Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was all it took for Adelasia's whole life to turn upside down. After being captured by the heathens raiding her city and taken all the way to the cold North, the youngest Ragnarsson takes an interest in her...
Aimlessly, she was wandering through the desolate hallways and corridors of York's castle, desperately searching for any sort of distraction from the hunger that was plaguing her. Ever since her family's visit, which had been a couple of days before, the armies gathered outside the walls had done nothing but wait, slowly starving them out. Not a single hunting party Ivar had sent had out had returned and things were turning dire. Though Hvitserk always passed her a chicken leg or something else of his food, much to the obvious dismay of Ivar, those scrapes grew scarcer as well.
Her attention getting caught by one of the doors she had not noticed before on her strolls, she curiously walked to it and tried the handle of the door. Feeling some resistance, she pushed until the door finally fell open, causing the hinges to creak loudly in protest and her to stumble half in. A not so lady-like word was about to slip from her mouth, until she noticed exactly what room she had just entered, her mouth falling open in a gape. It wasn't a particularly big room, but everything seemed to be covered in a ridiculous amount of dust, the small windows near the ceiling offering only a little light to admire the walls of the room, stocked from bottom to top with all kinds of scrolls.
Letting out a little gasp of excitement, Alasia turned around and firmly closed the door again, hastily walking off to the hall to grab one of the torches. Once she had retrieved one, she checked once more that no one had seen her, before locking herself in the room. She lit up a few candles and hung the torch back on the wall, curiously walking to one of the writing desks placed in the middle of the room. A stool was standing in front of it, and blowing the layer of dust from it, she took a seat.
Feeling an odd delight and a spark of excitement, she grabbed one of the quills and held it in her hand as she had been taught. It caused an unfamiliar sensation after not writing anything for such a long time, and putting the quill down again, she reached out for a small potion-like vial with ink. She had expected the ink to have run dry, but when she held the vial upside down, the ink ran into the cap and not being able to resist her urges, she unscrewed the cap and dipped the quill in the ink. She grabbed a clean sheet of paper, the material fragile under her touch, and after a heavy coughing fit from the springing dust, she started writing.
Her handwriting was unstable, full of blotches and shaky lines, but Alasia could not find herself caring. Biting the corner of her lip in concentration, she wrote out a few verses of Scripture she still remembered, slowly but surely the stroke of her pen growing steady and rich of curls, as it had been before. A great many times she had written letters for her father, who claimed that she had much neater handwriting than he ever could manage, and the thought of him sent a dull arrow of pain through her body. Frowning, she put down the quill again, putting the cap back on the vial.
