but everything looks perfect
from far away
from far away
If words are a poem then oh, Septimus opens a floodgate of them, haiku after haiku, sonnet upon sonnet. They rain down on him as the man of chocolate and smoke's attention does. Eyes, they are blue and beautiful between the star that would shine even on the darkest of nights, are bright, eager. How Septimus devours his own words! They would be a wildfire in this library if he ever let them go, out of control, a conflagration taking on its own life and will thundering through the hole oft he structure until there is nothing but ashes of what once was and the knowledge that would be lost...
Oh, but Ceylon is lucky that the winged man stops, pauses. Ecology. Magic. Botany. They are words that he knows. Concepts he is familiar with only in the way that he is familiar with building garden walls and fountains, carving stone, marble, into something more beautiful than its natural formation would allow. Of course, of course, he'd had to study that too back home. When the great demon came to swallow the city, it took with it countless wonders that their city had to offer the world and its denizens. He knew so few of them as a boy, but he remembers those green days that his sister would play with him beside the mermaid fountain in the colossal garden. The Garden of Song.
It was beautiful.
Now, it lives only in the memory of those who visited before its destruction. One day, once he is well versed in the art of building everything and anything in the world, Ceylon knows that his city will ask him to build it up again and make it just as beautiful if not more so. They expect so much of the man.
He does not know how to disappoint them.
"Are there many enchanted lands for you here?" he says into the silence. It is not so much a question nor a demand, ending almost monotonously. Uninterested in the most polite of ways if indifference could be considered polite at all. Septimus might have Ceylon's attention and eyes, the blue of them shining just as Sept's own, but he does not have his heart, his emotion to back it up. There are so few mortal attachments that would hold him to any single place or person.
The last person he cared for left him over and over and over. What a pathetic life it had been, loving one who would only leave.
For a brief moment in time, Ceylon pauses. Wayward hair inches nearer the ground as he tilts his head, lips pursed in thought. His favorite section... "History..." he hums at last with a decided nod. "It is my most wide read subject." The monks at the monastery made sure of that. Every book on their history he was to consume, integrating it as a part of himself until he could recite it, could draw every detail in picture after picture down to the most agonizingly small pebble.
He was not to peruse so many other sections than that. There was simply not enough time. Still, the maps of Novus (this land) sound interesting enough, almost as fetching as the enchanted areas. "Would you show me the scrolls on your...enchanted lands?" he inquires. At the end, Ceylon clears his throat and looks to the ground. Before, he would not ask for books. They were always piled up every morning and taken away every evening once he'd run through the pages. It was both a gift and a curse to be pampered with all the knowledge his thirsting mind could want, but never to be able to make his own choice on what he would most desire to learn.
In that regard, he knows as he knows precious few other things, his life is changed. Whether it is for the better or worse, he's yet to decide.
