“Just look at it.”
“I try to avoid that. It gives me the creeps.”
“Such a petite size…” He laid a hand on the glass at chest height for the skeleton. The ribcage wasn’t too dissimilar in shape to that of a human, although bearing the customary thirteen ribs. Much like some other creatures, all but the final pair of ribs were attached to the sternum via cartilage. “The broadness of that sternum, the elongated finger bones.”
“It’s the teeth that get me.”
Darshan lifted his gaze from examining the foot bones to the skull. Although common rhetoric stated that the sharper the canines the purer the elf, he’d never encountered one with teeth any more than marginally different. The canines of this skull were a good inch from the base of the jaw. “You hear nobles back home boasting of how pure their elven slaves are, but this is what the first settlers were like.” Whoever this specimen had been, those teeth could rival a tiger’s.
He stepped back to take the skeleton’s frame in its entirety. If the theologians could have this for but a day. Even an hour would suffice for a new wave of theories to spread throughout the academic circles. “This place has much in common with the average Knitting Factory.”
“Excuse me?”
Darshan frowned. What part of what he’d said had confused her? “Of course, my apologies. It is a somewhat colloquial term for our healing academies.” With apprentice healers being slightly cheaper than even their non-magical counterparts, common folk often sought aid. It didn’t seem to matter that it ran the risk of getting an inadequately trained healer and dying. “How did this collection come to be?” She had mentioned translations earlier, but not the language.
“This used to be a Domian outpost, back when Tirglas couldnae even be classed as a kingdom.”
He strode to the opposite side of the room. There was a space in the shelving, big enough for a cabinet of similar size to the one the elven skeleton sat in. That had to be where the human remains had resided. But there was also a similar structure on a third wall, the shelving there was also bare. Had there been more than two skeletons? Another elven specimen, perhaps? What had become of the third one?
“When the clans finally joined as a kingdom and ousted the Domians, a lot of their studies remained.”
“I am surprised they left the building standing, much less the work within. Do you, perchance, know what sort of studies they were doing here?” As much as some within the Crystal Court liked to idolise the ancient empire, Domian had a rather distasteful underbelly. Not that his own land was clean of atrocities, some of them had likely come from Domian during the invasion several centuries back. But the rumours of what the Domian people could do, what they had known… quite a number of their feats defied the natural order.
“Medical notes, mostly. A lot of that was a few generations before me time.”
Nodding distractedly, Darshan turned his focus on the tome dominating the table on the left side of the room. The yellowed pages were already opened to a section on the musculature that made up the forearm. Although age had faded the angular Ancient Domian script and constant use had darkened the page edges, the words were easy enough to make out. “I trust your people have a translated version?”
“Some sections have been—we keep those in the library downstairs. Most here still choose to work with the original text.”
“All these?” He waved a hand at the rows of books. Age had ravaged a handful of the leather spines, cracking the edges, but most looked no more than a century old. “Each one is Domian in origin?” It seemed impossible. The ancient empire had fallen centuries ago, but perhaps a pocket had survived. And if heretofore unknown knowledge rested within these walls, then maybe he could bargain for copies.
“Each one,” Caitlyn echoed, a small smile creasing her eyes.
So many. Only the royal library in Minamist boasted more than a half-dozen and here was thrice that all lined up in one spot. Strange to look upon them and know hands had crafted them almost two millennia ago, back before the Udynea Empire had been given a chance to properly form into an empire. “I never thought your people would possess this much knowledge on the inner workings of the body.”
“We’ve little else to turn our attention to.”
“Of course, my apologies.” Back home, the tales his tutors would tell of Tirglasian cloisters, of being confined to a place such as this. Those stories had always carried an undertone of dread, but how different was this place to the hermit towers of the priesthood? If these books were all as detailed as the ones used back home, then Tirglasian spellsters could very well be the most skilled healers in all the lands. Such a waste.
He carefully lifted a few pages. Much of the Domian text he had read about the body focused on one or two species, usually human and dwarf. It seemed the same here, both in the text and sketches. “Are these all human-based?”
“There are elven ones.” She pointed to the opposite side of the room where the mirrored layout of books and diagrams sat alongside the skeleton. He hadn’t even noticed them. From afar, little seemed different beyond a few less books and some additions to the diagrams. “I’ll warn you, they’re nae as detailed.”
They wouldn’t be. Elves were a relatively new arrival to the continent in regards to the time the various races had spent here, with only the dwarves being native to the lands. Seeing any evidence at all did date the information. Not much older than nineteen centuries. Elven bloodlines hadn’t yet been around for two millennia.
“We’d a few dwarven records, too. But—”
“Permit me to guess. The hedgewitches claimed them?”
