Jocasta grinned at Beren and then reached out and squeezed Beren’s muscled bicep in an approving manner.  A few of the various acolytes gave them some strange looks, but no one commented. Rough and ready adventurers clearly weren’t so unusual as to arouse comments.

“So any idea where you want to start?” Beren asked as they walked down one of the cluttered aisles. Shelves on both sides groaned under the weight of ancient books and Jocasta had a momentary image of being buried in a vellum avalanche

“I don’t suppose they have an ‘ancient dwarf fortress’ section,” Jocasta mused. They rounded a corner into a large antechamber in which literal pillars of books reached towards the sky. A few scholars seemed to be making an effort to do a rough sort of the contents. Jocasta suspected that she would be long dead before the project made any useful progress. As they watched, one of the teetering stacks began to lean. Jocasta opened her mouth to shout a warning, but froze, figuring there was nothing she could add that would do anything other than sow further confusion. With glacial slowness the books tilted sideways and then collapsed into two other stacks. Dust and must exploded upwards in all directions as they collapsed into ruins. There was a wind rush of a thousand rustling pages that was almost deafening. As the dust settled Jocasta saw that one of the scholars had been buried to the waist and was cursing fluently in several languages.

“I’m going to tentatively say… no,” Beren observed when the dust had begun to settle and Jocasta’s comical wince began to relax.

“Fortunately… I’ve done this kind of thing before,” Jocasta said. Reaching into a pouch she rummaged around for several long moments and then came out with a pair of large glasses with lenses of bright green glass and polished rims of brass that had been painstakingly inlay with sigils. One of the lenses was crazed and broken, crushed at some point during their adventures. She tutted in irritation and then snapped the glasses at the bridge of the nose. She slipped the surviving lens over her left eye and turned to Beren.

“Woah,” he said in shock. Jocasta’s left eye appeared huge in the lens, almost insectile, her black pupil darted left and right.

“Sorry, I forget what these things look like,” she apologized. Beren opened his mouth but closed it again without speaking.

“If you were about to ask what they do, other than make me look like a bug, they let me tell the age of documents. I figure whatever documents your friends need are likely to be among the oldest,” She explained. There was no real guarantee that was true. Someone might have stumbled on it a year ago and scribbled the information on the back of a recipe book, but the balance of probabilities was in her favor.

“I hope you're ready to hold some ladders!”

__________

“Well I’ll be damned,” Beren marveled. They were seated at a stone table surrounded by dozens of moldering tomes. The remnants of a large meat pie, procured from a local chop house after several house of searching the library, sat on one corner as did a couple of stone crocks of cider.
“Looks dwarfish right?” Jocasta said as she lifted a book she had found wedged under a table.

“Dwarven, but yes,” Beren replied. The object in question was a family crest on the inside of a rather boring genealogy that detailed the small deeds of minor aristocrats. The heraldry was very mundane, a quartered shield in blue and white with a lion rampant in one corner and an odd symbol in the inverse. 

“It looks like someone copied a dwarven rune, badly, it could be a couple of different things,” Beren said. Jocasta dug through her pile of books and found another work, this one on the noble families of the area some five hundred years ago. She leafed furiously through it until she arrived at the same blue and white crest. The rune was visible on this one too, though subtly different in shape.

“I’d say that is…part of a warding,” Beren said slowly, turning the book upside down to reorient the rune.

“The sort of thing one might find outside a dwarven city?” Jocasta asked.

“Maybe, but other places too,” he conceded. Jocasta read the archaic language. The text made no mention of how the device had come to be. A history of local heraldry might help but there was no guarantee such a thing existed in the library.

“I’m willing to bet you that this family, the.. Morloke’s, found this somewhere on their land and incorporated it into their coat of arms,” Jocasta postulated.

“According to the records they still hold their estate. Or did fifty years ago anyway. The story of how they found it might be in family folklore.”