LUCY
The royal library is as I remember it—which, after everything else that's changed in the past two years, feels almost disorienting in itself.
The moment we step through the towering double doors, the familiar hush of the place settles over me like a held breath. Shelves rise in tall, ordered ranks toward a vaulted ceiling painted with faded constellations, the kind of ceiling meant to make a person feel appropriately small beneath the weight of accumulated knowledge.
Long reading tables run the length of the main hall, most of them occupied—scholars hunched over open texts, a cluster of junior clerks sorting through returned volumes, a pair of elderly nobles arguing in hushed, animated tones over some point of ancient law. The air smells of old paper and beeswax polish, faintly sweet, faintly dusty, entirely unchanged from the countless afternoons I spent buried in these same shelves as a girl.
The moment I cross the threshold, the hush deepens further.
