4 Patience

Tomes, as the name suggested, were big, heavy books that were filled to the brim with ancient runes and words. They used to contain words of English, Latin, Greek and many other languages of the older ages . These books had been written centuries ago with information pertaining to history, records and anything at all, but after being enhanced, they contained the essence of magic, which they transferred to the person they were bound to.

Fuar, for example , formed a bond with a book which contained frost magic. This book allowed him to create icicles and decrease the temperatures around himself.

There were many more types of magic, and some of which Grim himself had seen being bound to people. He remembered the last time he walked down these stairs, but it still felt different this time.

The last time, a beautiful woman had followed his master down here, with him in tow. She bound a tome and following that a phenomenon appeared which increased the temperature of her surroundings. The tome she bound turned out to contain flame magic.

Grim, too, wanted flame magic or maybe even a magic related to fire. He was truly enchanted by the appearance of the flames around the beautiful body of the Flame Empress. They danced in the air like tongues as they licked the surface of the whole room.

Even his master had to put in quite the bit of effort into suppressing the flames released by the phenomenon caused by the binding of the tome that time.

He walked down the stairs behind his master and with each step he descended, he felt his heart beat faster. This was a big moment for him. If he could perhaps bind a tome which gave him an extremely powerful magic, he could rise up above the rest and maybe even become a power by himself. He wouldn't have to do all that troubling training and read those numerous books if he could break off from under his master's wings.

When the flight of stairs finally ended, he ended up in a huge room, surrounded by glass on all four sides, with nothing but a table at the center. It had a gate near the right edge of the wall directly in front of him and the only other opening was the one behind himself, the one that had stairs which connected this room to the ground above.

" Go ahead. Sit over there. " Fuar said as he pointed at the table in the middle of the room. " The tomes will come to you soon so sit tight and wait patiently. "

As soon as his words ended, he exploded with a ' Poof ' and vanished into mist that spread all around grim , creating a mysterious atmosphere.

Grim followed his master's orders and walked up to the table and looked around. The table was short, so the only way to sit would be if he sat while kneeling, and he had done enough of that to know how much it hurt his knees.

He sighed as he looked around himself once more, before muttering " Stupid geezer didn't even give me a normal bench to sit on. "

He slowly kneeled in front of what could only be called a Japanese chabudai, and looked around himself, waiting for the tomes to be delivered.

He waited patiently for a few minutes, with still no signs of a tome, decreasing his excitement by a fair lot and his imagination started running wild.

' What if there are no tomes ? ' He thought before shaking his head. His master was the Tomekeeper. He would keep at least one tome for him, even if there were no more left.

He waited and waited and started getting more and more impatient and paranoid. His knees were hurting, what with waiting for what seemed like 12 hours with nothing better to do. He felt like his master forgot him, so he started getting up, when he heard his master's voice again .

" Alright, it has been 3 hours since you sat there and did not move. Basic patience test has been passed. The tomes will be delivered right away. "

Grim was shocked. The one thing he could not do was be patient, and that was exactly what he was told to do. His master clearly knew that he was not patient, but he still made him take this patience test. This just went to show that his master hated him.

Zzzzzzzeeeeeeeeee

He suddenly heard a weird mechanical sound and looked at the table in front of him .