The ink on the spirit-thick parchment didn’t bleed.
Inside the twenty-pace enclosure of cured sheepskin, the sky rough churning of the seven colliding skies had been reduced to an eerie, breathless empty pocket. The flame of Mira’s juniper fire fifty paces away rose straight as a straight-line. It cast a steady orange warmth across the snow.
Ren Prime lowered the silver tip of his mammoth ivory awl to the parchment, inscribing the preliminary procedural header:
Forensic Inquest of Temporal Promise. Venue: The Crucible Of Val-Khorat (Original Archive Boundary). Clerk: Mira Vale (Permanent physical Witness). Recording Medium: First-Age Uncoerved Sheepskin Vellum.
The Man Who Returned watched the ink set. He had placed his hands flat upon the cool hard speckled rock of the stone base, his ink-stained knuckles scarred from hundreds of years of scraping corrupted parchment.
“Your handwriting is still too tight on the ascenders,” the older man remarked softly. “You crowd the letters together when you’re anxious. Master Garrow told you three times a week that an ascender needs breathing room. Or the notary’s seal will smudge the date.”
“Master Garrow died of the lung fever before I turned seventeen,” Ren Prime said, not lifting his eyes from the thick parchment. “Because the clinic charged four hundred silver crowns for an oxygen tent. The shop only cleared forty.”
