Cathrynna Veneresc

Cathrynna Veneresc keeps a desk in the office of the Concordate, within the pale, bone-smooth architecture of the Age of Song that surrounds the Great Library. Hers is the first desk a petitioner reaches, not the last: the reception and initial administration for this part of the office, where every enquiry and every visitor — and there are far too many of both — must first be heard, sorted, and sent onward or turned away. A high elf in her late middle years, she wears the formal Concordate grey and the small silver pin that marks her office. She is composed, soft-spoken, and visibly tired, and she is generous with neither time nor exceptions.

Most of what reaches Cathrynna's desk she cannot grant — only forward it, defer it, or turn it gently aside. Access to the Great Library is merely the request she refuses most often. She meets each one with the same calm certainty, the manner of someone who has turned a great many people away of late and expects to turn away more. She does not raise her voice. Pressed, she becomes more courteous rather than less, and beneath the courtesy a dry humour shows itself, sharper the more overworked she is.

She knows precisely where she sits in the machinery of the Concordate, and she is unsentimental about it. The doorkeeper passes petitioners up; she processes them, directs them onward, and returns to her forms. What weighs on her she does not say. The office has been busier of late, and more careful, and she is tired in a way the work alone does not quite explain.

Orsday · 23rd of Octen, 412 Concordis

Squam came alone to the office of the Concordate, sent up from the door by the memonek Vesarin to the desk where Cathrynna keeps her forms. She met him as she meets all who ask after the Great Library: with courtesy, with a process measured in months, and with the dry suggestion that he might find the whole of it just delightful. Then he offered a name — Vornathex Aldra'vhen — and her manner changed. The process did not vanish, but beside it appeared a promise of swifter passage, perhaps by the morrow. For his part, Squam repaid her with a kindness she had not asked for, setting the rest of her paperwork in order by a quiet touch of magic; she noticed only once he had gone.