Chapter Text
Aaravos enjoys reading quite a bit. To flip through spell books he’s paged through a thousand times before, old, and earmarked, and torn, and and worn down at the edges. Over the many years, they have yellowed. Aaravos remembers when the pages used to be pristine and white, and it’s a strange feeling to know. Well, he’s always had a vivid imagination, even just looking at words and sigils upon a page.
He remembers when mages from a different time would jot down these spells, so excited to show their new creations to the starkissed elf. He would watch in rapture, and take notes, learning from them new tricks he never would have thought of himself. So yes, he thumbs through these pages fondly, remembering companions he once had, who he still treasures in these archives, both sitting upon his shelves of his study, and the dusty, long memories within his head.
Sometimes though, when he’s upset, and he wants to throw chairs across the room, cast fire onto the books and watch them burn, only to watch them easily revert to their former state, then he reads them with tense, iron gripping fingers, snapping and sometimes ripping the pages as he turns them, to no avail, as he imagines doing terrible things with those same spells he had learned eons ago from some he once called family, those elves he had looked up to, the young fool he was.
Watching them burn and boil from the inside out as their innards turned to ash but their skin was still shaped in a face of horrror, watch their limbs turn to worms and their head to maggots, to take their very essence and swallow it so it’s like they were never there at all. Yes, this archmage burns with fury and compassion and it’s too much.
It’s true, he likes to read, to flip through what has been, and what could be, in the future where he will burn down the world and he will remake it, and they will pay but they will see the error of their ways. Well, he’s always had a vivid imagination, even just looking at words and sigils upon a page.