A few of the books did seem to be stand-alone novels, and he enjoyed reading those in particular, which seemed to make her honestly happy. She was always ready to talk about them, just as she was always ready to run off and get him whatever he needed. She had that kind of personality, the kind that begs to be looked after.
But the strangeness did not stop with the girl and her library.
Even when one stepped foot outside the inexplicable country house, the surroundings got somehow even more perplexing.
The house was set between two beautiful waterfalls, with verandas that wrapped around the side of the house and over a wide, calm pool on one side, and a charming but swift brook on the other.
And whenever there was the slightest breeze, red rose petals rained down from the mountainside behind the house. There seemed to somehow be a limitless supply of them, perfuming the air with a sweet, musky, old-fashioned scent.
There was a garden in front of the house that she sometimes puttered around in. She seemed to particularly like flowers and herbs. She also kept two chickens, who lived in the most opulent chicken mansion he had ever seen. It was far nicer than the homes of many commoners.
To the east there was an idyllic forest, and to the west there was gently rolling farmland with rich, dark soil. It was calm and safe, and wild animals moved about the area as if they had not a care in the world.
The whole place was a little surreal. It felt as if it had come from a fairy tale, a story of an idealized past that had never existed in reality. Even the colors of the place were striking: jewel-like and saturated, as if the whole of the world was being viewed through some sort of filter.
And of course there was the young lady herself.
She was small, short and delicate of build, except where she was not, when her assets were noticeable. She was beautiful. This was an unquestionably true fact of nature. She was beautiful, with a long tangle of curly hair that fell almost to the backs of her knees, and blue eyes that were deep and soft. She was as doe-eyed as any forest queen, perhaps even more so than an actual deer. Most of the time she moved with an elegance and grace that were breathtaking, and surely the result of a favorable combination of natural gifts and intense etiquette lessons.
(The rest of the time she was almost comically clumsy, but that, in itself, also had a powerful appeal.)
And she was also cute. She was beautiful, but also cute. The distinction was important and very clear in his mind. Watching her run around each day, busy with her own interests, was a little like watching a kitten. He had the overwhelming urge to protect her, while at the same time being fascinated by her inexplicable behavior.
In the beginning, he had stayed as close to her as he possibly could because he had held on to the lingering fear that the invader who had marked him would somehow find him here, at the ends of the earth in paradise, and attempt to do away with the young lady. But as time went on, he lost track of the reason he had begun watching her, and simply kept watching her because everything that she did was somehow nonsensical and flabbergasting at the same time.
For instance.
She had an alchemy atelier, a workshop where she produced her own potions and other materials. It was as fine a workshop as any alchemist might have dreamed of, and much like the house, she was the sole proprietor of it. The whole place had been built to accommodate her diminutive size, which left the equipment somewhat challenging for him to use.
And yet.
She did not have an alchemy master, and she did not have her own cyprianus. She had gone on studying and practicing Fluid Alchemy with no way to convert her experience into levels.
She was making potions and medicines with astounding properties and traits even while roadblocked at level one. The potion she had used to stabilize him had been one of her own manufacture. It had been unpolished, and of absolutely obscene taste, but unquestionable efficacy.
He had silently observed her alchemic activities for some time, trying to make sense of the situation, but had finally given up on an external solution and begun teaching her Fluid Alchemy from the ground up, beginning with how to use the tools of her own atelier.
(He still lacked certainty over exactly what had happened when she had impressed her cyprianus. It was a question left open for further investigation.)
She was a shockingly adept pupil (which probably oughtn’t have been surprising given everything else and yet somehow remained surprising) and she swiftly piled up levels in Fluid Alchemy, never satisfied with her progress and always pushing herself to improve.
They were largely alone at the country house, with the exception of a small slime and a very ornate chicken who lived with them in the house. (The ordinary house, and not the opulent chicken mansion.) The chicken was certainly a holy beast, although attempting to pretend otherwise for some reason or another. He and the young lady sometimes secreted themselves away in a corner and carried on muffled conversations with one another. They didn’t appear to be plotting anything, so he did his best to politely ignore them when they went around the corner and started whispering to one another.
There were occasionally other guests. There were dryads in the whimsical fairy-tale forest, and fox and beaver critterin dropped by with regularity, primarily to discuss civil engineering, of all things. The young lady was apparently the president of an organization they had formed to build a canal. She turned out to be shockingly adept at clerical and managerial work, churning out piles of paperwork and reports every day.
She was a busybody, involved in anything and everything, with a penchant for rounding up trouble and borrowing it when she felt that she did not have enough of it on her own.
If he followed the threads of the place, he always came back to the same spot. It seemed that at the center of everything was the young lady: Demeter.
The perfectly ordinary farm girl, Demeter Serraffield.