Ser Artaghh Learns to Read 2/06

Ser Artaghh had finally arrived. This place had been but a myth, a legend, a rumor to the peasant knight over the last five years, but on this fine evening in Dawn in his twenty sixth year, the bald axeman entered the doors of the library for the first time in his life. It was time for him to learn how to read. Naturally, he had twenty tons of granite strapped to his back, cleanly shaven off the nearby mountain before Artaghh's vigorous entrance into the book reading facility, and the glowing shroud of flaming blue energy covered the mithril armored knight shoulder to shoulder.

Lord Dylerun had made his threats very clear. Artaghh would suffer severe and certain injury if he did not learn how to read. The peasant understood it to a degree, it was dishonorable of a knight of Dawn to be incapable of even gauging his letters, and yet still the task had eluded the bald knight through all of his time in Dawn, a total of five good years now. The hardest part was finding the library itself, Artaghh had spent eight hours in the church learning his letters on accident before the training book he'd been learning from was revealed to the peasant as a holy text. It was a fine first practice, but at that point the knight realized he had participated in eight hours of thievery and trespassing unintentionally, which was not a good look for an official knight of any kind.

Now though, Artaghh had a grasp on his letters, and he was ready to train his mind and body at the same time. By exercising his muscles and hinging it to a set of defined rules regarding the knight's progress through the pages of a selected text, he would switch from finger to finger in single digit weighted planks to build his core strength and general musculature. He had to make it fun somehow, books had never been of any real interest to the roughnecked peasant, he spent the majority of his time at the tavern after all.

Pacing forth confidently through the library with twenty tons of granite bound to his back by dusty, mithril chains he'd had forged by Samwell Geenz oh so many years ago clanked lightly with his passage through wooden expanse of the knowledge center to the towering bookcases of the public library of Dawn. Digging through the texts, Artaghh was finally able to gauge a text that looked of genuine use to him. A human biology text book with details on the circuits of mana that ran throughout the energy user's being could be of great use to visualization, and this one seemed recent enough to probably be at least eighty percent accurate. After all, there were a lot of necromancers in Dawn, and they did body stuff that was pretty weird.

Laying the text on the ground, the knight would begin his plank trials as page by page he began to learn a little bit more about the muscles he was working out, learning all the while steadily how to piece together sentence structure through a steady application of repetition upon each page.One by one, Artaghh's nails would split open, fracture, and bleed as the heavy weight of the tons of granite upon the knight's back bore down upon each of his individual digits, but the flaming shroud of mana that surrounded him seemed to only grow in intensity and fluxuation as duress was accumulated by Artaghh.

By page ten, three hours had passed, and every last one of Artagh's fingers was swollen, bleeding, and near nailless, but he was finally beginning to make some serious progress. He had never been particularly stupid so much as ignorant, he lacked any formal tutelage from his time as a peasant before his arrival in Dawn. Books were money his family could spend on food, and that was that. None of them, neither Allende nor their father knew how to read, and their family tradition of education was non-existent. Humble living made Artaghh strong in body, but not in practical knowledge.

By page twenty five, Artaghh's letter mistakes and mix-ups grew barely present, and though his hands shook with exertion and pain as sweats beaded and plopped onto the page's of the Valmasian medical textbook that the knight had been learning to read from, the one digit planks kept on as Artaghh trained his mind and body at the same time without giving himself time to lose focus or interest. The twenty tons of granite upon his back felt heavier by the moment as he made his way through the textbook, but the knight finally was making progress with his own creation of sentences that were at least somewhat grammatically correct. The repetition had sunk in throughout the hours as he endured the painful one fingered planks, and that pain motivated the former peasant further and further in his determination to learn to read.

The night steadily passed and became the day as Artaghh ploughed through the book sore digit by sore digit, the flaming shroud of mana glimmering true through the night as he made an important step in his adult life. When the Dawn came upon Dawn, Ser Artaghh would slam closed the Valmasian medical text book with hearty swagger as he forced himself up of the ground shakily, his fingers purple, bruised, and dripping blood idly with torn skin from the long night of reading training, but the knight had never felt better. Grabbing a piece of parchment, some ink, and a quill from the nearby table, Artaghh shakily scrawled his own name at the bottom of the paper, blinking idly as he realized that for the first time, he could gauge his own name. It was his, his possession, the thing he would spread across the island of Agartha for decades to come. It humbled the knight, and made him proud.

The long hours of energy training had also borne fruit in Artaghh's practical knowledge and understanding of Human physiology, showing with clarity the finest places for an axeman to cleave deeply into with an edge of sharpened Nyeshk to cripple a man dozens of different ways, and kill them twice as many times over. The circuits of mana that Artaghh consciously abused in the manifestation of his shroud of energy never felt more clear in his mind than after the long hours of training Ser Artaghh had endured, but the knight now knew with certainty one clear fact above all others. He knew how to read.