"Here's your tea, professor."
Sharine said as she handed me the brew using my late mother's favored porcelain.
It was a very special collection that my mother had in her possession.
For someone who did not have any interest in history, she managed to get her hands on some priceless artifacts.
A dwarven glass-work dated all the way back to the Flame's Campaign. Roughly twelve hundred years ago.
Dwarven articles were sought after throughout Dunia like diamonds.
Their craftsmanship alone worth those exorbitant prices.
Add age and historical value to them and the articles would become as valuable as mannalite.
I did not interest myself on gems except if they were once worn on the hands of some monarch a couple hundred or thousand years past. But I knew how precious that magic ore was.
Indeed. My fellow intellectual who dabbled in minerals would not stop chattering her mouth off about it whenever she came to visit or I unluckily ran into her in the academy.
Fellow intellectual my foot!
Who cares if a rock came from a volcanic eruption or if it was a hardened river sediment?
A rock was a rock! That was it!
I could not care less how a pebble was formed or what it could do.
It only made carriage ride bumpier and less pleasant for my old back.
I simply could not fathom how someone would spend years to study rocks.
Not even the heir of the Eternal Throne could make me sit on a lecture talking about them.
I would only be interested in rocks if they were used to stone some tyrant a few centuries back. Or if they were part of the foundation of some long-lost ruins.
I probably should ask Sharine to send that colleague of mine away whenever she came. And perhaps I should tell my student assistants to ban her from entering my office uninvited.
Yes. I should do that.
Hopefully I would not forget to do so after I completed my work for today.
"Your tea is getting cold, professor."
Sharine's voice distracted me away from my pondering. Rather, pulling me back to what I was doing.
"Ah, forgive me, Sharine! I was just thinking."
I said to her while sipping the woman's delicious tea from the precious dwarven cup.
"That is what you always do, professor. Thinking."
The plump woman said with a little snarl.
She then put her hands on her hip, making her bun of white hair swayed slightly, and went on.
"Just make sure you don't fall asleep while doing it. You spent last night sleeping in the library because you were so engrossed in your thoughts."
"Haha! I was reading a good text last night. It was the ultimatum the Great Bromstead wrote to the Guntur invaders during the Northern Storm. Despite being one of the most powerful First Mage in the Tower of Circle's history, Bromstead tried to reason with the invaders before going on a skirmish against them."
"I understand, professor. But it will be bad for your health if you don't have proper rest. The healer said you must be resting whenever you can, remember?"
Hearing her, I placed my right hand on my left chest.
"Very well, Sharine. I promise to sleep on my bed tonight."
The gray-haired plump woman only sighed at my gesture. Perhaps remembering the many promises I broke after swearing that way.
She then bowed slightly with a disapproving stare and left me alone in my study.
I could not help but smile at that maid of mine.
I remembered when she was just a little girl whom used to tag along with her mother, the head maid at the mansion back then.
The years had done tremendously in changing her appearance, but I could still recall the times when the petite girl would deliver my meals when I was studying for my entrance exam to the academy.
She also attended me when I was travelling to research and write for my doctorate study.
The woman knew how to arrange my books and texts. Understood the procedure to treat fragile historical records.
Given the amount of time she had spent beside me, Sharine was as knowledgeable in history as any final year student in my academy.
Her long years of dedication and loyalty was the reason why I kept her by my side. And only her.
I could not hire any other servant given the nature of my work.
Only someone who I could trust with my life that I would allow to tend to my house, and especially, my study.
Sharine was the only one such person.
I laid down the dwarven cup and turned to the package placed at the center of my desk.
Carefully I unwrapped the paper packaging and uncovered an old, very old, leather-bound book.
It was a lost entry of the explorer Sulam's diary.
Rather than lost, it was more specifically made disappear.
The reason for such treatment was because this journal recorded Sulam's time with the Garudan tribe folks.
People with feathered wings and claws that could tear through steel.
When tens of thousands of Garudan waged war against Tsatu six hundred years ago, surviving soldiers of that age named the clash as the Iron Tempest.
That aggression was the main reason why the record of Sulam's journey to the Garudan settlements in Tsayap Mountains were erased.
Any writings that could uplift the standing of the empire's enemies or former enemies were wiped from existence.
The dwarfs were also our enemies during the Flame's Campaign.
But we could still buy and own their crafts. Since an exchange of money was made which portrayed the dwarfs as needing our trade, making them seemed to need us, the empire.
This was why there was barely any record mentioning about the sub human races in Dunia.
The Garudan. The dwarfs. The werewolves.
Each of their kind once went to war against the empire along the three millennia Tsatu was standing in this Dunia continent.
Ever since they were branded as our enemies, the empire and the Serpent's Order began to eradicate any cultural trace of those species in Tsatu, even in Tsahanam and Tchakra as well.
The existential evidence of these races were so minimum that many people in the empire thought they were just myths and fairy tales. It did not help that their population decreased drastically due to the wars and remained that scarce till this day.
As a historian, I pitied those ignorant people and the rare species.
I was really glad the Tsamudran Empire never battled against Tsatu.
Given the scarcity of Tsamudran records throughout Dunia already, I dreaded how any trace of Tsamudran would be left if they had.
Anyway, the empire blamed the wars for their reason of eradicating those cultural records.
But I believed there was something else.
Another reason as to why the empire and the Serpent's Order were exterminating heritage left by the sub races.
I pulled the drawer under my desk and revealed a rectangular fragmented stone tablet.
Thirty years I had spent to reconstruct the relic.
Travelling to dangerous ruins, collecting fragments, and piecing them together properly.
And for the past ten years I had been trying to decipher the texts carved on it.
This tablet was a Garudan artifact.