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Korvel shut the ledger carefully, though his hand lingered on the cover a moment too long. “We should take it.”
Alyra thinned her lips. “That seems dangerous. What if we’re caught carrying it?”
“Leaving it here seems worse, don’t you think? I think it could prove useful, given everything we’ve discovered so far,” Korvel said.
Lora looked between them and let out a sigh. “For once, I hate that he has a point.”
Elowynn took the ledger before anyone else could decide for her. It was heavier than she expected. A book found in a room buried between calamities, holding proof that the truth had not been lost; it had been buried.
She tucked the ledger against her chest and looked toward the descending corridor beyond the laboratory. The passage waited, lined with old channels and carved sigils that no longer felt like relics. They felt like veins leading toward the center of something ancient and wounded.
A shudder ran through her.
Caelyn’s gaze followed hers, and for a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder, both staring into the darkness for different reasons and fearing the same destination.
“It’s stronger past this room,” he said quietly.
Elowynn closed her eyes for a single breath. When she opened them again, she found Korvel watching Caelyn with a new expression. It looked like reluctant understanding.
“Then we keep moving,” Alyra said, because someone had to say it.
No one argued.
Elowynn held the ledger tighter and stepped toward the corridor with Caelyn beside her.
The chamber of forgotten instruments and abandoned records fell behind them, but the knowledge it had given her followed like a shadow.
The Conclave had known.
Someone had buried the evidence.
And Master Vaelor, with his careful warnings and his measured restraint, had likely known exactly how close she had come to finding it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Every generation believes it inherited the world. Few stop to wonder who actually built it.”
— Notes found on the desk of Master Vaelor
The corridor beyond the laboratory descended for what felt like an age.
Elowynn had lost sense of how much time had passed, for there were no bells deep beneath the earth.
The steady rhythm of footsteps against stone blurred together until it became a constant throb beneath every thought, while the darkness beyond their lanterns seemed determined to swallow any notion that a world still existed above them.
Veylspire felt impossibly distant now.
The city of observatories and scholars, of crowded lecture halls and illuminated archives, belonged to another life entirely. Down here there was only stone, silence, and the growing certainty that they’d never get all their questions answered.
The passage continued changing as they descended. The structures nearest the city had still resembled architecture Elowynn recognized, even when their purpose remained unclear.
Here, however, those similarities were becoming increasingly difficult to find.
The walls were smoother, but the proportions felt different. Several times she found herself studying carvings only to become frustrated because she couldn't identify the symbols worked into the stone.
Between the archives of Lumenshire and her turnings in Veylspire, she had spent most of her life surrounded by records of the past. She was used to knowing things. Used to placing names and explanations upon what she observed. The fact that she could no longer do so was becoming increasingly disconcerting.
Scholars liked to imagine history as a puzzle with missing pieces. Enough time, enough patience, and eventually those pieces could be found and fit together.
