Scanning the room he had found himself within, Noah fell onto the shelves and boxes strewn around, wooden ones, chests more like. They were dotted everywhere and there. Shelves lined the walls and a small table to the side was the only thing not covered by a box of sorts bar a single, small thing, a little jewelry box opened wide with a gemstone necklace set within it.
It was a sort of pillar cut crystal with a hole at the top where a thin leather string was pushed through. The crystal itself was dark purple, a type of amethyst, he guessed. Reaching out to it, Noah was about to pick it up when he heard Liora say from behind him, “it was my daughters.” He spun to her, seeing her standing in the doorway with a neatly folded blanket over her arm which she soon laid on the bed against the wall. Her hairshiny and wet from the bath she’d just had.
“Sor-”
“Don’t you say that word,” she snapped him to silence. Seeing him veritably zip-it, she let loose a vibrant smile, “I brought a blanket. Thought you might need it,” saying so as she came to his side and gently lifted the necklace from the box. Saying nothing for a bit as she lovingly stroked across the smooth side of the pillar.
“I made it when I first gave birth to her,” she rubbed the crystal as if polishing it to a shine, “I found this gem in some rock Harv cracked open while tilling the field. It was this beautiful red colour so vibrant I just couldn’t believe it existed. A friend of mine in the city, she offered to cut it into something nice as a gift for my new baby.
“I got it back not long after I finally gave birth,” she helf the band and let the pillar hang loosely as the setting sunlight streamed in, causing an effect like sun beaming through stained glass to cross her pale, lightly freckled skin. “I don’t know what happened to it, but after Eleanora left some years ago with her boyfriend, it turned this shade of purple. Perhaps it misses her as well?”
Noah stood mutely, unwilling and unwanting to interupt her while she was in such fond remembrance.
Setting the necklace back into her hand, Liora gave it a final look before gently lowering it back into the lockbox. “I could never find a good place for it anywhere in the house. I would always end up by it and think of her, wondering where she is and if she is alright out there traveling the world and whether she will ever come back to me.” Taking the box in hand, Liora looked to Noah then to the box then finally stood high on her toes and slid it onto one of the high up shelves.
“Idiotic, isn’t it? Thinking my daughter would ever want to return to such a decrepit farm while she’s living life amongst the winds. Travelling here and there, seeing sights I could only ever dream of, I haven’t seen her in how long now… fi… five years? Has it really been that long? Gods, I miss her. I hope she hasn’t been harmed at all…”
Noah chewed his cheek, feeling exceptionally out of place, like he was eavesdropping on a very private, very not-something-you-tell-strangers type of story.
Noah shifted his weight a little, but that was just enough for a floorboard to creak beneath his weight and startle Liora from her thoughts. “Oh, apologies. I was rambling to myself there.”
“It’s alright, I don’t mind.”
Liora laughed a little, “why thank you for being so patient with this old hag then.” Noah’s cheek twitched but said nothing in return.
Liora turned her head around the dusking room, “there isn’t much to do so late in the day, but I do believe there are some old books in that chest if you wish to read something until you’re tired enough to sleep.” She pointed to a chest—one of the large, more regal looking ones—set just off to the left side of the bed.
“I do think I have some games somewhere…” by then she fell to the hoard of chests and boxes and sighed, “I’m sorry for the mess as well. For as large as this house is, we have had exceptionally few reasons to furnish the other rooms, and frankly, I just couldn’t bring myself to remove any of Eleanora’s belongings from here. I do hope it won’t bother you much, I did do my utmost to clean up after she left.”
“It’s no problem, Liora,” he waved away her worries, “you should have seen the room my grampa gave me when I went over for the summers. I practically had to sleep standing up from how much there was stuffed in there.” It wasn’t a massive house, barely big enough for both hius grandparents and his two cousins, leaving Noah with a little storage room turned temporary bedroom not quite under the stairs.
Liora nodded along, brightly beaming as she gave one more bob. “Good, then I won’t be a bother to you anymore.” She skated with almost ghostly, waning steps to the door, each lift of her leg laboured, each dragging pull wasted. In the doorway, he saw a hollowness in her eyes as she turned to him, “if you need anything, I’ll be in the room down the hall. Have a good night.”
His mouth fell open, he wanted to say anything but by the time a gargled noise could escape, the door was already shut.
“Ugh…” he groaned and slumped onto the bed, face buried in his hands, “in time Noah, in time.” He pitied Liora, she was such a kind woman but the world treated her so poorly. He wanted to do something to help her, give her some way out. But what could he do? A nobody. A soul inside a stolen body with no knowledge of the world.
‘Excuses.’ He may be a nobody, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t help in the menial sense. Give her a shoulder to cry on, a hand to help around the house. Not to mention he could just learn the ways of this new world of his. His attenition turned to the chest Liora had said some books were laid within. He slid from the bed to his knees and scuttled towards it, noticing the latch had taken on a unique shiny tone from where the oils of fingers had leeched into it.
Books, they were always a good place to start when learning something new.
‘If I can even understand the language.’ He understood Liora just well, so his hopes were somewhat founded.
Lifting the latch, he opened the thick lid of the chest and was greeted with an assortment of neatly aligned books on the left and smaller boxes on the right with very few gaps in between. So tight in fact that the only way of getting anything out was to grab the longer ones by the end and tug.
There was a sort of curiousity that was taking hold of him. Noah knew it wasn’t appropriate to pry upon anothers stuff, but when his fingers found the seam and hinge of the weighty box, he flipped open the lid and was greeted with the jawdropping object within.
It was long and cylindrical, with one end tappered into a gentle curved egg while the other end was flat. His brows scrunched, confused for but a second before he suddenly realized what a woman could do with an oddly phallic shaped piece of wood.
“Wood cannot be good for that,” he muttered, “I mean, what if she got a splinter?” he shivered, just the idea of having a miniature shard of wood lodged somewhere private on his body caused him enough pain, he couldn’t imagine it for a woman though, he didn’t have the bits for that, but he could guess it wouldn’t be pleasant.
Shaking his head clean of those thoughts, he returned the box to its slot of focused on the assortment of books. There were dozens, with at least two layers on top of each other. Plucking from the top of the line, he checked the title of the red canvas bound book, ‘different language,’ he recognized those squiggles to be, ‘but I can still read them,’ and they said ‘An Encyclopaedia on Monsters: Volume 4.’
It piqued his interest, he’d seen centaurs and eaten a minotaur and witness a dark elf—if those were considered monsters to this world—so figuring out what else was out there certainly caught his interest. He glanced to the box, once more, finding the first volume and decided to skim through that first to see if his understanding of the language was more or just a fluke.
Taking it to the bed, he seated himself against the wall, one leg pulled up to act as a table while the other lay extended. Once comfortable, he opened the cover to the first page and was greeted with an illustration. It was that of a woman, though not that of a human, it looked human, though more insectoid with large, compound eyes and fan-like antaenae rising off her forehead. She lacked arms and legs, but he could see the barest bit of wings behind her. THough that didn’t change anything considering her modest sized breasts—and the nipples painted with agonizing detail—and the slit atop the mound between her legs.
“This… is this a porno? It is, isn’t it?”
Noah’s eyes skirted left and right, returning to focus on the moth girl the pinched the page and flipped through the foreword and whatever else there was. As tempted as he was to read it, he didn’t have the patience to deal with that. Rather see what this encyclopaedia truly was about.
What appeared on the first true page was a… human woman. Dressed in nothing, in a neutral pose that showed off her naked front of bountiful breasts and bushy crotch with a smaller male illustration just as naked, and with just as detailed genitalia. ‘I can see what the artists priority was.’ Noah chuckled and began reading through the text provided.
[Human]
[Sapience: Yes]
[Sex: Male/Female]
[Nature: Depend]
[Diet: Just about everything]
[Favourite Food: Depends]
[Special Aptitudes: Hardy, Adaptable]
[Arguably the most common sapient species to be found all across the continents of Estra. Honestly, there’s not much to talk about. If you’re reading this, you’re likely a sapient yourself, therefore you know what a human is. Arrogant, thinks little about consequences, gets killed a lot, etc. Slow births, slow growths, fast adaptation and ingenuity and filled with plenty of ethos. Really, if you run into one (and trust me, you will) feel free to kill of empty it of ethos till it dies. Gods know there is enough of them.]
Noah was left blinking incomprehensibly at the last bit. ‘Well, fuck you too…’ he flipped to the front page, scoured it for a name but found nothing, then flipped to the back and opened the cover, finding a name just between the crack of the moth-girl illustration’s naked behind. “Well fuck you too… Ali… Alikavamata… varnata… Alikavarnata tera… Terphanitun. Jesus, and I thought Arcturus was a mouthful, fuck me.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing it to alleviate the throbbing pain he knew to be incoming.
As he opened his eyes, he read the name again, “guessing they aren’t human then,” with a name like that, whoever this person was, was either posh, or just not human.
Sighing, he returned to the page of human and moved to the next page, ready to read and comprehend, “you may have a weird name Alikava… you know what, Alika sounds good to me. Well Alika, you may have a weird name, but at least I can learn something from this."
chappy thanqu
Thanks for the chapter :)
Thank you for the chapter.