Halo Of Horns (Discontinued)

ELEVEN

It was a scene out of a fairy tale. One Irina stole directly from a Grimm brothers adaptation (specifically of beauty and the beast). She sat cross-legged at the center of the lavish library, the towering shelves of novels surrounding the room in an embrace of must and adventure.

She had drug over the massive fluffy carpet that normally sat under the coffee table in the reading nook, to the center of the hardwood floor. She wanted to be directly beneath the middle sphere of the dome-shaped ceiling because she loved watching the twinkling of the fire stars as they fell down from the dark sky.

Deciding this was the perfect spot, she got to work climbing up and down the rolling library ladder, her small hands barely able to wrap around the wooden pegs. The rounded rungs were difficult for her to balance on, but her bare toes were careful to cling just a bit tighter when she reached for the top shelf.

At eight years old she was much too short to gain access to the books above her head and even the ladder wasn't much help when it came to the nearly ceiling tall bookcases.

She made several careful trips, refusing to throw any of the books to the ground and unburden herself with the hefty task that now hung over her. She couldn't bring herself to damage such delicate and precious art in that way. These were her only friends. Her haven to an outside world of fantasy and longing.

She wished that the worlds she read about were real so that she could run with other girls her age and play for hours before being called home for dinner at sundown.

Whatever sundown was.

She was still confused by the entire genre of fantasy and how these authors fixated on this detailed realm of imagination. The possibilities seemed endless and in every book she explored she found new meaning to an original idea.

Humans.

She found a lot of herself in the people who played in the sun. They didn't have wings either and talked about anything fantastical such as magic or flying as an impossibility. Or even evil.

Silly things.

With a stack of books towering in her arms, Irina wobbled back over to the center of the room. She only picked up a certain amount and depending on the page numbers subtracted from that amount accordingly. She was not going to damage any of them.

She did not want to face her father's wrath... or more specifically Azazel.

He loved the library just as much as she, and while she spent much of her free time in here, she did not see him often. However, he had gotten on her case about leaving food on the coffee table and her unfinished books lazily strewn about, so she knew he was a frequent visitor to her safe place. He made her promise to put the books back exactly where they belonged and begrudgingly had shown her how to correctly catalog them.

She was a mini librarian.

She would make sure to take apart her creation before he could find out. Until then, she needed to complete her vision.

Taking the larger-sized novels she placed them in a ring around the carpet. This was mostly dictionaries, a completely blank 850-page book entitled the Divine Comedy, and the depressing tale of Les Misérables that did not do well to define the war it was the humans chose to fight.

Authors liked to make up terrible stories of suffering for their characters, especially making them proclaim war on each other.

Using this ring as her base she meticulously stacked each book, moving down in size as she went until she created a wall surrounding herself. She had the pages facing inward with the spines out so each name could be read even in this configuration. She smiled, proud of her creation, and decided to settle in for a long afternoon of reading.