The Tome of Stygia

[Cassandra]

[[OOC Note: The events depicted here actually took place in Mid-June, 2011. They illustrate reasoning for character traits that have been part of the portrayed character since that time. If anything depicted affects anything associated with any other character, please let me know and I'll work around it. No infringement on other plotlines is intended.]]

"Excuse me? Excuse me, sir? Do you have any books? I'm just...I'm looking for a book..."

The voice was thin and meek, and even the walls seemed more obliged to focus their effort on holding up the shelves and shelves of odd, mismatched items than bother to echo them back to the shopkeeper teetering on a five-foot stepladder filling the shelves even further. They didn't need it, of course. The dust coating every bauble and tchotchke belied any illusion of sales that the place might have had. To be blunt, the shop was where the decorations of yesteryear went to die. And, quite paradoxically, it was where the dead went to further their lives.

The shopkeeper realized the part that the voice's bearer played in this cycle once he filed away his porcelain burden and set foot on the ancient wooden floor once again. She was of medium height, build, with nothing to set her apart from any other girl barely out of her teens. Nothing to tip off the brain to the utter foreignness of her existence. Nothing the shopkeeper could point at, specifically. But he knew. Something about the pallor of her skin, already pale in life but brought to a new level in the incandescent glow of the shop bulbs. Something about the grace with which she moved, completely out of place in a person so obviously accustomed to awkwardness. True, her body seemed to disobey her at times, stumbling over a crack or catching on the corner of a table, but in between it managed to elude countless obstacles with an almost ghostly ease.

Primarily, though, as cliche as it was, what really gave it away was the barely-healed puncture wounds on her neck.

[Cassandra]

"I - I don't mean to scare you," she said, noticing the widening eyes and dilating pupils. Dilating pupils? When the hell did she start seeing these things? She shook the thought off and advanced one cautious step. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just looking for something with m-more...more substance than..." She fluttered her hands at a nearby newsrack full of Cosmo and Maclean's back issues. "...Edward and Bella." She gave him a hopeful smile, which she hoped came off as bashful instead of predatory. Closed-lipped, she reminded herself. Haven't quite gotten the hang of that retracting-fang thing yet.

Either it worked, or he decided to humor her just to get her to stop blathering. He glanced nervously at the panes of glass in the front window, becoming translucent with age, then nodded. He ushered her toward the back, in the direction of a poorly-woven tapestry - the sort you'd see in those bulk-import catalogs, offering Celtic-pattern doilies handmade in China, sold by polite operators from India. A sweep of his arm revealed that it was hiding an archway to a back room, and she quickly shuffled through.

The room was different in every way from the shop in the front. The same rough-hewn floor continued throughout, but here it practically sparkled with polish beneath expertly-positioned track lighting. The objects on the shelves - which only lined each wall, leaving the center of the room open and giving it more the sense of a showroom than a common shop - didn't abide in the squalor of the peasantry up front. Each obviously owned its space, arranged to be pleasant to the eye and attractive to the buyer. Bottles swirled with unknown shadowstuff, various items of finery glittered in such a way that the observer knew there was more to them than meets the eye, and tiny USB drives sat entombed in plastic packaging to somehow add the physical illusion of value to contents intangible but useful. Cassandra drifted close to the shelves, peering at their inhabitants curiously even though they weren't what she was there for. She had a bare moment before a soft, hushed tone sounded in the back corner, heralding the arrival of another customer up front. The cautious but stern look from the shopkeeper did more than words to communicate his concerns at leaving one of her kind alone back here, and he disappeared through the fabric to tend to the new patron.

She ambled along the shelves, fingers cautiously extended to touch something here or there, a harmless defiance of the stodgy shopkeeper's implications. She grinned deviously for almost a full second before whirling in self-conscious panic to see if any security cameras caught her indiscretion. Though she saw none, she still jammed her hands into the pockets of her baggy cargo pants sheepishly.

Near the back, the light product shelves surrounded a thick bookcase, wooden frame bowed ever so slightly beneath the weight of its burden. Her breath caught, and her hands slipped free once again, this time to cover her mouth. She started on the leftmost edge of the topmost shelf, reading the spines of each volume in her head, as if the shelf itself were an index page of potential suitors waiting to be tried. These artifacts held more appeal to her than any potential mate, though, and their words sank closer to her heart. Hunting The Night, A Young Lady's Guide To Avoiding Temptation, Treatises on the Devil and his Handiwork...the titles ranged from near-intriguing to outright laughable. Not that they made her think any less of the collection - each volume, regardless of credibility, was here for the same reason. Their contents.

After the disappearance of vampires, the movement to eradicate them didn't simply go to bed, wake up in the morning, and go to work as if nothing had happened. It continued in its tried-and-true manner, fire fueled by hatred. They turned the fire on knowledge, like all upstanding, God-fearing humans, and it consumed all mention of the vampire. Any book that cited the nightwalking race went into the oil-soaked barrel, any education within becoming collateral damage to the crusade against their kind. Yet just as vampirekind survived in captivity, so did their literature, hoarded away in trunks and boxes, to emerge again in a later epoch. Not all of them held value, and many of them were pointless silly vanities, but Cass held out hope that somewhere among the machine-stamped lettering would be knowledge about her new life.

She reached the end of the third or fourth shelf, and her gaze dropped near the floor. A thick, leather-bound text was resting between one bookshelf and the next, as if hastily stowed there while reorganizing its contemporaries. Cassandra crouched, carefully slipping it from where it lay and lifting it into the light. No title marked the thick cover, colored by age but unmarred in whole. She tilted it to one side, examining the rough edges of its pages, when something jingled against the floor by her feet and drew her attention.

She retrieved the object, a bracelet finely-wrought from some unidentifiable but obviously valuable metal, inset with tiny gems that somehow reflected the rich coloring of the book's leather cover. The two were connected by a fine chain, a few feet long and necklace-thin. Cass looked from the book to the bracelet and back again, before resting the book on her knees. She turned the bracelet over in her hands, letting the light glint from its surface. Shapes were etched into the metal, and she couldn't decide if they were ornamental or some sort of cuneiform writing that she didn't recognize. It intrigued her, and she slipped it onto her wrist, where it rested chill against her skin, gleaming attractively. Standing, she took the book itself in hand and held it up to the light.

Opening the cover carefully, Cass found a title-plate centered on the first page the book fell open to. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she barely registered another tone similar to the one summoning the shopkeeper back front, but it was pushed aside as she took in the page before her. No author was listed, no table of contents. The illuminated text displayed a moonlit forest night, with deer surrounding a clear lake. Reflected in the water's surface was the only word on the page:

Stygia.

[Cassandra]

Cassandra smiled widely, closing the book and tracing her fingertips across its cover. "Oh, if you were mine, I swear I'd never put you down," she murmured, turning it over in her hands. It had a wonderful weight to it, and the colors were very pleasing to the eye. The spine was sturdy, a solid spot to anchor the chain leading to her wrist and its cuff --

Hold on. The what?

She stared dazedly at her thin wrist, which was no longer encircled by the loose bangle she'd donned. In its place was a wide, imposing, and all-too-formfitting metal cuff. She tried slipping it off, but it was too tight to fit over her hand. Setting the book on the shelf, she gave it another try, the metal digging into her flesh, but to no avail. She turned the cuff on her wrist, looking for a latch of some sort, but there was none to be found. It looked as if it were hammered from a single seamless piece of metal.

Cassandra's newly-sensitive ears caught the sound of the tapestry being pulled aside, and she whirled on the returning shopkeeper, waving the book at him like a weapon. "Is this some sort of joke?" she demanded of him. "This isn't funny in the least. I want this off of here right now." Her voice took on a note of franticness at the end. She had never been a claustrophobic person, but something about this drove the adrenaline into her blood and the worry into the back of her mind.

The shopkeeper was vehemently denying having ever seen the book before, and working his way quickly into defensive assertions of his innocence, but Cassandra was peering at the book, its spine, where the chain joined it. She opened the book to its middle, to get a better look from the inside, and her eye fell on the top line of the page's first paragraph.

The tome of Stygia was the first of their creations, a book to contain the knowledge they guarded so carefully. Steeped in Protean enchantments of their own clandestine design, it would remain bound to one chosen faithful until the end of their life. To prevent an accidental binding or one forced under duress, safeguards were put in place. The binding would only occur if the devotee placed the shackle upon themselves of their own accord, and then took a vow of devotion to the sacred object...

Cass stared dumbfounded at the page. The shopkeeper's protests were barely a buzz in her ear as she turned and stalked out of the building, hastily shoving the book into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder, headed in the direction of her new apartment. "This cannot be happening," she muttered to herself. "There's only so much bad luck to go around..."

[Cassandra]

The book sat on a small table in the middle of an empty room, polished hardwood floor reflecting the light from floor lamps placed around its perimeter. The warm light mixed well with the leathery brown of its cover, inviting the scene's sole viewer to pick it up, hold it, use it.

Cassandra was having none of that.

She stood a foot or two away, the chain leading from the book to the knot of her sternly crossed arms. She had fixed the object with a stern glare, almost as if daring it to try something else, but it simply sat on the table, effortlessly multiplying her ire without even the flutter of a page to show its intention. Not that it needed to. It'd done enough, she wagered.

She'd arrived home and dumped her pack on the sole chair tucked against the table the book now rested on. When she opened the pack, she'd found the object had changed quite a bit in appearance, with no explanation or obvious cause as to why. Instead of being the size of her forearm, as it had been when she picked it up in the shop, it was now the dimensions of an oversized paperback or small journal. The materials stayed the same - thick leather, rough-hewn pages, and fine brownish metal - but it was now about a third of its original size. The chain had changed as well - its links were thin but sturdy, about one inch long, and it had lengthened by about half again, allowing her to leave it resting on the table for examination.

Pulling the pack off of the chair and setting it on the ground, she took a seat in front of the book. She pulled it closer, opening the cover to about its middle, intending to re-read the passage about how she had become attached to this situation - no pun intended. Instead, as if defying her for its treatment, she was greeted by a blank ivory-colored expanse where the words had once been. She sighed, pushing the open book away from her and resting her chin on folded arms. Should she be surprised? She felt past that at this point. The book seemed to be at odds with her, almost as if it had thoughts - spiteful thoughts, it seemed - of its own.

"Look, I'm sorry," she told the book, with a deep sigh. What the hell, it's not as if she had anyone else to talk to. "It's been a really rough few weeks. Everything's changing and...and I don't know how to deal with it. A month ago, I was just getting out of college, checking out a new town. One late night on a park bench later, I - I can't even walk outside during the day!"

She clenched her jaw, fingering one of the links in the chain resting between her and the book. "I never felt like I belonged, but now it's even worse. I don't have a place. I don't have a purpose. There's this whole new world that I'm part of, and most people would be excited at the prospect. But I'm not. It's just another world that I don't have a place in." The corner of her eye sparkled as she welled up with barely-contained tears, but she took a deep breath and steeled herself. "I want to have a place. I want to know what to do, how to...be here. I just don't know how. But if you're this big repository of knowledge, maybe you do. I don't know." She uncrossed her arms, resting her cheek in the hand above the cuff instead. "I'm just saying...I don't know what I'm saying. I'm open to ideas, that's all."

She tugged the book close to her again, running her finger over the leather crease between cover and spine. Expecting nothing, she flipped the book open once more, to somewhere between the middle and front. To her surprise, the pages were covered in flowing manuscript. Leaning over the book with intense curiosity knotting her brow, she began to read.

In the beginning, there was the Darkness...



*****

((Note: For the full story Cass reads, click on over to The Story of Nox and Helios.))