Lucius regained his conscious self after a while of quietly sobbing. The minute of silence was over, and now they needed to get back to work, after all emotions and rational thinking never worked together.
They moved to what remained of the table at the corner of the room.
Lucius set the journal down on the surface and opened it carefully, the wrapped cover resisting before giving way. The burned edges of the pages crumbled slightly at his touch, small dark fragments falling away from the margins.
He turned past the destroyed front sections, the first dozen or so pages were gone entirely, consumed from the outside in, leaving only partial lines at the centre of each page where the fire hadn't reached
Whatever Cophey had written at the beginning was lost, erased forever.
He kept turning until he reached the surviving sections and stopped.
Her handwriting was small and precise, fitting a lot of information into limited spaces. Dense lines of text filled each page from margin to margin, occasionally broken by diagrams like geometric patterns, ritual circle variations, and notation systems that seemed to be her own.
Seraphine moved to his left side and looked down at the open pages without saying anything.
While Valeria stayed back, watching the door, giving them enough room to do what they needed to do.
The first readable section was comprehensive.
Page after page of divination methodology, the mechanics of sight based rituals, the specific components required for different classes of location work, the variables that affected accuracy and range.
It read like the working notes of someone who had spent decades refining a practice and was documenting it for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone reading it at some point.
Some of it was coded.
Personal shorthand, abbreviations, and symbols that substituted for full words, names reduced to initials, and locations described by landmarks rather than names. The kind of code that wasn't designed to withstand thorough scrutiny but was enough to make a casual reader lose the thread.
Lucius worked through it slowly.
Seraphine worked through it faster than he did. She had a facility for this kind of reading, the other recognition of someone who had spent years navigating church documentation that was deliberately obscured. She pointed occasionally, translating a symbol or expanding an abbreviation, her voice low and serious.
Midway through the surviving section, they found something interesting.
A list, running down the left margin of two facing pages, each entry brief. Names or initials, followed by locations, followed by short descriptors.
Potential allies built quietly over years, maintained at careful distance.
A network she had never gotten to use.
Luciys read the list twice and didn't say anything about it. He folded that page down at the corner and kept going.
The discovery came near the back of the surviving section.
The handwriting changed slightly here, the normally precise lines slightly less regular, as if these pages had been written faster than the others or under different circumstances. The entries were longer, less structured, more like thinking on paper than documentation.
The heading at the top of the first page read: "The Seer's Calling — Emergence Conditions."
Seraphine read that partly clearly and leaned in closer, curious.
Cophey had been researching it for what looked like years, based on the accumulated density of the notes. The question she was working through was specific: Under what conditions did genuine divination gifts awaken in people who hadn't been born into established seer lineages.
Her conclusion, built across a dozen pages of accumulated evidence and cross-referenced accounts, was that latent seer ability existed in far more people than the Church's records acknowledged, but that it required a specific kind of trigger to activate.
Divine events.
Significant concentrations of divine energy in a location or a major disruption to an existing divine current were the most reliable catalysts.
The church knew this, Cophey had written this in the flat tone she apparently used for things that disgusted her. They had known it for generations before theirs. The identification and suppression of latent seers in divine event zones was standard institutional practice, conducted quietly under the cover of post-event relief operations.
Lucius's brow furrowed at the sight of the paragraph. 'They did this in secret without informing people about it?!'
He kept reading.
Near the end of the section, a specific location was written down. Written out im full, which meant Cophey had considered it important enough to be unambiguous about.
[Ashvale.
Frontier settlement, Stormbreak foothills.
The population is small and isolated.
Regular divine current disruption from Weather God tributary activity in the mountains. Multiple accounts of unusual perception events among residents over the past three years. Latent seers are almost certainly present. Emergence likely during or after the next significant divine event in the region.]
Below it, in slightly different ink, a later addition: "If I'm right about the mountains escalating, Ashvale won't stay quiet much longer."
Seraphine read it twice, and then she straightened up.
"Ashvale," she said slowly, as if remembering.
"You know it?" Lucius asked.
"Yes, I think I do." She looked at the page. "It's a mining village near the base of the Stormbreak range, maybe two days into the foothills from the northern road." She paused, thinking. "It's a remote village. It's the kind of place that doesn't get much church attention because there's nothing there worth the thought."
"Which is exactly why latent seers there would go unidentified," Lucius said.
"Yes, supposedly." She was quiet for a moment. "If Cophey believed the next emergence was likely there, and if her methodology was sound —"
"Her methodology is correct. Must I remind you that she helped me locate the sun god," Lucius said.
Seraphine didn't argue with his words.
Valeria spoke from the doorway. "Ashvale is inside one of the Weather God's territories." Her voice carried across the shrine without effort, flat and precise.
"The Stormbreak Mountains are where the Thunder God and Storm Goddess are said to dwell. The whole region runs on their tribute network." A short pause, before she continued.
"That's not a coincidence. Divine current disruption from the weather god's activity. That's what Cophey probably flagged as the trigger condition."
"The mountains are escalating," Lucius said, looking at the journal entry. "She wrote that herself."
"Which means whatever latent seers are in Ashvale may already be in emergence," Seraphines said quietly. "Or close to it."
The shrine was still around him. The golden feathers on the floor caught the window light and held it.
Lucius looked at the journal, the list of contacts on the folded pages, and the ritual methodology in the surviving sections. The components documented in careful detail, cross-referenced against Cophey's own supply records in the margins.
They needed the components to replicate the divination ritual. They needed someone with seer potential to anchor it, and without both, the ritual was incomplete, technically complete, and functionally useless.
Cophey had pointed them toward both in the same location without knowing she was doing it.
He closed the journal.
"We need the components first," he said. "The list she kept, there's a dealer three days west from here. We move, resupply, and then head north." He looked at Seraphine.
"How much of her ritual framework can you reconstruct from what's in here?"
Seraphine considered it. "Most of it. The methodology is intact. The coded sections I can work through given time." She glanced at the burned front pages. "What we've lost is context, not the process."
"Then we have what we need." He picked up the journal and tucked it back inside his coat. "We restock then we head for Ashvale."
"The Weather God's homeland," Valeria said, the observation carrying no particular alarm. Just accuracy.
"That's where we're going," Lucius said.