PROFESSOR SABLE ROOKMERE
The Bestiary
Bestiary Keeper
Her Insignia and Seal
Professor — identifies a member of Evershade's teaching faculty.
Her wax seal — Professor Rookmere seals her notes with amber wax. You will find them pinned throughout her lessons, and now and then elsewhere around the castle, wherever a record has been left worth marking.
The emblem of the Bestiary.
About Professor Rookmere
Professor Sable Rookmere is a raven, and the keeper of the castle's creature records. The Bestiary Hall's long room of shelves — the beast-books, the chronicles, the trial reports, the ships' logs, the letters of officials who did not believe what they were filing and filed it anyway — is hers to keep in order, and she keeps it the way her kind keeps everything: by remembering exactly where it is.
Ravens remember. It is the plain zoological truth about them, and it is this class's whole foundation: a record is a memory that was written down, and keeping records well — dated, sourced, and honestly marked — is how a school remembers what a single lifetime cannot. When Professor Rookmere teaches you to mark a line T, S, or F — tale, sighting, or fact — she is teaching you her own discipline, the one her family has practiced on every buried acorn and every winter cache since long before there were castles.
She came to the castle the way the records come to her: by following a trail. The wild creatures who took over these ruins found the old hunting seat's library moldering in a tower room, and the beast-books in it were already old when the roof fell in. A keeper was wanted. A raven volunteered — or was volunteered; the minutes of that meeting, characteristically, were kept, but the hand that kept them has not been identified.
Professor Rookmere does not head one of the school's four houses. The Hall is her roost, and scholars of every house — and of none — are equally her scholars here. Her lessons are pinned throughout the Bestiary Hall, sealed in amber. You will know her notes by the patience of them: every claim dated, every source named, and the words we do not know used without embarrassment whenever they are the truth.
A Note from Professor Rookmere
Scholars ask me, usually in the first week, whether I believe in the beings on my shelves. I keep the question the way I keep everything else: filed, dated, and answered with the record. The record is what I believe in. It can be checked, argued with, and corrected — which is more than can be said for most certainties.
Come and learn to keep it with me. The Hall is quiet, the shelves are long, and there is room in the book for your hand beside the old ones.
The Bestiary
Bestiary Keeper