On the sixth day, Caerion summoned him.

Not to the Council chamber this time, and not in the formal way of the previous meeting. A member of the Oracle's staff arrived at the reading room mid-afternoon and relayed, through Miron, a request for Renji to attend a private meeting with the High Oracle at his convenience. The phrase at his convenience told him more than the rest of the message: it was a consultation, not a command performance. Caerion was adjusting the mode of their interaction.

He went.

Caerion's private office was smaller than the Council chamber and much more revealing. The Council chamber was a room designed for collective decision-making, which meant it was designed to obscure individual character behind collective authority. The private office was a room designed for one person's work, and it reflected the texture of that person's mind in ways that rooms used by many people could not.

The walls held books and records, organized with a specificity that told him Caerion either organized them himself or supervised their organization personally. The desk was positioned to face both the door and the window, which was both a security habit and a control habit. The window showed Veylwood, the luminescent forest, and the view had been maintained: no furniture, no plants, nothing obscuring the line of sight. Caerion wanted to see the forest from his desk. That was interesting.

There was a second chair. Caerion gestured to it. There was tea. Renji did not touch it.

Miron was there, which Renji noted. The meeting was going to be conducted in English, or enough of it. Caerion either spoke English and had chosen not to reveal this, or he did not and preferred the buffer of translation. Both were possible. He would note both.

Caerion said, through Miron: I understand your review of the Archive materials has been progressing.

He said: Yes. I have several preliminary observations.

Caerion said, still through Miron: I have been told you are thorough.

He said: I try to be.

There was a pause in which Caerion appeared to consider something. Then he said: I would like to offer you a more formal role in the preparation for the Blue Moon ceremony. Rather than simply reviewing the public Archive materials, I would like you to serve as official verification consultant to the Oracle's office. This would give you additional access, within limits, to the Oracle's own records.

Renji listened to this and thought about what it meant.

It meant one of several things. It meant Caerion had decided that whatever Renji found would be manageable, controllable, useful in some way that Caerion had mapped out. Or it meant Caerion had decided the risk of Renji having unsupervised access to the public Archive outweighed the risk of giving him supervised access to more. Or it meant something else, something Renji did not yet have enough information to identify.

He said: What limits?

Caerion smiled, briefly, the smile of a man who had expected the question. The limits would be specified in a formal document. Primarily: you would not have access to the restricted Archive without specific authorization. You would not share your findings with parties outside the Oracle's office without my approval. You would be present for the ceremony itself, in an observational capacity.

He said: I would like to see the formal document before I agree.

Caerion said: Of course.

He said: I have one condition to add.

Caerion's expression did not change, but his stillness changed quality in the way Renji had come to recognize: a man very carefully choosing not to react before he had enough information.

He said: If I find something wrong in the documentation, I need to be able to report it accurately, without modification.

Caerion was quiet for a moment. Then he said, through Miron: That is the purpose of a verification consultant, yes.

He said: I want that in the formal document.

Another pause. Caerion said: It will be included.

He had said yes before I specified the condition, Renji noted internally. He wanted my agreement before I asked what I would do if I found errors. He adjusted to include the condition, which means the condition is acceptable to him, which means he either believes I will find nothing that can't be managed, or he has a plan for managing whatever I find. Either way, he accepted it too easily.

He said: I'd also like access to the correspondence records of the Archive administration going back three hundred years.

This was the specific request he had been building toward. He had built toward it slowly enough that it would appear to be one item in a list rather than the primary goal.

Caerion said, through Miron, after a pause that was slightly longer than the previous ones: That may be arranged, subject to review by the Archive Keeper.

He said: That's acceptable.

The formal document arrived the following morning. He read it four times. It said what had been agreed and nothing else, which was more than he had expected. He signed it. He filed a copy in his document bag.

He went back to the reading room.

Lysera was there. She looked up when he came in. He sat down across from her.

He said: I've been appointed official verification consultant to the Oracle's office.

She said, without visible surprise: I know. I was informed this morning.

He said: The correspondence records from the last three hundred years are being made available to me, subject to your review.

She looked at him.

He said: I requested them.

She said: I know that too.

He said: What's in them?

She looked at her work for a moment. Then she said: Records of administrative decisions. Correspondence between the Oracle's office and the Archive. Records of document reclassifications, transfers, additions, and, she paused, removals.

He said: Removals.

She said: Periodically, over any long institutional history, documents are removed from active circulation. Damaged, redundant, superseded.

He said: Or inconvenient.

She said: Yes. Or that.

He took out his notebook. He opened it to the page where he had written Day 1 and the very first list and underneath that the note about the coffee machine.

He turned to a fresh page.

He wrote at the top: The Verdant Prophecy — Verification Project. Day 6.

He wrote: Known discrepancies to date, and began the list.

Lysera watched him write. She had the quality, when she watched him work, of someone who was deciding something.

He said, without looking up: What are you deciding?

She said: How much I trust your judgment.

He said: That's a reasonable thing to be deciding.

She said: You are very difficult to read.

He said: Most people say that.

She said: Does it bother you?

He said: Not particularly. Being easy to read would make this job harder.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: The correspondence records. I will pull them for you this afternoon.

He said: Thank you.

She said: I have conditions.

He looked up at that. She was looking at him with the direct, leveled quality of her attention when she had decided to say something she had been not saying.

She said: If you find something in those records that changes what you understand about the Prophecy, you tell me first. Before anyone else. Before Caerion.

He said: Why?

She said: Because I have been in this Archive for sixty years and I have been keeping these records for sixty years and I have been not asking certain questions for sixty years, and if those questions have answers, I have the right to know them before they are used by someone who does not understand what they mean for this place.

He looked at her. He looked at the very careful quality of her stillness, the stillness of someone who had just said more than they had intended and was waiting to find out what would happen.

He said: Agreed.

She said: I will also need you to agree to one other condition.

He said: What is it?

She said: Whatever you find, you approach it as a question, not a conclusion, until we have both reviewed the evidence. You are very good at finding discrepancies. You are, perhaps, less experienced with the specific kind of institution this is. I have context that you don't. I would like to provide it before you draw conclusions.

He thought about this. He said: That's reasonable.

She said: Do you agree?

He said: Yes. I agree.

She nodded, once, with the precision she brought to all her physical expressions, and went to the rear of the reading room to pull the first set of correspondence records.

He turned back to his notebook.

He added to the bottom of his list, in smaller writing than the rest: working with Lysera Vey under conditions of mutual disclosure and shared review. This changes the scope of the project. Previously: finding discrepancies and documenting them. Now: finding discrepancies and understanding what they mean, in context, for a place and a people she has spent sixty years inside and I have spent six days inside.

He paused.

He wrote: this is, objectively, a better methodology. Document it as such.

The correspondence records arrived in a stack that was, by volume, approximately four times the size of everything he had reviewed so far.

He opened the first file.

He got to work.

The formal request went to the High Oracle's office on the morning of the seventh day. The denial came back that afternoon. The denial was polite, professional, and cited the fragility of the materials in the locked cabinet and the ongoing conservation work being conducted on the oldest Archive sections.

There was no ongoing conservation work. He had verified this by asking Miron, who had asked the Archive's assistant keeper, who had reported that no conservation work was currently scheduled.

He wrote: denial received. Reason given: conservation work. Reason verified: not currently occurring. This is the third false documentation record I have identified in direct connection with restricted materials in the Archive: the restoration note for the oldest Prophecy copy, the Archive keeper's letter, and now this denial. A pattern of false documentation around a specific category of materials is not coincidence. It is a policy.

Lysera sat across from him and read his note when he slid it across the table. She read it twice. She slid it back.

She said: I knew the denial would come. I did not expect the specific lie.

He said: It's an old lie. The same category as the restoration note. Someone who knows the institution very well reached for the same kind of cover they've reached for before.

She said: Caerion has been High Oracle for two hundred years.

He said: I know.

She said: He was High Oracle three hundred years ago when the oldest copy was removed for eleven months.

He said: I know that too.

She said, and it was the most direct statement she had made to him yet, stated in the flat tone of someone who has been walking around a thing for a very long time and has decided to walk directly into it: He knows what's in the cabinet. He knew what was in it when he denied your request. He knew what was in it when he denied my mother's request. He has always known.

He said: Yes.

She said: And he has continued to run the Prophecy, and the ceremony, and the Archive, for two hundred years, knowing what's in the cabinet.

He said: That's what the evidence suggests.

She was quiet for a long time. He let the quiet be. He had learned, in his time working with her, that her silences were working silences. She was not absent from them. She was thinking, and the thinking mattered, and interrupting it was not useful.

After a while she said: I want to find the original.

He said: So do I.

She said: Not the cabinet. Not yet. The original of the Prophecy. What it said before it was whatever it is now.

He said: Do you have a theory about where it is?

She said: My mother did. She wrote it in her journal before she was removed. She believed the original was not a separate document. She believed it had never been transcribed independently. She believed it was embedded in the ceremony itself, in the binding that was performed when the Prophecy was first used as a structural element, and that the binding was anchored to the original text, not the modified one. Which meant the modified copies were what people read, but the original text was what the magic was actually running on.

He sat with this for a moment.

He said: If the magic is running on the original text, and the original text says something different from the copies, then the ceremony based on the copies is built on a false premise.

She said: Yes.

He said: And the magic is still working. Veylwood is still sustained. Which means either the magic doesn't care about the difference between the original and the copies, or the magic is not being sustained by the ceremony based on the copies but by something else.

She said: My mother believed the latter. She believed the ceremony based on the copies was supplementing a binding that was already in place. Not maintaining it. Not replacing it. Supplementing it. And that the original binding, the real one, had a different referent. A different document.

He wrote this down very carefully.

He wrote: if the original binding was based on a different document, the document still exists somewhere in the structure of the magic. It was used. It left a trace. The trace is in the ceremony, in the enchantments, in the history of the forest. It can be found.

He looked at what he had written.

He said: I need access to the records of the original binding ceremony.

She said: They are in the restricted archive.

He said: I know. He looked at her. Can you tell me what your mother found? About where the original document might physically be?

She said: She found a reference. In the oldest correspondence records, in a letter that predated the period of modification by two hundred years. A letter that described the Lunaryth Sword as the vessel of the covenant. Not the symbol of it. The vessel.

He thought about the plinth and the channels. He thought about the mechanism he had identified in the sword's base. He thought about where you would put something if you wanted it to be both accessible and secure, available for the ceremony but hidden from anyone who wasn't looking for it.

He said: The sword doesn't just receive the blood. It holds something.

She looked at him with the quality of someone who has had a theory for thirty years and is hearing it confirmed from outside for the first time.

She said: That is what my mother believed.

He said: We need to get closer to the sword.

She said: Yes.

He said: That is going to be very complicated.

She said: Yes. She picked up her pen. We should start planning.

The final thing he did on the seventh day, before he went to sleep, was write a letter.

Not to anyone in Elyndor. He wrote it to himself, the way he sometimes wrote things when he needed to be clear about what he was committing to, which was a practice he had developed after the first time he had submitted a report and watched it disappear into institutional silence. Writing it down as a commitment to himself made the commitment real in a way that just deciding it did not.

He wrote: I am going to find what was changed in the Verdant Prophecy, when, and by whose decision. I am going to establish, as far as the evidence allows, what the original document said. I am going to determine what the original was and where it is. I am going to document all of this in a form that is usable, verifiable, and complete, so that what I find cannot be denied on the basis of insufficient evidence.

I am doing this because it is what the evidence requires. Not because I have been asked to. Not because it will help me get home, though it may. Not because I have any authority here, because I don't. But because a document has been modified and the modification has been running as truth for three hundred years and the people living inside that truth deserve to know what it actually says.

He read this back. He added: I am also doing it because Lysera Vey's mother was right and it cost her everything and someone should finish what she started.

He folded the letter and put it in his document bag.

He went to sleep.

In the morning, he and Lysera Vey began the work in earnest.

He lay in the dark and thought about what tomorrow would bring.

More records. More discrepancies. More careful comparison between what things said and what things were. This was the work. It had always been the work, in every office at every company at every stage of his career, and it was the work here too, in a kingdom made of trees and old magic, in a room with a vaulted ceiling and a lamp that burned without consuming anything.

He was good at the work.

He was going to need to be.

The morning came with gray light through the narrow window, and the sound of Veylwood waking in whatever way a forest of that age woke, and the smell of stone and green that he was beginning to associate with this place so specifically that he thought he would probably recognize it from across a room, years from now, if he ever encountered it again.

He got up.

He got to work.