The Archive's Deep Elevator carried all four of them down through the carved shaft the next morning. Alucent stood beside Scribe Joy with his ebony cane resting against his leg while the cold Archive air pressed upward from below. Across the platform, Raya had her Weaveblade at her hip and her chestnut hair tied back, her hazel eyes watching the shaft walls as the script shifted from standard to pre-standard during the descent. Gryan stood beside her with his right hand gripping the platform's brass rail, his mechanical arm restored beneath his dark blue sleeve after two days at Castra's workshop. The rune-lines at the wrist still flickered occasionally, though the grip held cleanly when he flexed his brass fingers.
The platform settled at the Archive level, and they passed between the ancient pillars into the corridors beyond. Elder Solen sat at his reading table in the central chamber, his magnification lens fitted to his right eye as he examined a tablet without acknowledging their passage.
Scribe Joy led them past the central chamber and into the wider reading area where several stone tables sat beneath Rune Gleam installations. She chose a table large enough for four and began setting out materials from her travel case, arranging blank note-paper and reference sheets across the stone surface with the practiced motions of someone who had organized research in this space many times before.
"The Archive organizes by era first, then by Vale of origin, then by disciplinary classification," she said as the group settled around the table. "The deeper you go, the older the materials, and the language shifts as you move backward through time."
She laid a final sheet of note-paper on the surface before looking up at each of them in turn. "The Guild uses two languages in its documentation. The current working language is Nuin." She spoke a few words, and Alucent immediately heard the precision in it, every syllable evenly stressed and fully pronounced, each consonant given its complete value. The language sounded as though something were being measured with each word. "And the older ritual language is La'qwu, from which Nuin descended."
She spoke again, and the difference struck his ear immediately. The consonants dropped deeper into her throat, resonating in her chest, while the vowels stretched longer than any speech he had heard in Senele. The rhythm slowed into something processional, as though the language itself demanded patience from whoever spoke it.
"Both use the Standard Runic Script," Scribe Joy continued, returning to Huxley. "Eighteen consonants, five vowels, and four modifier marks that the Guild developed during the early Seventh Myric. But La'qwu text sits heavier on the page because of its grammar, with verb-initial word order, vowel-length tense marking, the a- plural prefix, and the mor negation particle producing denser inscriptions than Nuin."
She paused to let this settle before continuing. "Documents from the first century or two of this Myric are in La'qwu, because the Guild had not yet formalized Nuin from it. Everything after the transition is in Nuin. Anything that crossed over from the Sixth Myric is in La'qwu." Her blue eyes moved across the group. "I read La'qwu, which means I will handle the oldest layer. I will start with the Seventh Myric administrative records and work backward, because institutional references in later documents point toward what was suppressed in earlier ones. The trail runs backward. I follow it."
She turned to Raya. "You read Nuin. That means you handle the post-Guild-transition documents, the administrative records and institutional texts from the middle-to-late Seventh Myric written after the Silver Chisel completed its shift from La'qwu to Nuin." A faint warmth entered her voice as she added, "I would suggest working through the oldest bound texts shelf by shelf, every page of every text, because relevant information in suppressed material is never where anyone expects it to be. A document about agricultural administration might contain a single sentence about a practitioner removed from a census. A text about border maintenance might mention in passing that an inscription was ordered sealed."
"You want me to read every page," Raya said, her eyebrow rising slightly.
"I want you to read for the detail that does not belong in the document it appears in," Scribe Joy replied. "You are the most thorough reader among us. That is exactly what this requires."
Raya considered this for a moment before nodding once, accepting the approach without argument.
Scribe Joy turned to Gryan. "Castra's repair sessions will take part of each day. When you are here, there are Huxley translations of some documents, the ones the Guild translated into standard Senelean for broader access. Administrative records, historical summaries, formally published Guild texts. Those are yours."
Gryan met her eyes briefly and gave a single nod.
"Now," Scribe Joy said, turning back to the full group, "the deepest layer of research requires tracking terminology that crosses between documents and disciplines. The Shaytum roots run beneath every Senelean language as a shared substrate, the inheritance from the Primary Magical Tongue. If a Shaytum root appears in a document where it should not be, that tells us something about what the document's author knew or what they were trying to reference without saying it directly."
Shaytum... Alucent straightened on his bench. He knew those roots. Not from study in this world but from the Rune Threadweave training and the translation from the journal that had given him the foundational glyphs. Ven. Tesh. Neth. Rul. Mor. Kaed. Veth. Asha. They sat in his mind alongside the Cold Scribe method and the Bloodmark principles, part of the inheritance his advancement had carved into his understanding.
"I can read Shaytum," he said.
Scribe Joy's blue eyes shifted to him, and something moved through her expression that Alucent recognized as genuine surprise, brief but visible before her composure absorbed it. She regarded him for a moment, her head tilting slightly as she reassessed something about him.
"You read the Shaytum roots," she said, not quite a question.
"Ven, Tesh, Neth, Rul, Mor, Kaed, Veth, Asha," Alucent replied, listing the roots he carried from his Threadweave training. "They came with the Rune Threadweave advancement. The foundational glyphs."
Scribe Joy nodded slowly, and the surprise in her expression settled into something closer to respect as she continued. "Then you are the cross-reference. Those roots appear across every Senelean language in traceable forms." She picked up a stylus and began writing on one of the note-papers, her script clean and precise. "In Nuin, Rul becomes Qwel. Tesh becomes Teshara. Etcha remains unchanged. Inas is the Author's mark." She wrote each form beside its root. "In La'qwu, the forms go deeper. Rul becomes Qweth, the deepest sacred form. Ven becomes Ven-La, the ancient threshold. Tesh becomes Tesh-La, the old Acceptance. And Morun-Qweth is deep Runeforce."
She set the stylus down and looked at Alucent. "If you see Teshara in a document that has nothing to do with the Rune Threadweave, you flag it. If Etcha appears in a non-Scribe text, you note the context. If Ven appears in something that is not about thresholds, you ask why." Her blue eyes held his steadily. "You will not be reading the documents themselves. You will be reading the substrate beneath them, the Shaytum inheritance that runs as a silent layer beneath all vocabulary and reveals the roots that connect every language back to the Primary Magical Tongue."
Pattern recognition applied to language instead of data sets. That's what she's describing, even though she doesn't know about my old life. She looked at what I can do and found the exact right place for it. He pulled the note-paper with Scribe Joy's comparative forms closer and began studying the Nuin and La'qwu variants of each root.
"That covers the four of us," Scribe Joy said, folding her hands on the desk. "Shall we begin?"
They began.
The hours moved slowly in the Archive's controlled atmosphere. The constant temperature and steady Rune Gleam created a timeless quality that made it difficult to track how long they had been working. Alucent sat at the stone table with his note-paper filling steadily, marking Shaytum roots as Scribe Joy brought documents from the deeper shelves and Raya worked through the bound texts on the opposite side of the reading area.
Scribe Joy moved between the shelving sections and the table with measured efficiency, carrying stone tablets and wrapped scrolls to the reading surface before examining them under the Rune Gleam and returning them for the next. She worked backward through the Seventh Myric administrative records, starting with the most recent centuries and moving deeper. Each time she brought a La'qwu document to the table, Alucent watched her read it, her blue eyes moving across the dense, heavy text with a fluency that came from years of practice. The guttural consonants and long vowels were not obstacles for her. She read La'qwu directly, the way she read Nuin, without hesitation.
Raya worked on the far side of the reading area with a stack of bound texts beside her on the bench and a single volume open in front of her. She read every page, starting at the first and reading to the last before closing the text, setting it aside, and picking up the next one. Her pace was slower than Scribe Joy's, but her attention never wavered.
Gryan arrived midway through the morning, his mechanical arm humming faintly beneath his dark blue sleeve as the rune-lines brightened in the Archive's ambient field. He sat beside Raya and accepted a stack of Huxley-translated documents without speaking, opening the first one and beginning to read at his own pace. One page at a time. Every word.
Nobody commented on his speed.
Alucent worked between them, moving from Scribe Joy's translations to Raya's bound texts to Gryan's Huxley documents, checking each one for Shaytum roots that appeared outside their expected context. His note-paper filled with entries, each one marking a root, its location, and the surrounding text. Most entries were unremarkable, Shaytum roots appearing in their expected forms within their expected disciplines.
But occasionally, a root appeared where it should not have been.
Teshara in a census document from Year 408... Why would a census document use Threadweave terminology? The word appears in a sentence about a practitioner being "removed from Teshara-status." Is that an administrative classification I haven't encountered before, or is it referencing something specific that was done to this practitioner? What does it mean to be removed from "acceptance-status"? He circled the entry and moved on.
Scribe Joy found the first significant document in the early afternoon.
She had been working through the La'qwu administrative records from the early Seventh Myric, and when she brought the tablet to the table, Alucent noticed that she carried it with more care than she had given the previous materials. Her fingers held the edges precisely, and her blue eyes had sharpened in a way that told him she had found something worth stopping for.
"Year 312," she said, setting the tablet on the stone surface beneath the Rune Gleam. "An imperial inventory. Holdings census during the succession crisis."
She began reading the La'qwu aloud, her voice dropping into the processional rhythm of the old language as the guttural consonants and long vowels filled the reading area. Raya had set her bound text aside and crossed to the table, while Gryan looked up from his Huxley document and listened from his bench.
After reading a section, Scribe Joy paused and translated into Huxley. "This is a census of holdings, tracking each faction's possessions during the power vacuum." She pointed to a section of the tablet. "Here. A reference to 'the restricted scrolls' appearing in a list of categories exempt from the annual Imperial Census of Holdings."
Her finger traced the La'qwu text. "The scrolls are exempt because they are not tracked publicly. And the document notes this as established institutional procedure, not as something newly created. The restriction predates Year 312."
Year 312... That's during the Black War, isn't it? After the fifth Emperor died without an heir. Both factions started fighting through assassinations and coups. The inherited knowledge surfaced in fragments as Alucent leaned closer to the tablet. So during that chaos, someone still tracked these scrolls as part of a formal holdings census. They mattered enough to count even while the empire was tearing itself apart. And the restriction on them was already old by then, hmm, how far back does it go?
He looked at the La'qwu text on the tablet and spotted two Shaytum roots immediately. After pulling his note-paper closer, he pointed to the first one.
"Ven-Iam," he said. "That's a compound term. Ven for threshold, Iam for knowledge or understanding." He looked at Scribe Joy. "Is that a Juniam vocabulary term? It looks as though whoever wrote this inventory used it naturally, without explaining it."
Scribe Joy nodded, and something tightened at the corners of her mouth. "It is. The scribe who wrote this document knew the Juniam terminology well enough to use it as part of standard working vocabulary." She paused. "That means either the Juniam vocabulary had spread into general administrative use by Year 312, or this specific scribe had direct contact with the scrolls' contents."
Alucent pointed to the second root. "And this one. Ket. That's hold, or anchor, isn't it? The restricted scrolls are described as 'held' using a Shaytum root for structural anchoring."
"Yes," Scribe Joy confirmed. "They are not merely stored. The language implies they are secured, structurally fixed in place." Her blue eyes held his briefly before she continued translating.
The document laid out both factions' holdings during the Black War, tracking territory, military assets, institutional authority, and in one specific category, the restricted scrolls. Scribe Joy worked through the La'qwu steadily, translating each section into Huxley for the group.
When she reached the end of the relevant section, she set her hands flat on the stone desk. "Both factions knew about the scrolls. Both tracked them as strategic holdings worth counting. And both considered them important enough to keep off public records."
Raya leaned against the table with her arms crossed over her burgundy gown. "So whoever won the war got the scrolls."
"The anti-Blackware faction won," Scribe Joy replied. "Huian Wisgran became the sixth Emperor, and the scrolls passed to him." She paused, tracing the timeline forward. "Then through the Theocratic Emperors, and eventually through Kris'ten Luci's creation of the Five Vales. The scrolls were distributed across the five Vale Emperors."
Wait, Luci? Why haven't I heard of this before now? Or is it perhaps not the same Luci as me?
"Where are they now?" Gryan asked from his bench, his voice low and rough.
"Three in Verdant Vale. Four in Iron Vale. Nine here in Runepeaks. Five in Crystal Vale. Two in Shadow Vale."
The numbers settled around the table. Raya's jaw tightened as the connections formed, and Gryan's brass fingers curled slowly against his knee beneath his sleeve.
The Juniam scrolls... Whatever they contain, whatever knowledge about advancing beyond Thread 4 they hold, they've been fought over since at least Year 312. Probably longer, if the restriction predates that document. That means Seven hundred years of secrecy and political control over knowledge that could change what practitioners are capable of. He looked at the tablet on the table. And nine of them are here. In this city. Somewhere nearby.
After marking the final Shaytum entries on his note-paper, Alucent looked at Scribe Joy. "Can we check whether the same 'restricted scrolls' category appears in the post-Nuin-transition records?"
Scribe Joy nodded and turned to Raya. "That would be in the Nuin-language institutional files. Your section."
Raya pushed herself off the table and returned to her bound texts without a word.
Raya found the second document late in the afternoon.
Alucent heard her stand up from her bench across the reading area, and when he looked up from his note-paper, she was holding a text with a damaged spine. She carried it to the table and set it down carefully, her hazel eyes meeting Scribe Joy's.
"This was on the oldest bound texts shelf," Raya said. "Not in any classified section, not in anything restricted. Just sitting on an ordinary shelf, between geological surveys."
Between geological surveys? That's either a cataloguing error or someone deliberately put it where nobody would look for it. Alucent studied the damaged spine as Scribe Joy reached for the text.
"The binding is Seventh Myric," Raya continued, pointing to the spine. "The materials match the first decades after the Myric transition. But the content is older. When I opened it, the text inside predates this Myric entirely."
A Sixth Myric text bound in Seventh Myric materials. Someone took an older document and preserved it in a new binding during the early years of the current era. Why? Because the original binding was failing, or because they wanted it to look like it belonged on a Seventh Myric shelf?
Scribe Joy took the text and examined the spine. A cataloguing date sat partially legible on the binding, and she traced the remaining characters with her fingertip.
"Year 18," she said. "This is the date the Guild's early predecessor entered the text into their archive."
Year 18... That's when Sur'an Blackware is Emperor, only eighteen years in. He was building the unified state. The Vales don't exist yet, the Juniam scrolls haven't been found. Yes, that doesn't happen for another seventy years. The Rune Awakening is centuries away. And someone in Runepeaks catalogued a text from the previous Myric about something the current era hasn't even begun to understand.
"The text is La'qwu," Raya said, looking at Scribe Joy. "I can't read it."
Scribe Joy opened the text carefully. The pages held themselves with the weight of centuries despite the Archive's protection, and she turned to the title page. Her blue eyes moved across the La'qwu script.
She went still.
Not the measured stillness she used when processing information, not the composed pause from difficult conversations. This was different, as though something in the text had reached through her eyes and gripped her spine. Her breathing stopped for a moment before resuming more slowly, and her fingers tightened on the edges of the text hard enough that the tips went white.
"What does it say?" Raya asked, leaning closer.
Scribe Joy read the partially legible title aloud, first in La'qwu, the guttural consonants and long vowels filling the reading area with the processional rhythm of the old language, then in Huxley.
"Account of the Second Scribe and the Consequences of the Folly Path."
The reading area went silent.
The Folly Path. Alucent's hands went flat against the stone desk as the words registered. Tyranix's Threadweave. The one he used against us on the road. The emotional inversion, the perception distortion, the choir of voices. And it's here, in a text from the Sixth Myric, written down and catalogued before the Juniam scrolls were even found. Before anyone in the current era had formalized any Threadweave for public practice.
It's been sitting between geological surveys, for nearly seven hundred years.
Raya's hand had moved to the hilt of her Weaveblade, the same reflex Alucent had seen from her in Iron Vale whenever something dangerous surfaced. Her hazel eyes fixed on the text in Scribe Joy's hands.
"It was between geological surveys," Raya said again, her voice tight. "Not classified. Not restricted. Just sitting there."
Either miscatalogued, or hidden on purpose. Because who reads geological surveys page by page? Nobody does. Nobody except someone who reads every page of every text because they don't take shortcuts. Alucent looked at Raya across the table. Did it wait on that shelf for centuries until exactly this kind of reader picked it up.
Gryan had risen from his bench and crossed to the table. He stood behind Raya, his brass fingers resting against the table edge as he looked down at the text. His jaw set tight beneath the collar of his dark blue suit.
Scribe Joy held the text without moving. The La'qwu on its pages carried constructions and vocabulary from the Sixth Myric's final period, older than the La'qwu she had learned, with grammar and terms that were not part of the Seventh Myric's preserved corpus.
After a long moment, she closed the text carefully and held it flat against the stone desk with both hands.
"I will need time with this," she said, her voice soft but carrying the weight of someone who understood what she was holding. "It cannot be translated quickly or in pieces. The La'qwu is from the Sixth Myric's final period, and the grammar carries constructions I am not familiar with." She looked at Alucent through the Rune Gleam's steady light. "It needs to be read in full, carefully, with the attention that La'qwu demands."
She did not begin translating.
She held the text.
Raya stood beside the table with her hand on her Weaveblade, her hazel eyes moving between Scribe Joy and the text. Gryan remained behind her, his brass fingers pressed against the table edge. Alucent looked at the damaged spine, at the cataloguing date that read Year 18, at the Sixth Myric survival text that had crossed the Myric boundary and waited seven hundred years on the wrong shelf.
Day one was over.