Morning all. I hope you are ready for the morning prompt. As a quick reminder. I will have the November write in prompt up tomorrow morning as I am writing every day in November, but I will not be posting anything else as it is veteran’s day. And my day includes more VFW focused activities. But for today…Timers set for fifteen minutes and off we go.
okay now I am wondering what Tomar got up to.
Tuesday, November 10th: The book fell open to a well worn page.
The book fell open to a well-worn page. Sarni blinked. She hadn’t expected it to be that easy. She knew Tomar was studying. She could see the light in his tower night after night. She saw the increasing requisition for candles. She saw the pools of wax and the tired eyes from too many late nights.
She just didn’t know what Tomar was studying. Sarni entered the tower because he hadn’t been seen in three days. While Tomar was a loner, she knew she was the closest thing to a friend he had in the castle complex so she was asked to check on him. While no one asked her, she understood that they wanted to know what it was he was studying in his free time.
He never fell behind on lessons but everyone knew he had no trouble keeping up, Tomar was brilliant. He did not need to stay up late at night to keep up with her rest of the students. They all knew he was doing something else, researching or studying something else. No one was close enough to ask what without looking as though they were prying.
Sarni knocked on the door when she arrived. There was no answer but the door swung open at her touch. It was not latched as it had been the last time she tried to visit Tomar. She tested for unseen protections. If there were any, they had been removed.
Sarni stepped into the space calling out for Tomar as she did so. She knew it was pointless as she could feel the emptiness of the tower even as she stepped into the room. She knew there was no one there. She looked around and spotted the desk. There were books out, but all of the papers were gone. One of the books looked more worn than the others and she took a chance by letting it fall open.
She hadn’t expected it to work. Just to be certain she was going to his most oft checked page, she repeated the trick three more times. Each time it opened on the same page. She looked down at the page. It was heavily annotated. There were sentences underlined and long arrow pointing to the margin where text had been written. Sarni recognized Tomar’s handwriting. It was small but neat. She could see the excitement in some of his strokes, especially when his hand moved the pen upward but it was legible for all that.
It was a lot to read through though so she took a seat at his desk and began going through first the passage and then the notations. The book was unfamiliar, the writer not one whose works were often studied. His syntax was unexpected and just to read the passage was fairly an act of translation. She may have understood the language but it was almost as though the writer was using a code.
“It is a code,” Sarni realized. She blinked and flipped to the front piece hoping that the usual appellations were made. In the front she saw it. The authors name and the declaration that this was his work as set down by the printers and faithfully checked over by himself. While she appreciated the declaration, it was he date the author set the words to print that mattered.
Sarni read the date and nodded. The date and the wording of the declaration matched. The author was writing in a time when the church was routinely attacking anyone whose philosophy or subject they found to go against their principles. It was why the author had to declare his work. It was also why authors at that time used codes. Sarni knew several frequently used ones from the time period. She picked the most often used and tried to use it as a cypher first.
