Page 365 of The Academy of Blood & Shadow

At the bottom, Mistress Marr lights three oil lamps. No magical flame. "Old preservation wards don't tolerate modern enchantments well."

Nyra looks around. Shelves. Boxes. Ledgers.

Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Some bound in leather. Some tied with string. Some sitting inside protective cases. My optimism dies. Cassian looks around.

"We'll be here until graduation."

Mistress Marr locks the stair door behind us. "Not if you know what you're looking for."

Nyra smiles. "We do."

I envy her confidence.

We divide. Nyra takes civic ledgers. Cassian gets witness testimony. Caelen handles census and missing-person records. Rhyven takes regional correspondence. I get settlement reports. Nobody argues. We work.

The first hour gives us nothing. Crop failures. Flooding. Boundary disputes. A fascinating amount of livestock theft. One mayor appears to have spent eleven consecutive years complaining about a bridge.

I begin to understand why nobody purged these records. Death would be faster.

Cassian breaks the silence. "I found a murder."

Caelen doesn't look up. "Relevant?"

"No."

"Then congratulations."

"Thank you."

Another half hour. Nothing. Then Nyra says: "Here."

Every head lifts. Not loudly. Just enough. We gather around her table. She has a ledger open. Old. Very old. The page is yellowed. Ink faded. At the top:

WESTERN DISTRICT CIVIC ACCOUNTS. The date sits more than a century before the Silent War. Nyra points toward a paragraph. "Read." I do. The language is old. Formal. But understandable. A farming settlement reports livestock refusing to cross a section of field. Workers complain of headaches. Three manifestations fail temporarily. A well freezes in summer. Birds abandon nearby trees. No deaths. No attack. Just— wrongness.

"That sounds familiar." Caelen says.

"Depletion." I answer.