The candle burned down a quarter of its length.
The courtyard outside had gone quiet, the sounds of the day's work replaced by distant voices, occasional laughter, the clang of a door somewhere. Northwatch settling into its evening rhythms.
No one came.
Verity closed Varresh's journal and sat back in the too-large chair, feet swinging slightly above the floor.
The warchief was busy. Obviously. He was a warchief. He had an entire clan to manage, border tensions to monitor, decisions to make that were considerably more important than receiving one human archivist.
She should stay here. Wait properly. Demonstrate the kind of patience that would make a good impression.
Verity lasted another ten minutes.
Then she stood, took the candle, and went to find the stairs Grukash had mentioned.
The door at the back of the building was unlocked. It opened onto a narrow landing, and beyond it, stairs descended into darkness.
Verity held the candle higher. The flame flickered in a draft rising from below, carrying the unmistakable smell of old paper and stone. She caught her breath. She had spent her life around books. She knew that smell the way other people knew the smell of home.
The stairs were carved directly into the mountain, each step worn smooth in the center from generations of feet. Orc feet, considerably larger than hers. She picked her way down carefully, one hand trailing along the wall for balance, the candle casting jumping shadows ahead of her.
Twenty steps. Thirty. The temperature dropped steadily, the air growing sharp and dry. Good for preservation. Low humidity. Stable temperature. Whatever was down here had been stored properly, even if no one had been tending it.
The stairs ended in a corridor. Verity paused, letting her eyes adjust to the deeper darkness beyond her small circle of candlelight. Heavy wooden doors lined both sides of the passage, each one marked with symbols she didn't recognize. Some kind of organizational system. Categories, perhaps. Or dates.
She chose the nearest door and pushed.
It swung open more easily than she expected, hinges well-oiled despite the years of disuse. Beyond it—
Verity stopped breathing.
Shelves. Floor to ceiling, carved into the living rock, and every shelf filled. Scrolls in clay tubes. Bound volumes with cracked leather spines. Stacks of loose pages tied with cord. Wooden boxes that probably held correspondence. Stone tablets propped against the far wall, their surfaces covered in carved text.
She had pictured Varresh's collection. One orc, one working life, whatever a single archivist could gather and preserve. Butthis was not one life's work. This was generations. Centuries, possibly. A collection that dwarfed anything she had imagined, anything the Archive's sparse records had suggested.
She moved deeper into the room, candle held high, her free hand hovering just above the nearest shelf without quite touching.
But oh, she wanted to touch. She wanted to pull down every scroll and crack open every binding and spread the contents across that massive desk upstairs and not emerge for a month.
Verity blinked hard, her eyes stinging. She had not known Varresh. Would never know her. But she knew this—the careful hand, the evidence of long attention, the years of quiet work that most people never saw or valued.
She pulled out her journal and began taking notes, moving from shelf to shelf with the candle.
Northeast corner: bound volumes, correspondence tubes, loose document rolls—mixed. No apparent separation by format or medium. Dates on visible spines suggest a 200-year range minimum but do not appear to run in sequence. East wall: same. Organizational system unclear—by sender? By region? Need closer examination. South wall—
A sound from the corridor.
Verity froze, quill suspended over the page.
Footsteps. Heavy ones, echoing off the stone walls. The sound grew closer, and with it came the faint orange glow of another light source. A torch, she thought, or perhaps a lantern. Larger than her single candle.
She should announce herself. That would be the sensible thing.Hello, I am the human archivist, I was waiting for a summons that did not come, I found the stairs, I am not stealing anything, please do not kill me.
The footsteps stopped.
Verity turned toward the doorway, her candle flame guttering in the sudden displacement of air, and looked up.
And up.
