Page 92 of Legacy Ascended

“Because of these.” She points to the documents she's arranged after that date. “Every one has the break in the same place. And look here.” She moves to one of the later seals. “It's a little wider.”

Jon comes around the table. “From wear?”

“That's what it looks like.”

I look down the line. The break appears and then stays there, getting a little worse as the years pass.

"That's actually pretty cool."

"I told you."

I look back at the two messages. "Freya, where do those sit on your line?"

She follows my eyes. Her smile disappears.

"Wait."

"What?"

"The two messages about the arrangement. They're dated. Where are they?"

Freya goes back for them, one at a time, and sets them into the line by date. Both fall years after the break first appears.

All three of us look. The outer rings on both seals are clean.

"Hmm," Jon says.

"Say something better than hmm."

"There are other explanations." He bends closer to the first seal. "A House could have more than one matrix. They could have replaced this one. There could have been a spare that wasn't used often enough to show the same wear."

"Do we know if Luftemilen had another one?"

"No."

"Can we find out?"

"Maybe. If another matrix was made or repaired, there may be a payment for it somewhere in the accounts."

I look at the two messages again. "So this doesn't mean they're fake."

"No."

"It means their seals don't match the other Luftemilen seals from the same period."

"That's what you know," Jon says.

I write it down. "Freya, you weren't looking for that."

"I was looking at seals." She's gone a little pale. "I like seals."

We keep reading. Jon spends most of the next hour in the correspondence between the other Houses. Eventually he turns the summary toward me and points above the page.

"This is why I've been reading those."

"Why?"

"The summary says the other Houses were already concerned about Luftemilen before the incident. I wanted to see what they were saying at the time."