He came upon the girl in one of the dimly-lit upper corridors, in that area where the more anachronistic works had been piled, the collections of epic poetry by Pynchion and Familaust, Reginal and Openwise, yet he didn’t venture from the shadows to greet her immediately, for fear of startling her. Instead, he watched her for a time from the end of the hall, and so deep in the endless catacombs of ink and parchment were they, that the world seemed silent save for the occasional brush of mildewed paper as the girl turned the pages of the tome in her hands.
He leaned against the wall of crudely-bound volumes beside him after a while, merely to redistribute his weight, and the old books shifted against his shoulder ever so slightly, which caused her to look up.
“Is that you, Dravidian?”
He
