For people and beings to feed their own knowledge they ask questions and they seek answers. Whether or not those answers lie within a another person's brain or within the paper and ink bindings of books. Then even when we have found that person or that object that gives us the revelation we are looking for, is there not always another question. Another objective and goal is made even when the last one was just so recently claimed. It is people's nature to want and lust, greed and envy, while none of them are necessarily the same they are all synonymous. And what if at all there isn't an answer? Would they turn to the Gods and Goddesses, or would they seek forever and ever only to realize one day that the answer is that there is no answer. But the best place to find an answer or at least to start a search is at a library, especially this library. The Library of Parmamar was known as one of the most advanced and greatest in the world.
That's why she was here...
Among other things which included an abundant supply of fresh blood. Whether it be that of an elf or that of a human her tastes had blended and she no longer cared so much for who it came from as long as she got it. She no longer cared where she got it, for she was so confident at the time in her abilities and her gifts that she would feed almost out rightly in the public. And few would ever know, few would ever see their precious ones ever again and she laughed to herself at how much the people of this world were so affected by her feeding happens. She had come here to find out what had happened in the past few hundred years or so, to brush up on her history and to find food in this oh so large city. And she hoped somewhere deep down within under all the cockiness that no one would ever know.
Within the library she had found herself trapped the previous night. She had stayed in too late, and her by being what she is was able to avoid the patrollers easily. She passed the time however by reading various books in the dark, by the little light that came from the few oil-lit lamps placed haphazardly around the room. She used that little light to read those oh so precious words, she was not of course as luck would have it in the History area. And oddly enough she soon lost all interest as she was engrossed into a book and time seemed to tick away. She felt the sun come up, sensed is more like it though since she was located in a room of the great library that had no windows. Or at least no windows that faced the direction of the rising sun. And fatigue started to plague her mind, mostly because she had not been feeding as much as her body was used too. Before her slumber she fed enough to keep her up and alive at all times; now in this day that wasn’t really all that much later she fed enough to keep her more than active from day to day provided with some rest.
So that is where we find her:
Or at least she was found looking practically unconscious on a table, while for the most part this sleep was lighter than air and most likely a guise. She had done this an hour or so before to appear as if she either had arrived just as the doors opened or indeed been trapped inside all night, caught asleep when the doors became locked. The second of which suggested that the patrol or what not had not been doing their job, and that was just impossible. But in the end there she was her face open on the book she had been reading. its title obscured and the words covered up by her hair which had sprawled all over the book and some of the table. Her arms holding the book nearer to her, if this didn’t work in the end she’d have to resort to shapeshifiting.
She was always the first curious reader to wander to the library, just as it was opening.
As she pressed aside the wide doors of the library, the librarian at the head of the great chamber smiled in recognition, nodding his head slightly towards the elf. Este offered him a groggy, somewhat muzzy smile—it was much too early for conversation, so she left it at that. The elf came here often—she considered herself an eternal pupil, one whom would seek knowledge and educate her own self. Yet, her research often resulted in hours of long, hard frustration... only recently had she begun to master the written language. She struggled even more so while reading the tiny, ink script in each hard, leather-bound book... yet, it was that sheer determination to learn best she could of her world that drove her to sit beneath lamplight for hours, squinting her shy eyes to decipher their messages.
Her delicate, soft footsteps slowly advanced her into the center of the chamber, where a series of tables were erected between two long, continuous columns of books and parchment. Este also enjoyed becoming lost in the library—each and every visit she made here was an adventure of its own; becoming entangled in the hundreds of rows of books, lost in the forest of shelves, Este would pull out a single book high above her head, barely managing to remove it from similar works that hugged against it. And slowly, sinking into a sit within that very row, she would open it and bring it close to her face and begin to read, digesting every word at a painfully slow rate. Hours would pass and she would only be half done... despite hunger or other bodily needs, she would remain until she had read it from title to conclusion.
“Oh,” the elf stopped suddenly, her voice ringing in the emptiness of the library. She had suddenly noticed a woman hunched over a book, her face somewhat hidden to her as she rested her cheek within that book. Este’s brilliant eyes glanced about, to see if anyone else was around. Failing to find any company, seeing the library had probably just opened, her eyes fell back onto the woman... and though the woman looked at peace, Este knew how uncomfortable it was to fall asleep with one’s face in a book; she hated dealing with a sore back and a red face... it drew too much attention and was rather embarrassing to walk slouched over as one retreated from the library. Slowly leaning forward, her hand gently touched the woman’s shoulder, a touch and contact so barely made that the woman might not have felt it. “Miss? Miss...” Quickly leaning away, she redirected that hand to cover her mouth and chin, in an action of embarrassment.
“Oh, please wake up...”
The lamplight danced along the elf’s tanned skin, highlighting the pale, jade hue in her irises. Her eyes were rather strange, appearing so hollow in comparison to the vivacious colors of her cheeks and flesh... she wore a simple cotton dress and a green bodice, matching both her slippers and eyes. A touch of sadness painted her eyes and twisted down the corners of her lips... she was frail and svelte in frame, easily recognizable, as an elf for any human with her size and proportion would most likely be malnourished and dying. Este slowly and quietly pulled out the seat beside the woman; removing a bag from her shoulder, she eased it onto the table as silently as possible. Sitting down, she inched the seat closer to the woman, leaning over to her.
“Miss? Miss, I think you’ve fallen asleep... Miss?”
‘I think your asleep miss, uggghhh if she was any nicer and I had been asleep I think I may have really puked. No one could be that nice and cheery in the morning.’ she thought to herself before slowly faking herself waking up. She lifted one eyelid open and then another and let them shut several times before she yawned saying out loud, “Whose there...” it took her a couple of minutes to fake getting use to the light. But once she was ‘awake’ she tried to be nice. “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have dosed off and they forgot to wake me when they were closing the place up for the night.” and with that she started off the conversation, rather lamely is what she thought. She mimicked herself in her head saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must have dosed off and they forgot to wake me when they were closing the place up for the night. How stupid was that, surely I could’ve came up with better. I had the whole night to figure this out but instead I spent it reading a book which wasn’t even remotely related to the subject I was looking for. Oh well I might as well play along...’ Some people think it is rather lame to talk to yourself, but after you consider being locked away for two hundred years, talking to yourself is fairly normal. Even if it is just in your head where no one else can hear it unless their a telepath or something.
She looked the girl in the face taking her in, she sniffed and wiped away the imaginary sleep from her eyes. With that sniff however she was able to take in the smells of the room, and with her experience she was able to pick out the different blood from the old and dusty books, the wood of the shelves, and the horrible smells of decay from various corners of the place. With that small sniff she instantly identified the girl as an elf, pure blood, but with elves their blood never told of their real age so that was an ability limited to certain races. She was quite a beauty, not extraordinarily beautiful in Sere’s opinion, but she was pretty none the less. All the elves had this regal appearance, but once you got used to it many people realized that their apparent good looks were normal for them. And what was beautiful to them was ravishing to us, their standards were far above ours for the most part. After the obvious first impression though, the waves of kindness and good coming off of her would have made some of the more grimmer people nauseous. She looked over the girl’s body, her hair was a wonderful shade of brown(?), and her eyes were equivalently wonderful in a shade of oddly there was no color that was identifiable to her in those wonderfully hollow eyes. She would be one of the people that Sere would have loved to shape shift into and portray.
“Well in any case good morning, and thank you for waking me up...Miss?” she said with the last part of her sentence being vocalized more as a question than a statement. After all she didn’t know this woman, and hopefully she hadn’t been around long enough to know who or what she was. She suddenly realized she didn’t know what she looked like right now, her body always tended to revert to the state it had been in when se had been bitten. And since she couldn’t see her own reflection she had to resort to other means to make sure she looked right. Basically she assumed whatever form popped into her head and she had to do a retransformation every couple of hours or so to make sure it was all kept up.