Towards Adventure

Jimmy had been in the library for a while, searching through the shelves for something to take home. His parents had told him no more than an hour of looking, knowing that left to his own devices he would comb the shelves for much longer, and he could feel that his time was running short. Nothing he had seen had caught his eye as of yet, however, and he began to march back to the front desk, anticipating another fruitless trip to the library, when a clearly aged, leather bound book caught his eye. He stopped in his tracks to examine it, unable to see a name on its spine, and so he gently pulled it from its spot, gently cushioned between two other, more modern looking books.

The leather in his fingers felt like it could crumble at any moment, yet the book called to him, as if it had been alone for some time and longed for a human to crack it open, to flip its pages and see the words contained within. Quickly, Jimmy found a small reading desk and sat down, gingerly opening the cover to the front page. There was no introduction, no copyright information, and no title. Immediately he was confronted with a page full of handwritten text, slightly faded with age, written in an ancient style that made it hard to read. Carefully he turned the pages to see that every page was filled similarly. It was hard to distinguish the words from one another, much less to read any of them, but he began to notice that each page ended with the same string of words.

Curiosity burned in Jimmy's chest as he tried to read the pages. Somewhere, deep in his subconscious, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had to take this book home with him. He had to know what the contents were, who had written it, and why. But as he came to the back of the book, quite abruptly he found that there large chunks of pages that had been ripped away and discarded long ago, lost to history. It was only then that he noticed the roman numerals written at the top of the pages. He could recognize some of them, but in the back pages where they skipped wildly, the numbers became simply too large for him to be able to read.

Carefully he closed the book, his mind made up. Moments later he arrived at the front desk, checked out his book, and left with his parents. The check out lady seemed tired and uninterested, not taking the time to make any note of what book Jimmy had selected. His parents had seen him take so many different kinds of books home that they thought nothing of the age of the book, only reminding their son to be careful with it, and that with a book so old, it may be best not to take it with him to school. Even if they had not mentioned anything about it, Jimmy never would have thought of taking the book to school. It was far too old to risk doing that.

He spent a week pouring over the book in nearly every free moment he had. It didn't take long to learn the roman numerals, as they were much easier to make out then the text itself. He was surprised to find that the numbers exceeded seven hundred, and he soon realized that what he was reading was not just a book, but a journal. The numbers were the numbers of the day, beginning at one on the first day it had been written in.

The next thing Jimmy had to do was to decipher the text, which was much more difficult. Towards the back of the book, the handwriting became more consistent, but it also became rougher, as though the writer had been upset while writing it, or had been rushed in his writing. Some pages early on even seemed to have different handwriting entirely, as though they had been written by a different person. Yet even at the end, he ended every page with the same string of words, which Jimmy was eventually able to make out as being five separate words. It was these words that allowed him to finally, after three days, be able to decipher the text.

"Towards adventure I set myself."

At the end of the week, Jimmy returned the book reluctantly. He didn't want to let go of the delicate bindings, or the unique writing.

But at least he knew where it would be. And he knew that no one else would notice it, as they had not for so long. And he had been able to start deciphering the life of the adventurer, Bermis, whose story would soon become a focal point of Jimmy's life.