( @enforalla ) « liked for a queued starter
A DARK BROW furrowed over an ancient tome. The university library’s archive was a well-kept secret: precious few knew that this library acted as a backdoor repository for old, UNCLAIMED grimoires. Families who had died out whose family books bore curses forbidding them from falling into unknown hands were stored in a special room in the library, accessed only with a discreet, murmured word to the RIGHT librarian.
Kol had been in the room for a few hours; he stopped by whenever he was in town. The University had always had a tie to the occult, though many ( the supernatural included ) often assumed that that connection had faded when cynicism had replaced superstition in society. It had lived on, but with clandestine whispers instead of eccentric cover-ups for the magic truly happening.
His fingers traced over one of HIS OLD doodles. He remembered the family, and when he had left the few sketches he’d done had been, apparently, bound into the family grimoire for safe keeping. He’d been tracking the moon from their point on the hemisphere, their youngest son performing minor spells at his behest to see how well — or poorly — they performed under certain circumstances. The methodical and moon-besotted Mikaelson had proved and disproved many of his own theories in the months he’d spent with this family. Looking at his own writing, he was transported into the past, just for a moment.
His eternally-young face had showed up at their home after being pointed in the direction of the village’s MIDWIFE. It didn’t take long for him to see traces of real magic, humble as it may have been, and he’d spent months with them, having needed witches at that longitude to further his studies. Looking at the book now was... bizarre. Absently, he mourned for the briefest heart beat that the family line had died out, but after he meticulously remade his own sketch in his current journal ( others lay stacked in his apartment, book after book his thoughts on magic, on the world around him, on the time he had lost ) so he could leave the library without getting CURSED terribly.
A small handful of witches had come in and out of the room since he sat in there, but none had gotten close enough to disturb him. The head librarian had allowed him access, after all: even if they got close enough to realize that he was a vampire ( which, he had noticed, so few of the local witches had experience with vampires to realize who or what he was ), they seemed to accept that he would share their space for the time being.
He looked up after looking at the book for hours. In the room were two others: a particularly-studious witch who seemed to be combining the grimoires with a digital record, and another witch: a man. Kol stared for a moment, feeling a dark pit at how grossly familiar he looked. The man looked like the grown version of his youngest brother, rest his stupid soul. The thought jarred him, remembering with what felt like VIVID DETAIL the night an elder brother and a younger had decided to flout the rules of survival for the chance to be seen as daring. He’d often wondered what Hen would have looked like if he’d grown ( not as many times as he wondered what he would also look like fully grown ), but the thought was as futile as the thought that he would taste magic again. He stared for a moment longer, and eventually, as what happens when one is staring, he met the other’s eyes.
And Kol’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
