When the weeping stopped, the silence inside the First Archive was no longer hostile. It was the quiet of an empty workshop after the fire has been damped for the night.
Ren Prime wiped his face with the corner of his lambskin apron. His eyes were red-rimmed and stinging, his throat raw. But the manic fever that had driven his limbs across nineteen burned lives had broken. For the first time since the night he had broken into the High court vault, his breathing was slow, deep, and steady.
“Better?” Mira asked softly, sitting on the stone floor beside him, her legs tucked beneath her smock.
“No,” Ren admitted, his voice raspy. “My ribs feel like they were kicked by a heavy cart horse, my head aches, and in forty minutes our oldest self is going to come through that ceiling to murder me.”
Mira let out a quiet, dry chuckle. “Good. That sounds like an honest check. Now what does a keeper do when a check is bad?”
Ren looked up at the hard speckled rock drafting table. “He reads the original text.”
He stood up, his joints popping stiffly in the chill. He walked to the stone table and lifted the Speculum of Forfeited Paths from the dust. He set it down squarely beneath the faint beam of violet light shining from Mira’s quartz arm.
