Chapter 110: The List (30)
The library was far too quiet for the kind of suffering taking place inside it.
Even the candles hanging above seemed to pity the table full of history students, their flames flickering low, casting long, exhausted shadows across faces that looked increasingly cadaverous.
Every single one of them had the same thousand-yard stare, the same hollow eyes that had read one translation too many.
And at the center of that tragic congregation sat Corin.
His horns, once smooth, polished ridges that caught the light in elegant arcs, now bore the unmistakable signs of academic decay: faint white flaking at the edges, like stress fractures on a cliff face.
His fingers were smudged with graphite and ink, the tips roughened from turning too many pages, and his hair, once carefully tied back, now resembled the frayed end of a scholar’s quill.
The table before him looked less like a study space and more like an archaeological site.
Stacks of tomes towered precariously, most of them ancient enough to crumble if someone so much as sneezed too hard.
There were thick, leather-bound volumes stamped with crests of forgotten kingdoms, clay-tablet reproductions pressed with old runic alphabets, and open dictionaries in four different dialects of Dwarven.
Intermixed between them were sheets of his own frantic handwriting, covered in arrows, footnotes, and aggressive question marks.
A student sitting across from him let out a strangled sound, something between a groan and a death rattle.
No one even looked up.
They were all too far gone.
Corin dragged a hand down his face, staring at the page in front of him.
The passage he’d been rereading for the past hour stared back at him, cruel, inscrutable, and faintly smug in a way only ancient text could manage.
The lines hadn’t changed, not a stroke, not a symbol, yet each time he returned to them, they seemed to rearrange themselves just enough to defy certainty.
What had almost made sense ten minutes ago now felt deliberately misleading, as if the page were quietly mocking his persistence.
The text was etched in an old dwarven variant, somewhere between Stonekeep Formal and Low-Forge Vernacular, an awkward transitional style rarely used outside of contracts or technical treatises.
The script was dense and angular, characters packed tightly together, each mark carrying layers of meaning that depended heavily on context.
Idioms overlapped with technical terms, ceremonial phrasing rubbing shoulders with practical instruction. It was the kind of writing that assumed its reader already knew half of what it refused to explain.
It had already taken him thirty minutes just to realize that half the vowels were actually decorative.
He muttered under his breath, his voice low and dry as dust.
“Whomsoever enters this room, they shall…”
His eyes narrowed.
The next word looked like three consonants and a sneeze had conspired to form a linguistic abomination.
‘...they shall… uh. Okay. This word literally means unbecome, but depending on the era, it was used as a euphemism for… death, defecation, or, wait, when was this carved again? Oh. Right. In that case, it could also mean… sex.’
He blinked twice.
Then rubbed his temples.
“So… cursed tomb, bathroom, or royal bedroom.”
He glanced up, scanning the table of equally dead-eyed peers.
One of the students next to him, a pale boy with an ink-stained cheek, slowly reached for his mug of cold tea, missed, and just stared at his own hand for a good ten seconds.
Corin sighed and went back to work.
‘Okay, fine. Next line. The blessings of stone… the watcher’s breath… Alright, that one’s simple enough. Then… By the river that does not die. Easy. Then it goes, oh, for the love of, this is either a word for dam, or a really big beaver.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘No, no, this can’t be right. This section’s clearly about the construction project. But the dates are all wrong again.’
His eyes flicked toward his margin notes, messy lines of ink connecting phrases like River Trinthar and Floodworks of the Fifth Era.
His jaw tightened.
He remembered that river.
He remembered the sound of it, the roar of spring melt crashing through the valley, the smell of wet stone, the way the villagers had protested when the king’s surveyors came to mark off land for the imperial dam project.
The same lineage that now called it a “historic collaboration of the Dwarves and Men.”
Forgetting that the land belonged to neither.
But none seem to remember or care about that.
***
Corin had argued about it just last week with the professor.
The memory replayed in his mind like a curse:
The professor, all smug confidence, had claimed that the Trinthar Dam was built “some eighty-two years ago, during the reign of King Holmir II.”
Corin had looked him dead in the eye and said, “No, it wasn’t. It was eighty-seven. Mid-autumn, Year of Falling Leaves. You can still see the old runoff channels.”
The professor had laughed, asked how he could possibly know that, what book was he referencing and what sources did he have all the while tapping the book of historical records in his hand.
Corin wanted to argue back but he decided to just simply point to his horns.
The argument ended there.
Still, the old dam haunted him, not because of its geographic or economic importance, but because it was personal.
The river that the dam was built on used to flow next to his village, it was their primary water source.
That village was his first home.
Before the dam turned it into a reservoir.
Now, apparently, it was also an exam topic.
He turned back to his notes, jaw set.
‘Alright. Translation attempt number… I don’t even know anymore.’
He began scribbling:
‘By decree of stone and silver, we seal this chamber, that none may unbecome within.’
He frowned, reading it back.
‘That sounds… vaguely like a euphemism for murder. Or plumbing.’
He glanced at the footnote for ‘unbecome.’
One dialect traced it back to ‘vahn’durr’, meaning ‘to dissolve one’s essence.’
Another cited ‘va’nur’, a term for ‘laying one’s burdens.’
Yet another glossed it as ‘to disrobe the soul,’ which could be beautifully poetic or deeply erotic depending on how charitable one felt.
He buried his face in his hands.
Somewhere to his right, a girl sighed and muttered, “This is written in Ancient dwarven. It’s about… uh… well that word is… okay this is either a poem sung during harvesting or a goat breeding manual. Maybe both.”
The others didn’t even look up.
“That tracks,” they said flatly.
Another student chimed in, voice trembling: “Okay see, in one dialect this word means ‘demon,’ but in a related language with the same script it means ‘horse,’ and contextually it could be either.”
A long, heavy silence.
Then he murmured, “A demonic horse. Probably both.”
He slumped back, staring at the ceiling like it might offer divine salvation.
“You all, I swear,” he thought bitterly, “if history is written by the victors, then the victors had terrible handwriting.”
“How…how… did the people even talk to each other…if their language was this complex… I…”
One of the girls clutched her hair, on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Corin’s notes were a battlefield, footnotes bleeding into cross-references, arrows pointing at arrows pointing at words that no longer looked real.
The word “unbecome” repeated so many times it had started to look like a brand name.
He leaned forward again.
‘I’m just… gonna translate this as ‘cease to be.’ Yeah. Generic enough. No one can fight me on that.’
He jotted it down triumphantly, as if that tiny victory justified the suffering.
Then he realized the next line was in High Dwarven Script, a style so needlessly ornamental that even the Dwarves themselves had eventually given up on it.
It took him five minutes to realize he was reading the decorative border text.
At this point, he wasn’t sure if his eyes were dry or simply out of tears.
A faint clinking drew his attention.
Across the table, one of the students reached into a small pouch, took out what looked like some sort of candy, and passed it to the next person.
The pouch made its slow, sacred pilgrimage around the table, each student wordlessly taking a handful like a communion ritual for the damned.
When it finally reached Corin, he looked inside, the ‘candy’ had a stale smell, almost a musk and had an equally strange colour.
He hesitated.
‘Should I eat this,’ he wondered bleakly, ‘or do I consume these text books and hope some kind of osmosis kicks in?’
He looked down at the open pages again, the ancient dwarven text glaring at him like a smug lecturer.
‘Yeah,’ he thought, ‘if I eat them, then perhaps…’
In the end he didn’t eat the book.
But he did think about it.
And as the hours dragged on, the only sounds that filled the library were the soft scratching of quills, the faint groans of overworked minds, and the slow, steady flaking of Corin’s horns, like chalk shedding its surface, one thin layer at a time.
History, he decided, wasn’t written by victors.
It was written by people who really, really hated the ones that would come to study it down the line. .
