She has been asking the wrong question.
She’s been asking what binds threvenar. But the very thought of doing so is biological warfare. No one in their right mind would write a text on it. She has been thinking like an apothecary. But no one exporting a weaponized compound across kingdoms thinks like an apothecary. They think like smugglers. Merchants.Empires.
The question is: how is it being moved? How would it be exported and imported without raising questions?
Because somewhere, somehow, a potent substance is being moved between kingdoms, and there has to be a record of it.
Her gaze lifts slowly, scanning the shelves again. Not for apothecary texts this time, but for something else entirely.Trade logs.
She needs to find the trade of plants she does not immediately recognize. Rare. Enduring.Exported by Caeloria.
Her movements sharpen.
She abandons half the books on the table and crosses the room, climbing a ladder without hesitation. Her fingers trail across the spines until they catch on a narrower volume, bound in sun-faded leather, its edges worn as if it has been handled more in transit than in study:
Trade Log: Exports
Meraset Harbor, Azhareth
Third Era – Volume IV
Rubi pulls it free.
Back at the table, she flips through it with practiced impatience, skimming past records of salt, metal, textiles. Caravan notes. Export logs. Marginalia scribbled in different hands. It is not until she reaches the latter third of the text that something slows her.
Resins.
She leans in.
The entry is brief. Almost dismissive. A note on Caelorian exports—a resin harvested from desert flora, valued for its durability, its resistance to heat and rot. Used in preservation, in wound-sealing, in the transport of unstable compounds across long distances.
She doesn’t immediately recognize it. Certainly not as a widely-used binder.
Rubi’s eyes track the line again. Slower this time, and she begins to catalog its properties:
Used to preserve.Hydrophobic.
Seals wounds.Natural coagulant.
Stabilizes reactive compounds.Resistant to degradation.
Her breath stills.
This is it.
Not written the way she would write it. Not described with the precision of an apothecary who has ground it beneath her own hands and discovered the full extent of its capabilities. Butthe properties are unmistakable. The behavior she observed in the mortar, in the water, over flame—it all lives here, buried in the margins of a trade record no one thought to question.
Her finger traces the name.
The word catches. Not entirely unfamiliar—just buried. Something she’s heard once, years ago, in passing. Dismissed when Caelorian trade dried up, most likely—filed away as irrelevant, no longer accessible.
Ferralis Perforatum.
Ferralis Perforatum resin from Caeloria.
But what does that mean?
Rubi sifts through the archives of her mind, trying to access old Aevrish, a language lost when The Joining was formed and the continent split.
