The Mystical Murders of Yin Mara by Marshall Ryan Maresca

Author:Marshall Ryan Maresca [Maresca, Marshall Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artemisia Productions

The professor was deadly serious about the crate of journals. He delivered them to the house the next morning and told Jiarna he wanted them all— at least fifty— cataloged for their usefulness by the end of the week. “And mind you, they’re a mélange of personal journals with possible elements of magical studies and other notes mixed in. So, you’ll need to carefully go through them all. No skimming.”

That made it clear, he expected her to read through it all.

It would have been better for her if the journals held absolutely nothing of value. But as she read through them, they were exactly what she feared: several personal recollections of minutiae of daily life from three centuries ago by tiresome old men with at best, a passing interest in the science of mystical arts. But then, within each one, there would be some kernel of insight, some notable observation, that gave the entire thing a new value that she had to note.

For example, Jescor Hidd spent a decade in the tenth century travelling through the wilds of Waisholm and Bardinæ, roughly following the path Brenium had taken a millenium earlier. But Brenium had the foresight to compile his thoughts and observations into something organized and cohesive. Hidd’s journals were mostly a rambling free verse of every bodily function he engaged in on his journey. She admired the apparent thoroughness, for no meal, defecation or copulation was left out for the entire ten-year period. But buried between a rumination of the sexual vigor of the Bardinæ, (Jiarna found his attempts to quantify his experience with objective values of measurement a bit disturbing) and his suppositions on how specific local delicacies affected the consistency of bowel movements (Hidd had developed a system of analysis of his remains that had an intellectual rigor that Jiarna respected, even though she was deeply uninterested in reading such details), there was a rather fascinating examination of the runic magic of Bardinæ, and the way it might correlate with symbols associated with ancient power in Old Waish.

Most of the journals were like that, though none quite as obsessed with the scatological as Hidd. On top of that, the journals themselves were often ill-kept, musty-smelling and damaged. The work of going through them made her head pound, probably from exposure to whatever old molds festered in between the pages.

She reminded herself that this was supposed to be a punishment, and while she did not feel she deserved such a thing, she resolved herself to do the work with the same diligence she put into any other work she would undertake. In addition to the cataloging, she bought a fresh journal and transcribed any passage she found meaningful or insightful. Despite the hardship of the work, she did recognize the value behind it. While she read through a significant amount of nonsense, burning lamp oil late into each night and suffering from the lack of sleep, every single journal had something she found notable.

Then there was the one that was half in another language.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.