Reflections on the Dįvonësë War: The Dįvįnë Will Bear Witness to Fate

Chapter 4 - The Alabaster Princess

Digression 1
38th Day of Ope in the Third Month of Snow's Fall
4633 A.G.G. (Present Day) 

Castle Įcħor-Nåbįlå, North of the Yavan Mountains
The Continent of Kazakoto
1:45 P.S.R. (Pre Suns Rising)

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Aoleon

A tall, elegant woman clothed in a white turtleneck sweater, which hugged her lean, melanin-deficient body, found herself gracefully walking into one of the finest personally owned libraries in the world; the once great Yavan Abbey. Beneath the long black frisco skirt she wore, soft carpeting teased her bare feet. Her left ear jingled with a beautiful cuffed earring which was representative of her family's House; its thin dangling chains and stones toying with the light as her thick hips and long legs propelled her ghostly aspect forward. Resting on her forehead between her snowy brows, she wore with reverence and pride an honourable ornament. It was a decoration which had belonged to her mother, and her grandmother before her. A symbol of beauty and spiritual focus among her mother's people, the Dwalli; an exceptional carnelian stone which was suspended by a thin silver chain that ran the center of her head and was suspended from the base of her thick mousy white bantu knots. Knots that were heavily decorated in brass, dangling isilivere ropes, gold and ceramic.  

The woman's violet-red eyes fell onto the ground as she moved along and she took closer notice of the thick, plush strip of blood red carpeting that ran down its center she was walking on. Its warmth sitting in extreme contrast to the rough, unfinished stone that comprised the cold floor that jabbed at the souls of her feet as she passed between the two. Dark patterns of roses and leaves could be seen in the carpet and she imagined crushing them beneath her exposed toes as she walked over them. Causing her to randomly wonder how different the lands around her may have been in the time when the original construction which preceded it was founded in ages long past before it sunk beneath the earth; wondering if it resembled the woodlands those designs invoked. 

Colloquially known as The City of Light after its founding, the albino's stomping grounds had also been called The Land of Supreme Vision. Other names bestowed during its darker years were far less flattering, such as The Bloody Keep and The Citadel of Tears. Now Castle Įcħor-Nåbįlå, as it was properly christened in more recent times, was now more a proper home and less of a time-lost ruin due in no small part to the great wealth of the castle's lord.

Aoleon loved the castle's unique mix of cultural influences, as did its lord and his beloved queen. And in so loving it, he'd done his best during his reconstruction efforts to keep the castle and the surrounding land mostly as it was during its era; as it was when it was when it was built more than a thousand years ago. The city, especially the castle proper, ran as deep beneath the ground as it was spread wide above it; mostly dwarven with dashes of sunset sensibilities. Same with the land's outlying holdfasts, hamlets and ruins.

This was something rarely seen away from the mountains these days as surface-dwelling dwarves were far, far fewer in number than they were before the Ten and Five Year Wars, and their former surface dwellings and towns were becoming more and more difficult to find unmolested by opportunists, grave robbers or the ravages of time.

But of all of the rooms in all of the buildings of the gargantuan city-estate, this was, by far, her favorite. Understandable seeing as how the royal family was known for its shared love of knowledge and reading. To that end the king felt that nothing less would do than hiring the finest historians and former museum curators directly from the Joined Lands themselves to aid in Įcħor-Nåbįlå's restoration. And he ensured that the crown compensated them and their specialized teams very well to refurbish, organize and appraise the library's books and scrolls. And should they have chosen to remain under the purview of the crown, he further offered to house them in his township's rather luxurious High Town district along with the royal viticulturists, taxidermists, cooks and landscapers. Too great would've been the loss had the library, and the castle at large, been allowed to continue on the course of slow decay that it had been on for some two centuries after the city's "abandonment".