*mumblemumble*diary*mumble*
an excerpt

What the child had called a salon I would characterize as a study or even an alchemist’s laboratory, for, while quite spacious and lit by a row of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the courtyard, it was stuffed full of all manner of strange instruments, artifacts, specimens of fantastic creatures, and what I could only imagine to be experiments in progress. Shelves, groaning under the weight of diverse and ancient-looking tomes, lined the two short ends of the room, and the wall through which I had entered was completely covered with huge maps, most of places I didn’t recognize, dotted here and there with small pencil and charcoal sketches that looked as if they’d been hurriedly ripped from their books and pinned to the wall the moment they’d been finished. Tables and desks of various sizes were scattered around the room, most of them bearing the aforementioned experiments or littered with open books and loose papers blackened with lines of small, precise writing. A heavy chandelier, currently unlit, hung at each end of the room. My eyes could scarcely bear the strain of trying to take it all in.