Just Another Fantasy Story

The Secret in the Park

The ancient library had always been large but had sprawled outwards with various additions  over the years, adding wings and basements to accommodate an ever growing collection. Documents had been drawn from across thecontinents for centuries and copied from every ship and traveler visiting the city. Corith had discovered a dark corner that didn't show up in the records about half a year ago after a big earthquake.The shaking of the earth had broken open a wall that was rarely visited and behind that wall a flight of stone stairs. The further down one went down this undocumented basement the simpler the stairs,the bottom floors even seemed to be made of some other stone entirely. The scripts at the bottom fascinated him, their words archaic to the point of being intensely difficult to understand or straight up impossible, written in some possibly deceased language.He spent some time more or less every other week or so exploring the dusty old tomes, though some were so fragile he couldn't even touch them without causing damage. He made a point of finding the sturdier ones and seeing if he could make sense of them. His own personal project that no one knew anything about.

It was dark in the sub-basements, but darkness was his element. Sworn as a servant to the local God of Darkness, Corith spent most of his time learning the prayers to be granted magic power by the god and how to apply that power. The church of Sedha taught that life began in the dark; seeds under the earth, birds inside the egg, and animals in the womb. No living thing truly started in the light, and at the end they would return to the darkness. The dark wasn't a thing to fear for a servant of Sedha, and he was granted spectacular night vision as a boon from the god in return for his commitment. Still he did bring a lamp to avoid accidents and to see the writing in the books and scrolls more clearly. Even though he was granted better night vision than most he couldn't navigate through true darkness and no light at all reached the lowest levels unless he brought it with him.

He found an old book and opened it, finding a mosaic of simple pictures faded with age. They depicted beings that as far as he could tell were made of wind,earth, fire, water, light, and dark, usually somewhat vague in shape.He almost wondered if they were some kind of crude, metaphorical portrayal of the gods. The gods he knew always took something like human form though they stood a great deal taller, but each was closely aligned to one of the elements. Still, seeing what might have been Sedha portrayed as an inky cloud of darkness slinking around in shadow felt blasphemous. He decided they must not be the gods though when the art depicted a simple human figure that seemed to cause them to recoil and keep their distance. Gods didn't know fear. The last page that was visible showed more human-like forms made of the elements above text he couldn't understand. The last picture was ofthose humanoid elemental forms standing around the figure that had terrorized the simpler, unfocused shapes and locking him in chains.The pages after that were too faded to make anything out.

Corith went through the book several times, wondering what it might possibly mean. Most of the symbols meant nothing to him and the pictures in the margins felttoo abstract to his modern eye. The central story was the strangest though, maybe he was misreading it somehow. After a long while he put the book away and walked up the stairs. He expected to be greeted with the bright full light of day and was surprised to walk out into the dimming red light of a sunset. He had lost track of time and stayed far too long!

Corith ran out as fast as he dared, passing the display of useful and dangerous plants and their hand-out sheets. He stepped wrong and bounced off a display case holding a piece of netherworld vine. He stopped for a moment to make the case didn't crash or the sample fall out. The thick vine was dark and splotchy covered in an array of thorns. The vine was allegedly found nowhere in the world naturally and were said to only emerge from the earth wherever the barrier between the mortal world and netherworld wore thin. Goblins, orcs, and ogres would follow in their wake and spread carnage wherever they could and the vines themselves could coil and grab with bone-breaking strength. The most dangerous of plants, there were drawings depicting live and hydrated vines in motion next to the dried husk on display to make sure it could be recognized in life and writing in a number of languages tokeep away from them if they should ever be encountered. Sedha must have been willing to give him a pass today as nothing broke or fellout of place, he fought the urge to check his reflection too closely in the display case before running out the building.