"Tell me about despair, yours and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Hugo,
You used to visit more--not much more, maybe once or twice every season. Your life used to be full of the simple desire to do, to create, and you would come to the library with wide eyes and your face cracked with a smile.
Of course, there was nothing here that you would not find at home. The Arkwright family had written or owned every book about smithing in all of Novus, but you liked to brush the dust off of shelves as you passed, to open a tome that creaked as the pages flipped and to see each carefully rendered instruction drawn in ink on bound parchment.
You liked the wood smell, the damp air of Delumine. You liked that it rained and that it did not smell like saltwater. There was not always the drone of the ocean in the background, or the clang of metal.
It was quiet. Unhurried. You felt at peace.
You do not stop to ask yourself where that went: the happiness, the peace, the open-armed need to come. At this point you have not been to Delumine in a year or so and all you can think is your shuttered windows, your locked door, your quiet forge that sits like a low-burning stove in the dim light of your lanterns.
You know where your mirth went, what happened, why you are gripped by this crushing weight that tells you to sleep, and sleep, and sleep or else drink so it is not quite as heavy--it is just that you don't want to know, so you say you do not.
Today, you are directionless. Around you are shelves stacked high with books you don't read. You know that, around the corner, down a dimly lit hall, your family's books are neatly tucked away with the rest of the artisans -- it feels fitting, somehow, in a way that you can't quite place. You might wonder if it ever had a place at all. You wonder this more than you care to admit, and you doubt it more often than that.
Your directionless wandering drags you to the back of the room, points your face at a wall of shelves made from clean, dark wood, and you are thinking to yourself: the shop could use some new ones because every second of your life circles back to the shop, to the glow of molten iron and the distinct clang of your hammer.
There is a girl behind you - she is not watching you examine the shelves and you barely hear her at all when she says could you pass me that book? You pull it gently from the shelf and hand it over your shoulder, like it never mattered, like nothing has ever mattered, and it worries you that when you see her, purple like the first blink of a sunset, like spring, like coming alive, that you are as you always are-- unstirred.
After a moment you force a smile. The part of you that hopes she notices is not nearly as large as the part that's begging her to turn a blind eye. "Are you color-coding, or...?" you ask, shuffling your wings over your back. "What's it about?"
It never occurs to you that anyone else might not know what they're doing, who they are. You have always felt alone in it. You have never quite noticed that you are all, collectively, at least a little lost.
@Mesnyi
