Words I'll Never Say

With the search of the stacks coming up empty, Ruth had climbed down to wander aimlessly through the rest of the section. No doubt someone would cry bloody murder at the state he’d left behind him, but until the elf found his elusive journal, they could shove their complaints far up their ass, this was a matter of maintaining his sanity. Megara had her pipe and plants, and for him, the words and parchment of a book carried with him nearly always. It wasn’t all written in common, nor did it follow a coherent structure. Pictures, sketches and scribbled phrases, edits, were squeezed into the margins or spaces between the paragraphs of elvish gibberish. Some sections or glued in pages were unreadable, the author’s penmanship a code only known unto themselves. In all the journal was a patchwork of musings, events, observations, poems or sketches of a well travelled individual, an increasingly agitated one.

It wasn’t until Ruth had wandered into the reading room in a last effort to scour its couches when he heard a familiar phrase uttered. His path stopped dead, sharp blues scanning for where the voice had emanated from in determination and upon finding the thief, or the indication of their relative whereabouts, Ruth gestured with his hand. A ward of paralysis was swiftly marked out in the air, cast in the hope it would catch the culprit in the act.

“I know where I left my things. That book, in particular. If you’ve lost pages or damaged it I have to warn you I’m not going to involve any of the authorities, I’ll handle you myself.” While all five feet of him didn’t at first instil confidence in that threat, Ruth was more than capable at scraping. “I would prefer to not have to explain to Megara why I burned down the Refectory, but a man has his treasures.”