40 Glade 122
Writing clearly was as much a hurdle as everything else this new job entailed. He needed to write with a clear hand, a steady hand, and with a hand he had not used to write before. Even with weights and clips to keep the paper from moving, he still had to grow quickly accustomed to writing with his left hand. No one really expects for a creature in the woods to amputate your writing arm and take it as a trophy, but he had to adapt. It was endlessly frustrating that he required the assistance of a secretary to write most anything that needed to be legible to others, and Florian found himself stealing bits of time to practice.
He was never much of a writer before. He knew how to write, and his handwriting hadn't been atrocious, but now he had a reason for it to look nice. He found himself writing and rewriting passages from children's fiction. Thing that were easy to copy. It was a slow process, and made all the more difficult when it came to avoiding smudging the ink with his hand. Neither pencil nor pen were impervious to smudges, and keeping an elevated hand as he wrote was a tiring accommodation.
He was alone in the office. It was not as large as Brenner's, but it was his, and that was something that bewildered the Lysanrin. A pitcher of water — with ice! — sat on a side table near the window, and Florian stood up to pour himself a glass. He looked out of the window, at the view of the city the Presidium offered. It was not the scenery he had grown up with. When he looked carefully with silver eyes instead of blue, he could see the wards layered over the building, over the windows, covering ever inch of surface and regularly bolstered and fed by the strongest shield mages the Order of Reconciliation had to offer. Especially now, magical threats were at the forefront of the minds of the people here. Coven witches could see the regime change as a chance to strike — though Florian knew little of the Covens, just that they posed a danger — and Kalzasi was a veritable home of mages ready to go to war for their home. The wards did not just layer over the outside of the Presidium, but inside the rooms, too. Florian had briefly considered practicing his siphoning on them, but it was too soon to be so open about his inherent magic. His place in this world was precarious.
The scent of flowers covered the scent of smog that pervaded the air. He still watched out the window, as if he could see details clearly past the fractal-patterned, shimmering wards that were layered thickly over the windows. Sometimes he could get lost in thought watching the patterns of aether. It was the closest he could manage to relax.
