Nobody spoke immediately after the words settled onto the page.
If you are reading this, then Sarya finally reached the Garden.
The sentence refused to fit into anything the room already understood, and everyone in the lower archive seemed to sense this simultaneously — not the shock of an impossible claim, but the specific disorientation of a claim that was somehow both impossible and undeniable at once.
The impossible part wasn't that Elias had known Sarya's name. By every account they'd gathered across the past several chapters of history, Elias had lived and vanished centuries before Sarya had been born, in a Garden that had itself faded from the world's memory long before the First Road existed to connect anything.
The impossible part was the ink.
Kael leaned over the ledger with his scanner already active, running the same tests he'd run twice before, and finding, for the third time, nothing that explained what he was looking at.
