The Banishment of the Thief

Untitled Part 1

Gylon sat at a long, dark table and looked up at the towering bookshelves that surrounded him. The young man who had once made shoes in Venedi would never have imagined that there could be so many books in one place, but now the sight had become almost familiar. Ilshi was across from him, absorbed in the comically large book that she had needed him to transport for her.

Gylon took one of the relatively smaller books that Ilshi had finished and opened the tome to a random page, hoping that there would be an illustration there. There was not, but he was satisfied to simply examine the meticulous script whose meaning was entirely lost to him.

After that night at the lake, Patro said to him "Mind yourself. Let the troubles of Delith stress you no further.", so that was what he had been doing. He had been spending much of his time with Ilshi. Every day, he came with her to the library and helped her retrieve and return the books she read. Other times, they would talk. She didn't like to talk about her own experiences much, but she was very interested to hear about Gylon's distant past as a cobbler's apprentice. After he told her about his father's work, she found an old book on shoemaking and talked to him about what she had learned. In truth, he didn't like talking about shoes, but he appreciated the friendliness of this more than he would ever admit.

When he wasn't with Ilshi, he spent his time talking to people around the castle, when they would have him. In Gylon's opinion, the most interesting person was Erngei, Delith's magical physician. It helped that she was also the one most willing to humor him. The people here were ancient and wizened, and they told stories that were like nothing he had ever heard.

Gylon flipped through the pages one by one, looking at each cluster of mysterious symbols. He found a set of pages that did have a picture for him to look at. It was a simple drawing, its colors dull and faded, showing armored men with blank expressions on their faces battling each other. Those from the left side wore green, and those on the right wore blue. The gruesome details were drawn in a silly, crude way, but it still felt unsettling. Gylon closed the book and set it down.

"Ilshi?" The white haired girl looked up from her massive book and regarded him expectantly. Her wide, purple eyes that seemed to stare right through his but were themselves opaque and impenetrable used to frighten him, but he had grown accustomed to them. He thought that she looked somewhat like an owl. "What is this book about?" he asked.

She looked at it from across the table and said, "It's about famines and wars after the fall of the Grinal Empire." Ilshi spoke matter-of-factly, as if there was no more to be said than that.

"Did you like it?"

"It was alright. The man who wrote it was very bitter." With that, she contentedly returned to her reading. Gylon already knew what her current book was about; he had asked her while he was lugging it. It was a complete history of the Empire of Grina. That had been her theme for the past few days, she wanted to read about the country she was currently in, or at least what it had used to be.

The girl had only been learning to read in his language for few months, and she was already tackling imposing books such as this one. By now, her speech was hardly ever clumsy. Either Tiran was an excellent teacher, or Ilshi was a remarkably fast learner.

A few minutes later, Ilshi took a book out of her 'finished' pile and pushed it over to Gylon's side of the table. "This one has a lot of pictures."

The corpse smiled and opened it, intrigued to find a unique architectural sketch with every other turn of the page. He saw bathhouses and high ceilinged dining rooms, all reminiscent of what he had seen of the ruins that were most of Delith.