Valerie set down the cup with an audible thud, sloshing the aged water… liquid inside.
"Wanna walk around? We still have some time left, I think."
"Wouldn't hurt."
The two stood up, making an audible creak on the wooden floorboards. Quies followed behind Valerie as the two left the dining room. The lamp overhead flickered, and then turned off as the entered the hallway.
"Lead the way."
The two switched places, Quies in front of Valerie now. Even if he had spent years away from his home, he still knew it like the back of his hand. However, there were some places which he hadn't gotten to explore yet when he was a kid. The two walked down the pitch black hallway. There were no light sources to illuminate the patch, so he had to just go by instinct and his other senses. He put his hand on the left wall, feeling its bumps and grooves.
Eventually, his hand fell upon the hard wood of a sliding door. He took one more look into the eerie hallway and slid the heavy door open.
"Lights!"
Quies clapped his hands together. Valerie gestured towards the main lamp in the middle of the room, turning it on and illuminating the living space.
This was one of those rooms which Quies hadn't really gotten the chance to explore much. Among the usual types of rooms within their house, Quies and his family also had a library. It wasn't necessarily odd to have one in a person's house, though. In fact, it's practically essential in households that have a resonating family member who wants to further their understanding of the song.
There were bookshelves.
A lot of them.
Not a lot compared to the Vigil library, but still enough to hold at least a small tree's worth of books. There was also a study table with an open book on in, ink and quill positioned to the left. From afar, the pages looked half written. The slim outer cover of the book was a simple crimson red, with no accent markings on it.
Quies turned his attention back to the library. Not all of the shelves were fully stocked. Some had gaps missing in them of different sizes. Upon a closer look, Quies didn't even think that the books were in some sort of order, whether it be alphabetically, numerically, or by color. It looked like a jumbled mess of crimson, red, green, and blue literature covers.
"Hmm… that's the book I was reading earlier on my boat."
Valerie looked to her left towards a shelf at her eye level. It was separate from the rest of the books. Its bright red cover was complimented by its yellow accents.
Of course, it was The Eternal Flame and the Failure of Man, by Amorus Pleetsky.
"Is that some sort of popular book?"
"Sort of. You do know it was written by the strongest flamecharmer in existence, right? I mean, he literally invented… found the attunement from a part of the song."
"Here we go with the 'strongest' again. Let's see… I've met the strongest galebreather already, and now this Amorus guy is the strongest flamecharmer."
"Yup."
"Great…"
Valerie, after approaching the bright red book and studying it, walked around the aisles of the library again. Specifically, she looked for books which had a primarily yellow color to them, since their contents would most likely be related to thundercall.
'At least book colors are mostly associated with different attunements.'
With this process, it would make it easy for, say, a flamecharmer to find a flamecharm book in a library full of galebreathing manuals. However, there were also fiction books sprinkled within the shelves here and there. There were also children's books, which Quies read when he was younger.
The library, unlike the other rooms in the house, felt completely isolated from the outside world. There were no windows to let light in; the lamp was the only source of light during both the day and night. There was a lack of air vents that led outside, which made the room rather humid with the door closed. There was the study table, which was positioned to the right wall near the entrance. The bookshelves were arranged in rows similar to a supermarket aisle.
Whatever a supermarket was.
It didn't take long for the two to peruse through all of the books in the library.
"I should've brought a bag with me. I really want to take home some of these books."
Valerie held a book with an ornate looking cover on it. It looked like a history book. Her eyes were glued onto the words in the pages, jumping from line to line. Eventually, she begrudgingly put the book back onto one of the shelves.
'I should probably look at the book on the study desk.'
Quies made his way out of one of the aisles, passing by a rainbow of literature. It was strange to him how there was absolutely nothing documenting the use of bloodrend and its uses. There were two possible conclusions as to why this was.
The first would be the fact that coming across a bloodrend user, like Quies, is extremely rare. It's like finding a tiny spindle in a stack of wheat, except that the stack of wheat was three times the height, width, and length of Quies. In this case, it would make sense for bloodrenders to be completely omitted from general history and contemporary books, since they don't really hold as much of a presence as the four main attunements: flamecharm, galebreath, frostdraw, and thundercall.
The second reason is that the authorities and figures of power have collectively decided to suppress the knowledge of bloodrend. Quies couldn't form a theory as to why they would need this type of knowledge to be suppressed, though. Maybe it was a form of attunement that was too dangerous, or maybe the process of obtaining it had some negative implications.
Maybe it would infringe on their power.
Quies stood above the crimson red book. The ink on the pages and tip of the quill had dried long ago, but the ink in the jar was still good. However, the ink on the open page was smeared, making it completely illegible.
'The person writing must've been in a hurry.'
Quies carefully picked up the book. Wondering what its title was, or if it even had a title, he closed it shut, leaving the front cover facing him.
His eyes widened at the sight of it.