ad voco draconis
by Testudo Tesselata (L107) filia Chalybs (L77)
And hanging from the rocky cliff, where I could at first discern no being nor object, came clear to my eye (with judicious use of intellego vim) was the breathing incarnation of the Void. Charnel breath melting rock beneath its nose, the black creature curled into the curve of the stone like a black flame in stasis. When the black became disrupted by a sudden yellow gleam of tooth or eye, my guide lead me back from the ravine floor to the safety of the neighboring forest...
Since sightings of dragons are fairly infrequent, further elaboration of this type would have been appreciated. But what Testudo has done, is to combine a goodly portion of the common knowledge of dragons from her region, akin to the collections of folklore and myth known to us in the Circulus scienticulæ and others. The stories of folk heroes taming dragons often ascribe the quieting of the beast to a religious cause, as in this plate of Love awakening the dragon of Firth.
Another entry bring us a flavor of the Dawn, with the ethereal seven-headed beast found in the following illustration, evoking thoughts of the rather questionable spirits of creation mentioned in An Infinite Quiet.
This text may offer some of the breadth of of local knowledge that will render it a useful resource for further research and travel, that may have recommended the Usufructus to it's recent re-estimation. However, as it is a field guide to dragons, caveat emptor.
Pretty!
Pretty!
thanks!
I stumbled across a website full of medieval dragon pics and I couldn't resist.
tiny
Somehow I forgot this one would be a tiny book. How cute! Little itsy-bitsy dragon-chans. Oojy-woojie-woo...
Perdix cheated, then.
Since I don’t see either of them being a dab hand at reproducing illuminations with such patience and skill. —Unless, of course, this was another gift. Which is possible.
magic=cheating?
Is part of the appeal of the trunk that it's all made to size? I don't see it as cheating, but it could be a gift. Any talented artists from back in the salon days?
Trunks; castles; magic; cheating--
The trunk is (and the castle will be) set up so that anyone who steps within its bounds is shrunk with all their possessions. So if you were carrying the book, it would be shrunk, so long as it remained inside the spell. —But the whole point of the dollhouse is to make stuff for it; Abakoshi (the sister) had the fascination for dollhouses, and Shotik (the brother) had always had a habit of making fiddly little things for them. (It’s one of the reasons he was initally tracked as a Touccian at Bethelion.) You get a miniature into the dollhouse without shrinking it into a miniature miniature by pushing it in with a stick or something, so that it isn’t a “possession” when it crosses the threshold, and so doesn’t shrink. (This is also how they get their hash inside, and why it lasts them such a long, long time.) —To carry a “big” thing over the threshold and miniaturize it is, by their rules, a form of “cheating.”
They’ve made books for the trunk/castle by propping the book outside and sitting inside and scribing onto a miniature pile of paper and then binding the result into a miniature book. After the incident, one would read the book outside while the other sat inside scribing a copy; they did a number of books this way while retreating from the world, as a way of not thinking about what had happened.
But they haven’t made all the books in their little library. Lætitia had a miniature copy of Quo ventus made as a gift for the twins, fr’inst. So I could see it as a gift—from Tiro, say, post-incident, with a suitably gross Maneréan double-entendre lurking obscurely within. Monsters for a monster, say. But pretty. Very pretty. And so small!