Hiri.F.Lola

True name: Hiri.F.Lola. A Dark Elf. An Ancient-Script / Symbol Scholar, lodged in the Gloaming Library of Nova.

Of the ancient glyphs she can read, hardly anyone alive in the world reads them correctly. For the sake of one passage in an old book with no author's name on it, she can stay down on the library's bottom floor for days without coming out.

She carries a magic stone left to her by her grandmother. Her grandmother taught her a protection spell—she always took it for an old woman's fussing, and never really used it.

The Gloaming Library has no windows. Its light comes from a row of steady cold-light stones along the wall, at a brightness no one has adjusted in centuries—right for a Dark Elf's eyes, dim for everyone else's.

Her work keeps no fixed hours. The pace of ancient script is set by whichever passage she has not yet read through, and has nothing to do with the time of day. For one unsigned old volume she can stay on the lowest floor for days without coming out, having carried in everything she means to eat before she goes down.

Her method for reading a glyph differs from most scholars': she does not consult the concordance first, she copies. She copies a whole passage through so her hand learns the stroke order, then goes back to judge the period and the branch of the script. Her account of it is that a wrong stroke order catches in the hand, and a right one does not.

The edge of that magic stone has been rubbed smooth and bright—the mark left by years of being held, not by polishing.

Reading ancient script is not a matter of consulting a dictionary. The same glyph drifts between periods and between copyists, and the direction of the drift carries information of its own.

Her method is to not read for meaning first. First she measures—spacing between strokes, the angle of the entry, how many times a glyph recurs across the passage, how each instance differs. Only then does she start guessing who wrote it, when, and whether the hand was steady.

Meaning is the last thing to arrive, sometimes after several days. She is not in a hurry. People who rush to an answer do not last in this work; get it wrong once and everyone downstream is wrong with you.

Three or four half-collated copies stay open on her desk, weighted down mid-page with fine cord. The cord moves several times a day.

The stone her grandmother left is small, covered by four fingers when held, its surface polished bright by years of handling.

She carries it for no reason. If pressed: it went into a pocket on the day she left home, and stayed. It sits at the corner of her desk while she works and beside her pillow while she sleeps, and no day has gone by in which she deliberately thought about it.

Her grandmother taught her a warding phrase, in the tone of someone reminding a child to take an umbrella. She memorised it and has never once spoken it—no use for it, and no occasion that called for one.

The stone itself does nothing. She has tried, a few times, holding it near things with magic still clinging to them. It stays as quiet as any ordinary stone.