73 Searing 121
The Academy of Kalzasi
It wasn't uncommon for Finn to find himself in the Academy's archives. He might not have been there today had he not been given a reason, however. After his morning classes, he might have gone to Ale'Ephirium to see if Lyra needed him for anything that day, or gone busking to keep his performance skills honed just in case every good fortune that had built up over the past couple of seasons burst like a soap bubble and he was back to singing for his supper and hoping he would have enough for rent at the beginning of the next month.
But Petra Cormorant, the woman with the face of a card shark and the strange companion, had remembered the Crown and Lion and sent him a note there. Mail was uncommon for him, but she asked to meet at the archives that day and so here he was. But his classes had ended long before the appointed meeting time so here he was. Caught up on most things because he kept himself to a strict schedule lest he get overwhelmed and everything come crashing down, he found himself with idle time and so he found himself copying out what he thought was something poetic in Vallenor.
At this point, he could read it phonetically, but his actual grasp of the ancient elven tongue was not impressive unless one was impressed by a young minstrel attempting to learn a dead language just because. His script was neat and concise, though not as pretty as the original. The foundation of most of the lines consisted of two hemistichs of six syllables each, separated by a caesura. It seemed like an iambic hexameter, which would certainly flow like water. He murmured many of the lines as he wrote them, making little musical notations here and there to remind him later of some little idea that had struck him if he were to put it to music. If it did turn out to be purely iambic, he might have been mispronouncing a couple of words. Where the stress fell mattered, of course, but some vowels changed shape depending on whether they were stressed or unstressed.
Finn was unstressed by this. There was no deadline, only his own intellectual and artistic curiosity. It hardly felt like work at all.
But he did lose track of time, startled, and quickly packed things up. In his rush out, he handed the source material to a librarian and asked if it could be held for him until the morrow. With murmured thanks, he hurried to the appointed meeting place Petra had described.
The Academy of Kalzasi
It wasn't uncommon for Finn to find himself in the Academy's archives. He might not have been there today had he not been given a reason, however. After his morning classes, he might have gone to Ale'Ephirium to see if Lyra needed him for anything that day, or gone busking to keep his performance skills honed just in case every good fortune that had built up over the past couple of seasons burst like a soap bubble and he was back to singing for his supper and hoping he would have enough for rent at the beginning of the next month.
But Petra Cormorant, the woman with the face of a card shark and the strange companion, had remembered the Crown and Lion and sent him a note there. Mail was uncommon for him, but she asked to meet at the archives that day and so here he was. But his classes had ended long before the appointed meeting time so here he was. Caught up on most things because he kept himself to a strict schedule lest he get overwhelmed and everything come crashing down, he found himself with idle time and so he found himself copying out what he thought was something poetic in Vallenor.
At this point, he could read it phonetically, but his actual grasp of the ancient elven tongue was not impressive unless one was impressed by a young minstrel attempting to learn a dead language just because. His script was neat and concise, though not as pretty as the original. The foundation of most of the lines consisted of two hemistichs of six syllables each, separated by a caesura. It seemed like an iambic hexameter, which would certainly flow like water. He murmured many of the lines as he wrote them, making little musical notations here and there to remind him later of some little idea that had struck him if he were to put it to music. If it did turn out to be purely iambic, he might have been mispronouncing a couple of words. Where the stress fell mattered, of course, but some vowels changed shape depending on whether they were stressed or unstressed.
Finn was unstressed by this. There was no deadline, only his own intellectual and artistic curiosity. It hardly felt like work at all.
But he did lose track of time, startled, and quickly packed things up. In his rush out, he handed the source material to a librarian and asked if it could be held for him until the morrow. With murmured thanks, he hurried to the appointed meeting place Petra had described.
