Winter's Treasures
By Rey

Chapter summary: Who is faster: a jötun Asgardian or bits and pieces from his past that seek to catch up with him?

15. Library, Part 2

Loki's love of scholarly pursuit saved him from any more distraction once the one-to-one lesson on Ymska reading was underway, and once his minder was gone. His self-assigned tutor brought in a stack of chalky-white stone tablets, what looked like charcoal sticks, and a tapestry with Ymska characters stitched on it, silvery white on a rich purple-blue background. They attached the tapestry's corners to the blank stretch of wall behind his cushion using their ice, and the lesson began.

With his stiff and highly discomfited self perched in their arms for an easy look at the basic set of Ymska characters put on top, he learnt to recognise, vocalise and finger-trace the lettering, first. His tutor was astonished and delighted – gratifyingly so, he must admit, even just to himself – when he worked through the basic system and rules of the vast collection of symbols in, in their own words, an unprecedented speed and competence. They did not need to know that he had gained such competency through his stint as one of his father's – Odin's – scribes centuries ago; and he had spent the centuries after that mastering – or at least understanding – various lettering systems and ciphers, even the writing system belonging to the long-dead realm of Niflheim, in addition to decoding a piece of text's real message.

Only now did he wonder, why Jötska – or, as these people said it, Ymska – had never passed through his mind during his studies, despite the disgusting taste of learning anything about a barbaric enemy…. Come to think of it again, had he seen any manuscript about the jötnar in the palace's library?

`Well, I am here now. I can remedy this knowledge defeciency before I leave, if only for survival's sake. – We spent so much time getting to this town. The message to the Capital must take nearly as long to deliver. I have some time yet. I cannot remain ignorant and under their mercy, always relying on them speaking in Allspeak.`

Back on his assigned seat on the huge cusion, he proceeded to diligently learn to combine letters and read the words formed from them: simple, everyday vocabulary related to the first five characters of the writing subsets, then seven, then ten, as the tutor, seated across from him on another cushion, wrote those words on a few stone tablets using a stick of charcoal. Writing was learnt through copying those characters and the words they were shaped into on his assigned stone tablets, again and again and again, with his own charcoal stick. The charcoal stick itself turned out not to have quite the texture and quality of those he had been accustomed to: less brittle and gritty, for one, and gliding smoothly on the no-less-smooth surface of the tablets like a piece of coloured wax-pen instead of scratching on it.

Later, he found that the simple vocabulary apparently came with a holographic primer book-shaped piece of technology, complete with sound recordings of how each word was pronounced and what it meant in other tongues. The devise was activated and fed by thin streams of seiðr, and he could borrow it to study outside of the classroom.

There had not been anything like this arrangement – or this technology, for that matter – on Asgard, except for those of the noble class who paid particular attention on education, scholarly pursuit and technology, the number of whom was fairly limited even in combination of each. To think that, here, this kind of luxurious tool and chance was available to the general populace, at least in the bigger settlements….

Or was it truly publicly available, really? Were these people treating him as his station demanded it – as his markings told them to, as Avlar had once claimed in other words? What did they want from him, if so? What would these people gain in sending a message to the Capital for him, for that matter? Why would they spend precious resources and time and energy for a runt that would be rejected outright by whoever was going to receive the message, anyway?

It took his tutor several tries to regain his attention. And still, even as he forced himself to renew his attempt to make a sentence – or rather, a word chain – from the words he had learnt, their eyes had never left his hunched self, as if they knew that his heart was no longer in the lesson.

And then, the said tutor got the idea to play a word-chain game with him, with a small bag of highly colourful stone beads as the prize….

He fled the cushion, the tutor, the taunting bag of beads. But he couldn't flee the sudden, inexplicable longing for Eðlenstr that the various bright colours of the beads evoked in him. This bizarre, ridiculous urge just topped up all the various thoughts and questions that the presence of the high-tech primer book had sparked in him, and he couldn't bear it while in such a close proximity to anybody.

Libraries on Asgard were always guilded but ultimately useless corners of a nobleman's home – or a wing on the palace's farther side, in a greater scale – and books were rarely allowed to be carted out of those places, regardless of how little they might see use otherwise. Those who could access such resources were, in consequence, those of the noble class or at least highly favoured by that ilk.

But here, in this land of monsters, in this huge, packed, beautiful, well-organised library that Loki could only wish he'd had access too long before this, he'd spotted rather numerous people with various bearings and numbers of family lines from his ever-changing hideouts among the shelves. They were reading things ranging from coated scrolls to book-shaped electronic devises, all shoulder to shoulder and avid and relaxed, as if they were all equals and had equal opportunity to gain knowledge and have the pleasure of it. He'd seen only one instance of class distinction, when a smaller – maybe younger? – jötun, with less intricate markings than their counterpart at that, yielded the book they were about to read to another jötun; but even then, the exchange had gone without a hitch, let alone grovelling from the lesser jötun, and the said lesser jötun quickly immersed themself in another book nearby all the same.

Feeling somehow disturbed by the scene, he talked to one of the other visitors of this main wing of the library, just long enough to get a direction to the shelves containing the Allspeak-translatable manuscripts, with the plan to immerse himself in books so that he did not need to observe the interactions of frost giants overly much anymore. The scoffing remark that the jötun tagged at the end of the instruction, about the uselessness of "learning Allspeak," only added to the surreality and all the thoughts and questions smothering him.

He began to get an inkling of how low the opinion of the jötnar – not only some of them – was on Allspeak – or maybe Asgard, as the main propagator of the use of that particular spell-skill – when, upon arriving at the area as instructed, he was greeted with the sight of a seemingly long-abandoned couple of shelf columns; so starkly messy and disorganised, when compared to the other parts of the library. Still, if a little cautiously, he began to peruse the shelves, looking at titles and choosing the neutral-seeming, simple-seeming ones to read.

He settled down in a nearby reading nook, a pit of pillows and furs on a slightly raised dace which was just as unkempt as the shelves were in this section, with A Compendium of Ymirheim's Predators, in the end. The enchanted tome was marked for "two thousand five hundred years and older," but… well… he did need to know more about the dangers that were present out in the wilds of this broken, hostile land, anyway, and it was stupid to assign such a vital bit of knowledge only to someone well past their majority.

The gruesome details on the life-like images and descriptions of each entry soon enlightened him to why the bar was set so high, although he was still in the opinion that someone a millennium younger than two-thousand-and-five-hundred could still read the tome safely. People like Thor would certainly relish books like this, even if they read nothing else.

And then, he came upon an entry near the back of the tome, and all bemusement over age limitations was driven clear out of his mind.

The picture alone managed to clog his throat like few others could. – A hulking beast, built more vertically than horizontally, was wreathed in fog so that it did not seem quite solid. It seemed to glide over the rocky land that served as the background, too, just like a tendral of mist would. A maw of large fangs, sharp and serrated, appeared out of the fog like a forest of deadly trees. Blue-black liquid dripped from many of the fangs in good amount, and Loki could not help wondering if it was jötun blood that he was seeing there. The dozen long, clawed arms framing the fanged mouth, topped by a cluster of sharp, beady eyes, only served to trigger the fight-or-flight instinct even more.

This compendium named the beast "the nightmare glider." The picture of it alone could certainly incite more than a few nightmares, even to a tough Asgardian like Thor and his ilk.

Still, Loki swallowed his instinctive fear and forced his eyes to move away to the caption beneath the picture, which, in this compendium, listed the image provider and the circumstance of the person encountering the animal being featured.

Image provided by Laufey Bergelmir-childe, 782nd Monarch of Ýmirheim, the only person in the recorded history of this land who slew three of this beasts in one encounter, when ambushed on their way to Agglasý.

`Laufey….` – But there could be more than one person named so, could it not? Surely this fearsome-sounding Laufey was not the one he had slain so easily in comparison, in that recovery chamber of Odin's? Maybe this Laufey was the ancestor of his own sire? Why would the Laufey that he knew have visited a poor district of the land, anyway, if the Agglasý that Eðlenstr had referred to some time ago was indeed the same with this one?

He read on; and the longer he read, the heavier and more constricted his heart felt, as if clutched by a merciless iron fist.

Because, past the drier bits of fact about the beast, including the admission of the author of the compendium that little of this species was known despite its ancient history given its lethality to "Milaðen," the entry went on to describe that, oftentimes, the only indication that a member of this species was nearby was when one's instinct of danger went off. – Despite its bulk, purportedly bigger than "the kindreds of the fields and the valleys," a nightmare glider moved lightly over even the most difficult terrain and thus left little track to follow or to overhear. The water droplets that somehow coalesced round its form as tendrals of fog further muffled the senses of hearing and smell of its prey, and worked with lethal tandem with its ability to move at top speed over short distances. It was attracted to living prey of any kind that was taller than three feet, which was the lowest reach of its lowest arms, since its bloated head-body could not bend and its pair of slim legs similarly did not seem to be made for bending. It made no sound, either, except for the crunching of its teeth on its prey.

Just like what had happened to Derek….

Being found weeping in a remote, long abandoned corner by the tutor one had fled from without any good reason was nearly as horrifying as the startling – and startlingly poignant – grief for a frost giant itself. It took Loki a long moment before he was aware that he had once more migrated – unwillingly – into the arms of a big blue monster, and yet a longer moment for him to at last try to wriggle free.

"You should have heeded the age label on the cover, little one," was all that the jötun commented, even as they tightened their arms round him and wiped the tears that still stubbornly seeped out of his eyes in trickles. "You are… what? A thousand years? A thousand and two hundred, at most. – Well, in any case, you are not even half of the required age, Little Loki. You should have known to mind the warnings on a book even if you could not yet speak Ymska."

The gentle rebuke, which was surprisingly not patronising, was nonetheless humiliating. More so, when they emerged out of the main section of the library and Avlar was there, waiting anxiously, shifting from foot to foot.

"Lokyé! Are you all right? I mean… what happened?" the boy burst out as soon as Loki was on his own feet again. The addressee shook his head. However, his erstwhile tutor seemed to have a different idea and extended their admonishment to Avlar, with "nightmare glider" thrown in.

Their baffled self soon had to contend with two weeping runts.

The librarians that Lúkra – Loki's once tutor – had galvanised to soothe him and Avlar managed to get the whole sorrowful tale of flight and capture and death from the latter, while a very, very tight-lipped Loki chose to determiminedly bury his nose – shield himself, in other words – behind a big tome about Jötunheim's flora, which was now assuredly for the ages of below one-thousand-and-five-hundred. Panic ensued, however muted by – most likely – some respect for the venue, and the Grand General was called back to the library to receive the highly alarming report.

Loki had no desire to see… her… any time soon, however, and, repaying Avlar's genuine show of concern for him, an alien concept that it was in his sorry life, he toted the boy along with him in his escape.

a strange young orphan without any clear background that he must look to the jötnar, nonetheless, saw no heads turning when he said to one of the librarians on the front desk that he wanted to bring two books out of the library, one of which being the high-tech primer book his self-assigned tutor had shown him during their aborted lesson. It was not because of the purported royal kinlines that he had, though, apparently, like he had briefly suspected, because Avlar toted four of them in a leather backpack. Some others, trundling along with the two towards the front door, were likewise burdened by at least a book each, either in their hands or in various bags.

He exited the library's building feeling even more confused and dumb than when he had come in, something that a library rarely incited in him nowadays.

To think that this library belonged to monsters, and manned by such….