Vitae Memorandum

03-Destined Turmoils

Sunlight split the dawn of a brand new day. Though, deep within the great library of the elves, you might not be aware of its passing.

Mhyl for years now had lost all sense of time. For her, the greatest signs of day or night was if the library was busy or quiet. The waking hours of her day's free time were spent doing only a single thing, reading. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the library carried over millions of books, it was not only possibly one of the biggest buildings of the Elniri, a folk already not known for having many buildings, but was a rival of the Magus Citadel itself. More than a castle, the sheer expanse of the library competed with the size of both human capitals. The halls of books were akin to streets at market, the shelves resident the most popular patron of the halls, the books. However, Mhyl was yet another resident, an oddity among the endless tide of papers and binding.

She wasn't the only elf to grace the halls, the library's staff frequented around, doing whatever work they needed doing. A library of this size needed constant staff and had endless things to do. In consideration of their hard work, Mhyl made certain to carefully treat every book with care, and properly return any material exactly from where it was found originally. It was not as if she was the only elf to live among the books, but all of them worked here. Even a library patron was a rare oddity in the halls, as no one would bother searching the miles of the halls for anything specific, when they could just leave a request with the staff and have their book brought to them.

She was special in her own right, her mother was the High-Sage, an elven point of influence on par with the human Arch-Magus. But contrary to the workings of most human politics, the High-Sage was an elf chosen by nature itself. When her mother was young, the wills of the wilds had carefully chosen her in a naming ritual, making her henceforth the next High-Sage. When it came time for her mother to step down, the same ritual will be held, and the wills of the wild will choose another elf. In all accounts, her mother was still young enough to keep her position for a long time, and the naming ritual tends to pick someone rather young. Mhyl's chances of being picked for the next one were basically nothing, this wasn't a matter of lineage.

What did matter was that she was the daughter of the High-Sage, and as a mother, the High-Sage was especially overprotective. As a result, Mhyl had never in her life stepped from the walls of the library her mother presided over. The library was effectively the great office of the High-Sage, offering a world-renowned collection of wisdom as a resource for the most sagely of elves. To share in the bountiful harvest of her blessing, her daughter has had free access to all of the information held within. She was effectively a caged bird.

She was quite friendly with all of the passing staff, but her biggest friends were still the books. Those books would share with her tales of the world beyond, places she would never get to see, people she would never get to meet. She knew that her role in life was to one day become yet another staff member of the library, and just live here forever. She took that sense of responsibility to heart. She started accounting for the placement of each book, and had gotten faster at finding books than most of the staff. While reading, if she found books misplaced, she fixed them. This is itself why none of the staff had yet felt inclined to begin presenting her with any form of responsibility, why she was still not staff. Nothing was a matter of getting paid, her mother already accounted for all of her needs as is, and becoming staff would only mean that her earnings would go to her mother's estate, which wouldn't then change anything. For her, money was a thing from stories.

For obvious reasons, Mhyl never really felt alive. Everything of life came from books, a life is what she experienced in stories, and then the book reached its end, was over, and she would turn to the next. She herself had no value in the slightest, no purpose, no ambition, nothing. The days just rolled on, and she never noticed.