lurikeen blush, sucking on his finger where an improbably sharp needlepoint had stabbed him. A boobytrapped book? What sort of sodding silly place to... but, no no trap no, why there place it there?
Rolzt examined the tome from the other side, and with his other hand very carefully and very slowly reached his finger inside, finding the slippery coldness of keen metal, but no razor-sharp point attached. He struggled for several moments trying to gain a grasp upon the metal instrument with just his one finger, but finally by degrees managed to slip the treasure from the book. And what a marvel it was...
Impossibly shining and unmistakably silver even in the faint glow of his crystal staff, the tool was as long as the spine if the book itself, a weapon of pure spun wire. Impossibly fragile, the wire only suggested the outline of a dagger, the handle looked as if it would crush upon itself if grasped, the blade, still (as was painfully obvious) still kept its razor-sharp edge. Strangely, the spun silver was coated with a dark blue paint along its supposed blade, Rolzt ever so carefully scrapped a fingernail along the inside of where the blade would be on any sane knife. The coating flaked and chipped easily off of the wire, unto the front of the book, as if the metal was somehow resisting the grasp of the purple stain... Rolzt looked down, and gasped in sudden realization... the coating chipped just like dried blood... and it matched the hue of the ink on the covering of the book. This wasnt paint at all... And suddenly Rolzt realized how this gift had indeed saved the writers life, of why whoever had wrote this had went to such great lengths to protect the tome. That, as indecipherable as it may have been it was somehow very important... and followed a history of terrible, terrible danger.
With almost sacred slowness, Rolzt returned the wire dagger to its binding, folded the parchment back and placed it as he had discovered it, slipping the heavy tome into the protection of his packs. He looked out against the sea, startled to find the rain had long ago ceased, and twilight had already deeply ensconced the cliffs and the Sea. As the last few orange rays of the sun disappeared well behind the unknown vastness of the water beyond, Rolzt found himself strangely unsettled to be here, as if he were now unwelcome to be in the presence of this rock, of this somehow sacred patch of mud and turf. Not bothering to break down his rickety lean-to and bring it along, he set along the open beach, heading south to his family and Taobh Aisling . He felt the sense of unwelcomeness grow, almost palpable, like a high-pitched keening just out of his hearing, like a warning of being watched by something dark and menacing, or a terrible evil coming to find him... Rolzt turned the collar on his robes against the growing dark and cold, his strides growing longer as he marched along the beach. Ever in the back of his mind grew the unsettling knowledge that he had discovered something very important. And terribly, terribly dangerous.
