Post by Joliette Thorne on Jul 28, 2007 13:30:07 GMT -5
She was only a crest of rumpled black hair peeking above a teetering stack of dust-thick tomes, vellum and parchment scrolls placed precariously atop those; the woman's unfamiliarity, as well as her frustration, with the process of lengthy research might be observed in the torrent of mutters sounding from behind this erstwhile fortress, and in the pale hand that would now and then reach for the rum-bottle set to a chair-seat beside her. "Hlangfrith the .. what? Oh, you must be joking." The bottle would vanish behind the stacks again. "I'll never learn all this.."
Orimathrash walked in a skin not his own. In place of scale was skin, talons were as hands and feet, a tail became nothing more than a retarded curl of a human coccyx. For all intents and purposes, there was no dragon here, just an old fragile human man. From behind dull lenses of hazel, white and black peered the cold and calculating glare of Orimathrash, his scarlet flares of oval irises and crescent slits of midnight pupils dulled to the mundane corneas and scleras of humanity. the face was a whithered, crumpled thing, as if a great sheet of paper had been furiously balled and discarded as useless, only for the brain behind the hand to regret the waste in a moment of calm, too much angst for their action to smooth it properly. It was the ruination of age upon human skin that the dragon wore, the bark of an ancient tree with chalky lichen as hair and taut tendons upon a perpetually craning neck the roots. The greybeard had, as the dragon knew the old were prone, been acted as to have risen early to amble along the paths and cobbles of the small town, the dragon's intention to, as yesterday, appear innocent as he scoured the tomes of the library for things of use or interest to him. The door was heaved as his hunched back lay glistening with dew on cloak under the slanted fingers of the early sun, a knobbly cane clutched in equally knobbly hands as he quickly shuffled over the threshold, not keen for the door to swing back and knock him down. Success. It swings only to meet the frame, letting out a loud echo through the large room, though the dragon-as-man had already began to amble awkwardly along the lines of shelves, eyes on the spines of history's skeletal tales.
Tenebrae closed her book with a snap, raising her head to avoid the cloud of motes that puffed from the pages as she did so. More muttering, and she took another swig from the brown bottle, which was replace to its chair to sit as if it were a study-companion. Which, in a way, it was. She was reaching for a brittle scroll around which was tied a strip of gnome-skin in place of a ribbon, and upon which was, or so the slip of paper before it on the shelf had said, a ten-century old manifesto on the displacement of necromantic ability from mage to homunculus. A long shot, sure.. but perhaps in the crabbed and oddly-configured text, if she could at all read it, there might be a hint of a solution to her problem. As the door yawned open with a low-throated complaint that ushered in some early-rising literate, she'd peek over the top of the paper-hill before her, Orimathrash's gnarled and tottering form the source of a smile; she was not all that eager for company, but if she must have it, better it be someone who wasn't likely to charge her with a sword, or use her for fireball target-practise. "Morning.." The bottle was hastily swiped from its seat and stashed inside a propped-up copy of Vermidraght's Guide to Ocular and Renal Revival, for propriety’s sake. Wouldn't want anyone to think she was a lush.
Orimathrash had a very specific subject to mind upon which he craved enlightenment; the rise of the Immortals. He had seen the ruins of the desert, the prophetic murals of the dissembled walls. He had seen the tapestries and scrolls of the Cenril church, the hordes of demonic creatures swarming around figure of darkness as flies on feces. He had heard from the mouths of men, intelligible beasts and unintelligible innkeepers the rumours and tales of this catastrophic era, so recently passed. Indeed, he had been entirely skeptical to the entire thing. After all, it was mere mortals, now, as heroes so often were prone, vanished into obscurity. His hand raised as he ambled along the row of books, finger perched to run along the edge of a shelf as civilisations of microscopic mites were annihilated by the crooked claw, the sleeve of his robe slipping back to reveal the skeletal wrist below. He turned at her words, speaking in a fluctuating, hoarse voice, "Oh, good morning, there. I am afraid I did not notice you." He was so accustomed to lying at the highest degrees in this form that the dragon needn't even devote any thought to the process. In fact, as pathetic the old man appeared, he was spry as a faun and with senses of sight and hearing at the peak of draconic development. But the facade had been moulded for a long time, and the dragon knew well how it was his marionette should function. For though it was he that pulled the strings, the character of Frederiche was so detailed to his mind that it was as if he became another being entirely. There was risk to this, undoubtedly, but his brain held secure hold over the personality of the aged being. For now, at least.
Tenebrae gave the venerable man a small and polite smile, before sinking back below her book-stacks with a heavy sigh. Even that brief distraction from what seemed interminable wading through a sea of archaic and near-illegible texts had been a relief that only brought home the tedium as she turned back to her task. Sneaking a sip of liquor removed from the center of it, Tene tugged the knot on the gnome-skin tie on the Vermidraght scroll, placing the scrap on the top of the book-pile so as not to lose it, and unrolled the parchment. It was every bit as bad as she'd thought, and a low groan rumbled in her throat. Elbow to desk, chin propped on the heel of her hand, she was soon absorbed in poring over the ramblings of a man whose sole obsession had been with the re-animation of eyes and kidneys, sans the bodies they were harvested from. Eking out the words, one by one, lips moving in silent pronunciation of the outdated verbiage and syntax, she wouldn't notice the gnome-skin tie wriggling away like a floppily retarded flatworm, to drop off the edge of the book and accordion its way across the table's edge at the other side, and from thence to plop to the boards below. It was, with a singular determination, inching its path toward the ankles of the apparent elder, though any sentient intent on the thing's behalf was highly doubtful. Oblivious to the ribbon's escape, Tenebrae read on, pausing now and then to sigh, and sip, and grumble.
Orimathrash had, as her attentions were returned to her study, began to continue his walk around the library, noting that he would have to return as the elf that he might climb the ladders to look at the higher tiers of lore without arousing suspicion. The ribbon of animated epidermis continues its course over the floor, a hairless caterpillar of skin that sought his shins for a reason known only to it. Perhaps it was chance, perhaps it simply sought something to wrap around and the course was blind and random. Perhaps it did hold some nefarious intent, seeking shrivelled skin which it might try to befriend or woo. Whatever the cause, the dragon-as-man was distracted, making sure that none were observing him as he sneakily returned several purloined tomes and annuls that he had borrowed overnight for sake of copying them, his robe as some enchanted sack as they appear in a continuing stream, his frame far too gaunt to hold so many books. However, as the old being reached the corner of the room, he turned and caught from the corner of his eye the approaching wormling, the strip of gnomeskin that appeared intent to have him as its destination. Far from taken aback, for the dragon had seen men recreated from smouldering heaps of destruction, he simply throws one of the tomes, one too large and thick for thin wrists to hold were they genuine, to land on top of it. Secure that he had not been seen, though now knowing the loud thud of tome on stone would raise attentions, he feigned shock as he clutched his chest.
Tenebrae, at the sound of the book smacking boards, almost ruined Vermidraght's last – really, his only - work, written with a gull-feather quill in squid-ink wrung from the vagrant cephalopods washed now and then over the rim of the barred window of his tiny semi-subterranean cell in the seaside bedlam he'd long ago been committed to for nefarious and unseemly magics, not to mention the frenzied removal of eyes and kidneys from unwilling and still-alive donors. Fortunately, the infamous treatise was rescued when the vampiress' hand shot out to catch the bottle knocked in her half-rise, with the hand that had flown to her side for a sword that wasn't there. Wide green eyes would greet the ancient's glaucous sight, were he looking that way, as she exclaimed her surprise in words more fit for a dockside bar than a library reading-room. At sight of the old man, hand pressed to his torso as though clutching to still an unsteady thread of pulse, she'd push out from her chair to step his way. "You alright there, sir?" Odd. As she neared, she noted he had a strange odour. Tene mentally shrugged; she had not met that many folk this old, so wasn't entirely sure -what- they should smell like. Still, it was both peculiar and oddly familiar enough to catch her attention, if not keep it. "Is it your heart? Can I get you something? Here.. let me..." She'd bend to reach for the fallen book.
Orimathrash played the role to perfection. The old man wheezed as he bent down, slapping a gnarled claw of a hand down to garner folds of cloth about a knobbly kneecap, making his feeble exclamation, "Oh, yes. Oh, my poor heart." He seemed to struggle for breath for a moment before the dragon checked himself with the act, no wanting to have the woman suddenly spring upon him with phials or probing fingers in some gallant attempt to ease his false suffering. Bothersome were physicians and healers, the overzealous were incomparably so. He reared back to his stooped height, affectations of spinal discomfort displayed in winces and groans. He gradually gathers his composure, speaking as he flapped a hand on limp old wrist dismissively, "Confounded shelves, felling their books without rhyme or reason!" He wagged a finger accusingly to the nearest shelf, narrowing his eyes, "Can't be trusted with the only job you have, can you!"
Tenebrae chuckled, half of the sound sheer relief that the withered man wasn't going to drop dead at her feet, half at the jest he'd made. "This place.." She glanced around at the overstuffed shelves, dust-smeared glass cases of scrolls and sundry clutter. "Needs a good clean-up, I'd say." The tome weighting down the absconded gnome-hide band forgotten for now, she offered the crook of her arm toward him, eyes roving to a nearby stool. "Best you take a set, pet. You looked right poorly a second ago." Whether he took it or not by the time the shelf above had begun to wobble would become a moot point - as the whole shelf seemed to writhe of a sudden, flutters of loosed pages falling like yellowed autumnal leaves to the floor, many of the books seeming to swell in their places, or perhaps attempt to open themselves while still jammed against their fellows - as her hands flew to her pack, habitually taken up as she rose and slung to its perpetual abode. That, too, was shaking, as though a sack abruptly filled with displeased ferrets, and it'd be shrugged of her shoulder and onto the floor. "What in the.." The room was a bustle and rustle of minute movements, as even the leathern reading-chairs popped and buckled their seats, and groaned in a futile attempt to motion.
Orimathrash had two options now. Either he could blast to oblivion the avalanche of leather and treemarrow that was heading for him at the failure of the shelf, or he could allow himself to become buried beneath them. The first, while effective, was outside of his nature in that he; firstly, loved lore and literature; secondly, would reveal that he was not a helpless old man. Neither of these outcomes were satisfactory. Therefore, while a blow to his pride in a small degree, he must take the option of allowing their contact. The body he had created for his tamer sojourns was sound, in that as frail it appeared to become buried would not destroy its integrity. The mound that shuffle and writhe from their standing attention upon the shelf fly upon wings of annotated scrawl, their lofty ambitions of soaring off to some fabled land where men and women lie around nude for them to inspect at their leisure thwarted by their lacking plumage and bulky frames. He vanishes behind a flurry of paper and ink, the chaos of the room seeing more of the tomes that had sat upon the lower shelves adding to the growing mountain, any trace of the ancient man swallowed beneath the writhing pile of animated novels. However, at the core of this mound, he lay sprawled in relative comfort, hands gripped around an account by Thribble Ripstrap, the gnomish warrior-poet, detailing the ancient confrontation between a band of gnolls and a diamond mine outpost run by humans. It was quite engaging, with script that glowed faintly in response to the lacking ambient light and images that moved as he watched them, quite literally for the book was enchanted, relaxed and at peace. If she managed to excavate him from the vast stack, he would put on bewilderment and shock. For now, he was contented to read.
Tenebrae shuddered as, beneath her niveous fingers, the hide-bound covers of the fallen books tore themselves off their backings and moved like wrinkled, flattened slugs in random directions. Picking each up each flayed tome with thumb and forefinger, she'd fling them to the side, the old man's excavation slower for her repugnance. Not that the revenant bindings were any great horror to the necromage, it was the blind autonomy and shape that gave her shivers, some subconscious thing, a remnant nightmare's ghost perhaps. That, and the fact that it had dawned on her that all this might be her own fault.. She recalled the events following the last time she'd shrived a living being of its sins, the preserved eyeballs and severed fingers that had rolled and caterpillared around the tavern. So it wasn't only the graveyard she had to avoid.. Digging harder, less mindful of the struggling repositories of magic lore, she finally uncovered the ancient who was, unsurprisingly, looking shocked and bewildered. "Oh, I'm so sorry, I never meant to.. " Fingers pressed to one bird-boned wrist to check for pulse. "I'm afraid we must leave here. Let me help you up."
Orimathrash had lay with eyes wide and mouth agape, the captivating tale of gnolls seeking gemstones already stuffed into the bottomless satchel that lay veiled beneath his garb. Her words fall to apparently deaf ears, as a fleshy sheaf of salamander-skin pages vacate themselves from his shoulder. He splutters as his hands clasp around her elbow, feebly pulling upon her to try and heave himself off. In reality, he had strength enough, even in this frame, to easily tear her from her feet to flop atop him. The actual effects are more a weak and pathetic grip and a frail tug upon her forearm. He spoke as he went about this decrepit attempt to depart the shivering isle of animated covers and their orphaned innards of paper, seeming to regain his wits as he gasped, "What is all this? Why would you do such a thing to a poor, harmless fellow like me? Oh, my days. My poor heart."
Tenebrae's face was a mask of empathy, as she drew the stranger to a somewhat unsteady hand, wincing at the mention of his heart. "I.. uh.." How does one explain a thing like this? Tenebrae, as was her wont, would simply blurt it out. "I ate some sins, and an amorous demon, and now bits and pieces come back, not just whole bodies, even without the spells, but the good news is..." She'd offer him a tiny smile, and start trying to hustle the olden-bodied man from the room. ".. it wears off, eventually. Or at least it did last time." Her lower lip buckled inward as white teeth closed on it, the demon an unknown quantity in the sum of the present dilemma.
Orimathrash allowed himself to be coddled off by her, his hands wrapped around his cane as its tip raps a cold, terse tempo to their progression. A dryad-skin scroll makes the gambit of leaping from its shelf, unfurling itself to a thin strip of faded runelore, diving for his cane in attempt to latch around it, the reanimated flake of woodland nymph seeking to tie her bonds anew to the nearest thing perceived as the bole of a tree. To scale, the splinter of mahogany served this purpose. It clasps onto the stick as the old man lets out a startled gasp, swinging the cane to dash it against the edge of the bookcase where the bookleech lay. It eventually cedes to the barrage of blows, curling into a ball on the floor and shivering. He looks to the woman with a look of bewilderment, posing a thought the dragon struggles with to keep selective to his mind, "Better hope your clothes don't get any ideas... being that they're leather."
Orimathrash walked in a skin not his own. In place of scale was skin, talons were as hands and feet, a tail became nothing more than a retarded curl of a human coccyx. For all intents and purposes, there was no dragon here, just an old fragile human man. From behind dull lenses of hazel, white and black peered the cold and calculating glare of Orimathrash, his scarlet flares of oval irises and crescent slits of midnight pupils dulled to the mundane corneas and scleras of humanity. the face was a whithered, crumpled thing, as if a great sheet of paper had been furiously balled and discarded as useless, only for the brain behind the hand to regret the waste in a moment of calm, too much angst for their action to smooth it properly. It was the ruination of age upon human skin that the dragon wore, the bark of an ancient tree with chalky lichen as hair and taut tendons upon a perpetually craning neck the roots. The greybeard had, as the dragon knew the old were prone, been acted as to have risen early to amble along the paths and cobbles of the small town, the dragon's intention to, as yesterday, appear innocent as he scoured the tomes of the library for things of use or interest to him. The door was heaved as his hunched back lay glistening with dew on cloak under the slanted fingers of the early sun, a knobbly cane clutched in equally knobbly hands as he quickly shuffled over the threshold, not keen for the door to swing back and knock him down. Success. It swings only to meet the frame, letting out a loud echo through the large room, though the dragon-as-man had already began to amble awkwardly along the lines of shelves, eyes on the spines of history's skeletal tales.
Tenebrae closed her book with a snap, raising her head to avoid the cloud of motes that puffed from the pages as she did so. More muttering, and she took another swig from the brown bottle, which was replace to its chair to sit as if it were a study-companion. Which, in a way, it was. She was reaching for a brittle scroll around which was tied a strip of gnome-skin in place of a ribbon, and upon which was, or so the slip of paper before it on the shelf had said, a ten-century old manifesto on the displacement of necromantic ability from mage to homunculus. A long shot, sure.. but perhaps in the crabbed and oddly-configured text, if she could at all read it, there might be a hint of a solution to her problem. As the door yawned open with a low-throated complaint that ushered in some early-rising literate, she'd peek over the top of the paper-hill before her, Orimathrash's gnarled and tottering form the source of a smile; she was not all that eager for company, but if she must have it, better it be someone who wasn't likely to charge her with a sword, or use her for fireball target-practise. "Morning.." The bottle was hastily swiped from its seat and stashed inside a propped-up copy of Vermidraght's Guide to Ocular and Renal Revival, for propriety’s sake. Wouldn't want anyone to think she was a lush.
Orimathrash had a very specific subject to mind upon which he craved enlightenment; the rise of the Immortals. He had seen the ruins of the desert, the prophetic murals of the dissembled walls. He had seen the tapestries and scrolls of the Cenril church, the hordes of demonic creatures swarming around figure of darkness as flies on feces. He had heard from the mouths of men, intelligible beasts and unintelligible innkeepers the rumours and tales of this catastrophic era, so recently passed. Indeed, he had been entirely skeptical to the entire thing. After all, it was mere mortals, now, as heroes so often were prone, vanished into obscurity. His hand raised as he ambled along the row of books, finger perched to run along the edge of a shelf as civilisations of microscopic mites were annihilated by the crooked claw, the sleeve of his robe slipping back to reveal the skeletal wrist below. He turned at her words, speaking in a fluctuating, hoarse voice, "Oh, good morning, there. I am afraid I did not notice you." He was so accustomed to lying at the highest degrees in this form that the dragon needn't even devote any thought to the process. In fact, as pathetic the old man appeared, he was spry as a faun and with senses of sight and hearing at the peak of draconic development. But the facade had been moulded for a long time, and the dragon knew well how it was his marionette should function. For though it was he that pulled the strings, the character of Frederiche was so detailed to his mind that it was as if he became another being entirely. There was risk to this, undoubtedly, but his brain held secure hold over the personality of the aged being. For now, at least.
Tenebrae gave the venerable man a small and polite smile, before sinking back below her book-stacks with a heavy sigh. Even that brief distraction from what seemed interminable wading through a sea of archaic and near-illegible texts had been a relief that only brought home the tedium as she turned back to her task. Sneaking a sip of liquor removed from the center of it, Tene tugged the knot on the gnome-skin tie on the Vermidraght scroll, placing the scrap on the top of the book-pile so as not to lose it, and unrolled the parchment. It was every bit as bad as she'd thought, and a low groan rumbled in her throat. Elbow to desk, chin propped on the heel of her hand, she was soon absorbed in poring over the ramblings of a man whose sole obsession had been with the re-animation of eyes and kidneys, sans the bodies they were harvested from. Eking out the words, one by one, lips moving in silent pronunciation of the outdated verbiage and syntax, she wouldn't notice the gnome-skin tie wriggling away like a floppily retarded flatworm, to drop off the edge of the book and accordion its way across the table's edge at the other side, and from thence to plop to the boards below. It was, with a singular determination, inching its path toward the ankles of the apparent elder, though any sentient intent on the thing's behalf was highly doubtful. Oblivious to the ribbon's escape, Tenebrae read on, pausing now and then to sigh, and sip, and grumble.
Orimathrash had, as her attentions were returned to her study, began to continue his walk around the library, noting that he would have to return as the elf that he might climb the ladders to look at the higher tiers of lore without arousing suspicion. The ribbon of animated epidermis continues its course over the floor, a hairless caterpillar of skin that sought his shins for a reason known only to it. Perhaps it was chance, perhaps it simply sought something to wrap around and the course was blind and random. Perhaps it did hold some nefarious intent, seeking shrivelled skin which it might try to befriend or woo. Whatever the cause, the dragon-as-man was distracted, making sure that none were observing him as he sneakily returned several purloined tomes and annuls that he had borrowed overnight for sake of copying them, his robe as some enchanted sack as they appear in a continuing stream, his frame far too gaunt to hold so many books. However, as the old being reached the corner of the room, he turned and caught from the corner of his eye the approaching wormling, the strip of gnomeskin that appeared intent to have him as its destination. Far from taken aback, for the dragon had seen men recreated from smouldering heaps of destruction, he simply throws one of the tomes, one too large and thick for thin wrists to hold were they genuine, to land on top of it. Secure that he had not been seen, though now knowing the loud thud of tome on stone would raise attentions, he feigned shock as he clutched his chest.
Tenebrae, at the sound of the book smacking boards, almost ruined Vermidraght's last – really, his only - work, written with a gull-feather quill in squid-ink wrung from the vagrant cephalopods washed now and then over the rim of the barred window of his tiny semi-subterranean cell in the seaside bedlam he'd long ago been committed to for nefarious and unseemly magics, not to mention the frenzied removal of eyes and kidneys from unwilling and still-alive donors. Fortunately, the infamous treatise was rescued when the vampiress' hand shot out to catch the bottle knocked in her half-rise, with the hand that had flown to her side for a sword that wasn't there. Wide green eyes would greet the ancient's glaucous sight, were he looking that way, as she exclaimed her surprise in words more fit for a dockside bar than a library reading-room. At sight of the old man, hand pressed to his torso as though clutching to still an unsteady thread of pulse, she'd push out from her chair to step his way. "You alright there, sir?" Odd. As she neared, she noted he had a strange odour. Tene mentally shrugged; she had not met that many folk this old, so wasn't entirely sure -what- they should smell like. Still, it was both peculiar and oddly familiar enough to catch her attention, if not keep it. "Is it your heart? Can I get you something? Here.. let me..." She'd bend to reach for the fallen book.
Orimathrash played the role to perfection. The old man wheezed as he bent down, slapping a gnarled claw of a hand down to garner folds of cloth about a knobbly kneecap, making his feeble exclamation, "Oh, yes. Oh, my poor heart." He seemed to struggle for breath for a moment before the dragon checked himself with the act, no wanting to have the woman suddenly spring upon him with phials or probing fingers in some gallant attempt to ease his false suffering. Bothersome were physicians and healers, the overzealous were incomparably so. He reared back to his stooped height, affectations of spinal discomfort displayed in winces and groans. He gradually gathers his composure, speaking as he flapped a hand on limp old wrist dismissively, "Confounded shelves, felling their books without rhyme or reason!" He wagged a finger accusingly to the nearest shelf, narrowing his eyes, "Can't be trusted with the only job you have, can you!"
Tenebrae chuckled, half of the sound sheer relief that the withered man wasn't going to drop dead at her feet, half at the jest he'd made. "This place.." She glanced around at the overstuffed shelves, dust-smeared glass cases of scrolls and sundry clutter. "Needs a good clean-up, I'd say." The tome weighting down the absconded gnome-hide band forgotten for now, she offered the crook of her arm toward him, eyes roving to a nearby stool. "Best you take a set, pet. You looked right poorly a second ago." Whether he took it or not by the time the shelf above had begun to wobble would become a moot point - as the whole shelf seemed to writhe of a sudden, flutters of loosed pages falling like yellowed autumnal leaves to the floor, many of the books seeming to swell in their places, or perhaps attempt to open themselves while still jammed against their fellows - as her hands flew to her pack, habitually taken up as she rose and slung to its perpetual abode. That, too, was shaking, as though a sack abruptly filled with displeased ferrets, and it'd be shrugged of her shoulder and onto the floor. "What in the.." The room was a bustle and rustle of minute movements, as even the leathern reading-chairs popped and buckled their seats, and groaned in a futile attempt to motion.
Orimathrash had two options now. Either he could blast to oblivion the avalanche of leather and treemarrow that was heading for him at the failure of the shelf, or he could allow himself to become buried beneath them. The first, while effective, was outside of his nature in that he; firstly, loved lore and literature; secondly, would reveal that he was not a helpless old man. Neither of these outcomes were satisfactory. Therefore, while a blow to his pride in a small degree, he must take the option of allowing their contact. The body he had created for his tamer sojourns was sound, in that as frail it appeared to become buried would not destroy its integrity. The mound that shuffle and writhe from their standing attention upon the shelf fly upon wings of annotated scrawl, their lofty ambitions of soaring off to some fabled land where men and women lie around nude for them to inspect at their leisure thwarted by their lacking plumage and bulky frames. He vanishes behind a flurry of paper and ink, the chaos of the room seeing more of the tomes that had sat upon the lower shelves adding to the growing mountain, any trace of the ancient man swallowed beneath the writhing pile of animated novels. However, at the core of this mound, he lay sprawled in relative comfort, hands gripped around an account by Thribble Ripstrap, the gnomish warrior-poet, detailing the ancient confrontation between a band of gnolls and a diamond mine outpost run by humans. It was quite engaging, with script that glowed faintly in response to the lacking ambient light and images that moved as he watched them, quite literally for the book was enchanted, relaxed and at peace. If she managed to excavate him from the vast stack, he would put on bewilderment and shock. For now, he was contented to read.
Tenebrae shuddered as, beneath her niveous fingers, the hide-bound covers of the fallen books tore themselves off their backings and moved like wrinkled, flattened slugs in random directions. Picking each up each flayed tome with thumb and forefinger, she'd fling them to the side, the old man's excavation slower for her repugnance. Not that the revenant bindings were any great horror to the necromage, it was the blind autonomy and shape that gave her shivers, some subconscious thing, a remnant nightmare's ghost perhaps. That, and the fact that it had dawned on her that all this might be her own fault.. She recalled the events following the last time she'd shrived a living being of its sins, the preserved eyeballs and severed fingers that had rolled and caterpillared around the tavern. So it wasn't only the graveyard she had to avoid.. Digging harder, less mindful of the struggling repositories of magic lore, she finally uncovered the ancient who was, unsurprisingly, looking shocked and bewildered. "Oh, I'm so sorry, I never meant to.. " Fingers pressed to one bird-boned wrist to check for pulse. "I'm afraid we must leave here. Let me help you up."
Orimathrash had lay with eyes wide and mouth agape, the captivating tale of gnolls seeking gemstones already stuffed into the bottomless satchel that lay veiled beneath his garb. Her words fall to apparently deaf ears, as a fleshy sheaf of salamander-skin pages vacate themselves from his shoulder. He splutters as his hands clasp around her elbow, feebly pulling upon her to try and heave himself off. In reality, he had strength enough, even in this frame, to easily tear her from her feet to flop atop him. The actual effects are more a weak and pathetic grip and a frail tug upon her forearm. He spoke as he went about this decrepit attempt to depart the shivering isle of animated covers and their orphaned innards of paper, seeming to regain his wits as he gasped, "What is all this? Why would you do such a thing to a poor, harmless fellow like me? Oh, my days. My poor heart."
Tenebrae's face was a mask of empathy, as she drew the stranger to a somewhat unsteady hand, wincing at the mention of his heart. "I.. uh.." How does one explain a thing like this? Tenebrae, as was her wont, would simply blurt it out. "I ate some sins, and an amorous demon, and now bits and pieces come back, not just whole bodies, even without the spells, but the good news is..." She'd offer him a tiny smile, and start trying to hustle the olden-bodied man from the room. ".. it wears off, eventually. Or at least it did last time." Her lower lip buckled inward as white teeth closed on it, the demon an unknown quantity in the sum of the present dilemma.
Orimathrash allowed himself to be coddled off by her, his hands wrapped around his cane as its tip raps a cold, terse tempo to their progression. A dryad-skin scroll makes the gambit of leaping from its shelf, unfurling itself to a thin strip of faded runelore, diving for his cane in attempt to latch around it, the reanimated flake of woodland nymph seeking to tie her bonds anew to the nearest thing perceived as the bole of a tree. To scale, the splinter of mahogany served this purpose. It clasps onto the stick as the old man lets out a startled gasp, swinging the cane to dash it against the edge of the bookcase where the bookleech lay. It eventually cedes to the barrage of blows, curling into a ball on the floor and shivering. He looks to the woman with a look of bewilderment, posing a thought the dragon struggles with to keep selective to his mind, "Better hope your clothes don't get any ideas... being that they're leather."