Cinnamon Bun

I was never someone who was super interested in like... rigorous study. I mean, at school, I'd do what I could to pass, but I was usually working just hard enough to get the grades I needed to keep my teachers happy.
For the easier subjects, I got good grades, for the harder ones I'd need to study a heap more and I had usually passed without
much trouble.
The truth was, though, that when it came to studying... it was kind of boring? Books should be exciting tales of friendship and adventure, not multiplication tables or dry records of dead people.
All that to say that I was kind of impressed with how absorbed I became in the book Ophelia found for me.
With storybook prose, Mister Celiga opened
by explaining his personal curiosity concerning these strange legends.
Celiga went on for a few pages, but the start of the volume as a whole really just felt like... a friendly but open letter. Not one addressed to one person in particular, but rather one meant to be read by a lot of people. Or maybe it was like a lecture? But no, it was too... personal for that.
I didn't know what to make of it, but it was very interesting reading, even if Celiga was a bit academic in the way he wrote.
I might have had to reread a few bits. This was interesting, sure, but it wasn't as easy to parse as some of the stories I was used to. Maybe that was because he was a serious historian, or maybe it was just because this was fact, not fiction.
Carrying a few books, Calamity joined me at the table I'd picked out in the corner, and soon Desiree joined the both of us, though she only had two books herself. Calamity was rather smug about that. I decided to continue reading before I looked into what they found.
If nothing else, it felt like Celiga's book would at least give me something to work off of when it came to the myths of the Black Avatars.
I blinked as I read that. So... two hundred years ago, the Black Avatars might've been real people. Possibly. It looked fairly likely, if I could trust this author. That was long before airships and such, so they would have had to travel on foot or by ship. Sylphfree and Mattergrove weren't close to each other at all. It would take... months, maybe a year, to get from one to the other on foot. Unless they had skills that let them move faster, or teleport... right, that would complicate things.
I wasn't great at Geography, and the units of measurement here were way different from back home, but I had the impression that the continent I was on was about the size of Europe back home... more or less? I'd never seen a full globe of Dirt. I wasn't even sure if one existed yet. Had anyone circumnavigated the world yet? Maybe a dragon could do it, but if so, they didn't spread world maps around.
Anyway, the Black Avatars dated back some ways. Celiga had little annotations in his text that pointed to pages further in with transcripts of the original documents. I turned over to those, but most were very hard to read, even with my translation magic, they were in a very archaic font? Is it still a font if it's handwriting?
There were a few more appearances of groups that may or may not have been the Black Avatar that Celiga and his associates found. He prefaced that a few of those were very suspicious, and that he was skeptical about them. Others seemed more reliable and detailed, but they were few and far between.
I sat up. That was super interesting. The first legend that survived to this day. The rest before that were just little footnotes and historical bits of data, but they weren't really
.
A foe that lived in a dungeon?
"Hey, guys, have you found anything about the enemy that the Black Avatars were fighting?" I asked. "Because... I think I have a feeling, and it's not a good one."
***