(Time-Stilled World, A Lost Conclave, Leo's POV)
Leo didn't move at first.
He just stood there, torch still in hand, staring at the mural— more specifically, at the dragon— because something about the way it faced the sun, so unlike the others, gnawed at the edge of his thoughts like a whisper he couldn't quite hear yet.
Staring at the dragon, Leo felt his anxiety begin to stir. It wasn't fear, nor was it awe. It was something far stranger.
A quiet, inexplicable pull crept through him, tugging at the edges of his soul, making the blood in his veins feel warmer than it should, as if something ancient and long buried inside him had begun to wake.
'This… isn't normal,' he thought, finally dragging his gaze away, as he turned and slowly scanned the rest of the room with fresh eyes, as the more he looked the more he found.
To the left of the mural stood a splintered bookshelf, its wooden frame barely holding together, with stacks of faded scrolls and dusty tomes stuffed into every uneven gap between shelves.
Most of it was unreadable.
The paper was too brittle. The ink too faded. The language—something he had never seen before, as curved symbols and stacked glyphs adorned the paper, with some written vertically while the others were written in spirals.
'What? What the hell is this?' Leo muttered, as he crouched beside a pile and picked up one of the scrolls, only for the brittle parchment to crackle and flake in his hand.
He gritted his teeth, eyes narrowing in frustration as he flipped through book after book, scroll after scroll, but none of it made any damn sense.
Until—
He found it.
Near the corner of the room, buried beneath a pile of torn rugs and half-shattered pottery, was a small rectangular book.
It was thin.
The cover worn and soft, like something that had been handled a lot.
And on its surface was a simple painting of a fruit.
A green apple.
Beneath it, a symbol.
And when he flipped the page, another image, this time of a flame, with another symbol underneath.
'Wait… is this…?'
Leo blinked, flipping forward faster now.
Each page had a single object. A clear, painted picture.
A rock.
A hand.
A bird.
A sun.
And beneath each image, a single glyph.
'A picture book… a damn children's book?' he realized, eyes widening with a jolt of understanding.
It was a teaching book.
A language primer.
Meant to help children associate words with meaning.
And just like that—something clicked.
'Holy shit… this might actually help me decipher the script.'
He wasn't a linguist.
He wasn't a historian.
And he sure as hell wasn't someone who usually got excited over forgotten libraries.
But the painting of that dragon—
That painting had done something to him.
As the moment he'd locked eyes with that painted gaze, he'd felt something awaken inside him, something primal and restless that made his skin itch and his heart race.
He had to know more.
About the mural.
About the beasts.
About the sun.
About how this place was created and how it survived for so long?
'I don't know why… but I need to understand this.'
His fingers curled around the little book like it was treasure.
And just like that, 'The Boss' Leo Skyshard, assassin, circuit winner, and definitely-not-a-scholar, sat cross-legged on the tiled floor of an ancient room lost to time, flipping through a children's book by torchlight…
Trying to learn the language of a dead civilization.
Trying to unlock a secret the rest of the universe had long forgotten.
—---------
Time blurred for Leo as he became engrossed with learning a lost language, each hour melting into the next as he poured over the scattered materials inside the conclave.
He barely ate, barely moved, barely slept— because for the first time in his life, something had seized his full attention that wasn't combat, bloodshed, or survival.
The children's teaching book he'd found quickly became his anchor. A visual dictionary to use as reference, as it became the key to unlocking the secrets of the lost language.
Leo, who had never been a lover of books or languages, found himself slowly piecing the puzzle together. Word by word. Image by image. Symbol by symbol.
As it was funny how a children's book that was probably created to teach 2 year olds how to speak the language, became the guide that helped him unlock all the secrets.
He found the symbols he knew from the children's book in every scroll he could find, and then he wrote down the associated words around it, and tried to see if he could form a sentence, or some connection, as he began with the basics….Fire. Water. Rock. Sky.
Then expanded to verbs. Run. Eat. Die. Burn.
Then slowly, phrases began to form in his mind—primitive, broken phrases that hinted at meaning.
He created a mental log, scratching translated words onto blank parchment he found nearby. He began organizing them by root and structure, grouping symbols based on shape, size, and stroke direction, as patterns slowly began to emerge.
Some sentences were too complex. Some pages had no pictures. Some scrolls were faded beyond use.
But Leo kept going.
Day after day.
Eating simple rations. Drinking what water he had brought with him in the storage ring and sleeping only when exhaustion forced him down.
And just like that a week quickly passed by for him, and by the end, the indecipherable glyphs finally began to take shape.
Sentences stopped looking like scribbles and started feeling familiar.
The words began whispering meaning.
The wall murals, the scrolls, even the warnings on ancient pillars—he could start to read them now.
Not perfectly. Not fluently. But enough.
Enough to know he was getting closer to something.
Something big.
Something tied to the beasts on the wall.
And whatever it was… he could feel it pulsing at the edge of his understanding, just waiting to be uncovered.