The Princess of Leaves arrived in the Archive without announcement, which told him something about the nature of her relationship with the Archive's administrative norms.
He was at the reading table, working through the classification revision list, when the door opened and someone came in who was not Lysera and was not Miron. She was young, by the standard of the people around her, with the quality of energy that was either youth or the kind of temperament that preserved youth's restlessness past its chronological expiration. She wore the formal robes of the palace but had done something to them that made them look slightly less formal without being obviously changed.
He said: Can I help you?
She said, in good English, the English of someone who had learned it for pleasure rather than professional necessity: Are you the auditor?
He said: Yes.
She said: Good. She came to the reading table and sat down across from him with the ease of someone who sat wherever she chose. I am Elirane.
He said: I know who you are.
She said: You do not seem particularly impressed.
He said: Should I be?
She considered this. She said: Most people are. I find it either refreshing or concerning when someone is not, depending on why they are not.
He said: I am not unimpressed. I just do not lead with it. He went back to his notes. Why are you here?
She said: Because you are the first person in the palace who has spoken to me like that in a very long time. And also because I wanted to see the person who asked whether the sacred sword had a certificate of provenance.
He said: That was a reasonable question.
She said: It was a remarkable question. Reasonable and remarkable are not the same thing. A question can be both.
He set down his pen. He said: What do you actually want?
She looked at him. Her expression had the quality of someone who had been performing, slightly, since they entered the room, and had now decided to stop. She said: I want to know what you have found. What is actually wrong with the Prophecy.
He said: Why?
She said: Because the Prophecy tells me I am going to be given to a hero as a prize for killing a dragon. And I would like to know whether that is what is written in the original text, or whether it is another piece of the same thing you have been finding everywhere else.
He said: That is a specific question.
She said: I have had a long time to think about which question I most wanted answered.
He said: How old are you?
She said: Ninety-six. She looked at him. I know that sounds old to you. By my reckoning it is not particularly old. But it is old enough to have spent thirty years understanding clearly that my primary civic function is to be a reward in a narrative I did not write and was not consulted about. And I would like to know if that is what the original text says or if it is something that was added along with the other additions.
He said: I do not know yet. I have not found the original.
She said: But you think there is one.
He said: Yes.
She said: And it says something different.
He said: That is what the evidence suggests.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: I came to the Archive sometimes when I was young. One of my tutors used to bring me here for lessons in Elyndor's history. There was a room in the east wing used for tutorial sessions. One day, when I was perhaps twelve years old by human reckoning, I got separated from the tutorial group and wandered into the part of the Archive near the shrine for the Lunaryth Sword.
He said: The ceremonial section.
She said: Yes. I found a door in the base of the altar platform. I was curious. I tried to open it, and it opened, and I looked inside for a few seconds before my tutor found me and pulled me out. He wanted to know what I had seen. I told him there was a small chamber with stone shelves and on one of the shelves there was a box. He went very pale and took me immediately back to the main palace and told me I was not to return to that part of the Archive without permission. I was never given permission.
He said: You never told anyone else.
She said: Who would I have told? My tutors reported to the palace administration. The palace administration reported to the High Oracle. If that room was something the High Oracle wanted kept quiet, telling anyone would have accomplished nothing except alerting them that I had seen it.
He said: You were twelve.
She said: I was twelve and I had already learned, by watching my mother and my aunts, that the information you have about the people with power over you is something you keep carefully until you understand what to do with it.
He looked at her. He said: What was in the box?
She said: I do not know. I was twelve. I did not open it. I just saw it on the shelf, in the chamber, in the few seconds before I was removed.
He said: But you remember it.
She said: I remember everything about that day. The room smelled of stone and old paper. There were three shelves. The box on the middle shelf had a seal on it. I did not recognize the seal at the time. She paused, then said carefully: I would recognize it now. It was not an Elyndor seal. It was different. Older. Simpler.
He said: What did it look like?
She described it. He wrote it down. He looked at what he had written.
He said: I need to see that chamber.
She said: The altar platform is in the ceremonial shrine. Access is restricted to the ceremonial staff and to the Oracle's office.
He said: I know.
She said: I could provide a reason to visit the shrine. In my capacity as Princess of Leaves, I have rights to certain ceremonial spaces.
He said: Why would you do that?
She said, with something very direct in her voice, the directness of someone saying a thing they have been thinking for a long time: Because if the Prophecy does not require me to be given to a hero as a prize, I would like to know that. And if it does, I would like to know that too. Either way I would like to know what it actually says, rather than what everyone has been telling me it says for thirty years.
He said: That is a reasonable position.
She said: It is also a remarkable one, in this kingdom.
He said: Yes. He paused. I will let you know when I need access to the shrine.
She stood. She said: You are very careful about what you agree to.
He said: I try to be precise about the scope of agreements. It saves confusion later.
She said: That is either a professional habit or a character trait.
He said: Both.
She left with the same ease with which she had arrived, without ceremony, without the weight of significance that most people seemed to carry in and out of rooms in Elyndor. He sat with what she had told him.
He wrote: the box in the chamber. The seal she described is not an Elyndor seal. It is consistent with the description Miron gave me of Drakonir script characters. If the original Veylwood Covenant is the foundational document, and if it was a bilateral agreement, both parties would have sealed it. One seal for each. The Elyndor seal would be recognized. The Drakonir seal would not. That is why she did not recognize it at twelve. That is why no one has thought to ask about it. The document they are all looking for is there. It has been there. In the altar, in the chamber, waiting for someone who knew to look for it.
He thought about the box on the middle shelf. He thought about the twelve-year-old who had seen it and had been immediately removed and had spent eighty-four years keeping that memory carefully, not knowing what to do with it, until the right moment to do something with it arrived.
He thought: every piece of this has been preserved by someone who knew it mattered and did not yet have the means to act on it. Miron's eleven years of linguistic research. Lysera's sixty years in the Archive. Elirane's eighty-four years of a childhood memory held in careful trust. The information had been waiting for someone to put it together. He was putting it together.
He thought, after Elirane left, about the specific shape of the evidence they had assembled.
They had three lines: the documentary line, which he had built over eighteen days in the Archive; the linguistic line, which Miron had built over eleven years; and now the testimonial line, which Elirane had provided without realizing it was exactly what was needed to connect the first two to the physical object that would complete the case.
The documentary line said: the Prophecy has been modified. It says when and how and in what direction.
The linguistic line said: the modification changed the language used to describe a people, erasing their nature as a political entity and replacing it with a classification as a monster. It says what the original language meant and when the meaning was changed.
The testimonial line said: the original document exists, physically, in a specific location, in a sealed container with a seal that is not Elyndor's, in a chamber beneath the altar platform of the Lunaryth Sword's shrine.
Together they pointed at the same thing from three different directions.
Three lines pointing at the same thing, from three different starting points, was not coincidence. It was the structure of a fact.
He had spent his career building these structures. He knew what they felt like when they were complete and what they felt like when they were close to complete. This one was close. One more element: the document itself, in hand, legible, confirming what the structure predicted it would say.
He thought about the ceremony that was now ten days away. He thought about the timeline.
Ten days to get the document. To read it. To understand it well enough to know what it actually said and how it differed from what the Prophecy said. To assemble the comparison in a form that was presentable. To determine how to present it, to whom, and under what conditions.
Ten days was enough. He had done more in less time. The question was not the time but the access. The access depended on Elirane. Elirane had indicated she was willing to help. He would follow up with her tomorrow, with Lysera present this time.
He thought about Lysera's comment about Elirane. She and I have worked in adjacent spaces for many years. I have seen what the role costs her. She had said this with a kind of regret that was not about herself but about the relationship, about the sixty years of working adjacent to someone and speaking rarely and formally, about the conversations that had not happened because the institutional structure had not made them easy.
He thought: when this is over, those conversations can happen. That is one of the things that happens when a structure is corrected. The people inside it get to be different people, or at least get the option of being different people, because the structure that was constraining them in specific ways is no longer constraining them in those ways.
He was not sentimental about this in the abstract. He had corrected structures before and watched the people inside them be mostly the same people afterward, because most people were mostly the same regardless of the structures around them. The structures changed what was possible, not what was necessary.
But occasionally, when a structure had been constraining specific people in specific ways for a long time, removing the constraint produced something worth seeing. He thought that might be the case here.
He thought about Lysera and Elirane, and about what it might look like for both of them to have access to conversations that the current structure made either impossible or unnecessarily formal. He thought about Miron, who had been waiting eleven years for someone to listen to his research, and about what it would look like for his research to be acknowledged.
He thought: none of that is why I am doing this. I am doing this because the documents are wrong and the wrongness has consequences. But it would be a good result, alongside the necessary one.
He put his pen down. He went to sleep. He had work to do in the morning.
He thought, after Elirane left, about the specific quality of the information she had provided.
She had come to the Archive because she wanted to know what was wrong with the Prophecy. She had told him about the box because she had been waiting, for eighty-four years, for someone who would know what to do with the information. She had left with the understanding that he would contact her when he needed access to the shrine.
These were not the actions of a bystander. She had arrived with a specific piece of information that she had been holding for eight decades, and she had given it to the person she had assessed as most likely to use it correctly, and she had offered her assistance in accessing what was needed. This was the action of someone who had been a participant in this problem for much longer than she appeared to have been.
He thought: she has been waiting too. Not as long as Lysera. But in the same direction. The Prophecy had made her a symbol and she had been watching what being a symbol did to the people around her and the kingdom she lived in, and she had decided, at some point before today, that she was not going to remain purely a symbol when the moment came to be something else.
The moment had come. She had been ready for it.
He wrote: three people who have been waiting, for different lengths of time and in different ways, for something like this. Miron eleven years. Lysera sixty years. Elirane, in her own way, for decades. And me, eighteen days, which in this context is the shortest duration but which is also the one that brought the tools the others had been waiting for.
He thought: I did not choose this. I fell asleep at my desk and woke up here. But I think I was, in some sense that is not mystical but is about the specific shape of skills and situations, the right person for this moment. Not the only possible right person. But one of them.
He thought: I should stop philosophizing and plan the shrine visit. He picked up his pen and began making a list.
He followed up with Elirane the next morning, with Lysera present as he had promised.
The three of them sat in the small reading room off the main Archive corridor, and he explained what they needed: access to the altar platform in the ceremonial shrine, specifically to the hidden chamber at its base, specifically to the box on the middle shelf that Elirane had seen when she was twelve.
Elirane listened with the quality of attention of someone who had been thinking about this for eighty-four years and was finally getting to act on it. Lysera listened with the quality of attention of someone who was updating the picture she had been building for sixty years with new information from a source she had not previously known to consult.
Elirane said: I can arrange a ceremonial visit to the shrine. It is within my rights as Princess of Leaves. The visit will be noted in the ceremonial log, which the Oracle's office reviews.
Lysera said: We should assume Caerion will know about the visit.
Elirane said: Yes. But my ceremonial visits to the shrine are not unusual. I have visited three times in the last year alone. A fourth visit, for what will appear to be a routine devotional, will not necessarily raise questions.
Lysera said: The question is whether we can access the chamber without the access being obvious.
Elirane said: The chamber door is at the base of the altar platform. During a ceremonial visit, I would normally be alone in the shrine for a period of contemplation. The ceremonial staff withdraw. There is a window of approximately fifteen minutes.
Renji said: That is enough time, if we know what we are looking for and Miron is ready to translate.
Elirane said: I can arrange for the visit on the day after tomorrow.
Lysera said: That gives us two days to prepare.
Renji said: Yes. He looked at both of them. He said: Thank you. Both of you.
Elirane said, in the tone of someone who has been waiting a long time for something worth thanking someone for: Do not thank us yet. He said: No. But I intend to.
He wrote, after the planning meeting with Lysera and Elirane, a summary of what the shrine visit would need to accomplish.
First: locate the chamber in the altar platform base. Elirane knew where the door was. She had opened it at age twelve and had never forgotten the location.
Second: open the chamber. Whether the door was still unlocked or whether it had been secured in the eighty-four years since Elirane had found it open was unknown. He had made a note to bring appropriate tools, though he was uncertain what counted as appropriate tools for a door that might be magical in nature rather than mechanical.
Third: locate the box on the middle shelf. Elirane had described three shelves. The box was on the middle one. With the Drakonir seal.
Fourth: open the box. He had no information about whether the box itself was sealed or locked.
Fifth: read the document. This was Miron's role. He needed Miron in the shrine for the translation.
Sixth: document what the document said, in sufficient detail to be reproducible without needing the original document to be present for every subsequent reference to its content.
Seventh: restore the document to its location. He intended to restore it. The document was not something he had the right to remove permanently. He would need to return to it, or others would, but the first access needed to be a reading and documentation, not a removal.
Eighth: exit the shrine without alerting the ceremonial staff to what had happened.
This was a tighter operation than anything he had managed in his prior professional life. He was an auditor, not a covert operative. He had never planned a clandestine access to a secure location. He had, however, spent nine years finding things that people did not want found in places those people controlled, and the skills were not entirely different.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The Princess of Leaves arrived in the Archive without announcement, which told him something about the nature of her relationship with the Archive's administrative norms.
He was at the reading table, working through the classification revision list, when the door opened and someone came in who was not Lysera and was not Miron. She was young, by the standard of the people around her, with the quality of energy that was either youth or the kind of temperament that preserved youth's restlessness past its chronological expiration. She wore the formal robes of the palace but had done something to them that made them look slightly less formal without being obviously changed.
He said: Can I help you?
She said, in good English, the English of someone who had learned it for pleasure rather than professional necessity: Are you the auditor?
He said: Yes.
She said: Good. She came to the reading table and sat down across from him with the ease of someone who sat wherever she chose. I am Elirane.
He said: I know who you are.
She said: You do not seem particularly impressed.
He said: Should I be?
She considered this. She said: Most people are. I find it either refreshing or concerning when someone is not, depending on why they are not.
He said: I am not unimpressed. I just do not lead with it. He went back to his notes. Why are you here?
She said: Because you are the first person in the palace who has spoken to me like that in a very long time. And also because I wanted to see the person who asked whether the sacred sword had a certificate of provenance.
He said: That was a reasonable question.
She said: It was a remarkable question. Reasonable and remarkable are not the same thing. A question can be both.
He set down his pen. He said: What do you actually want?
She looked at him. Her expression had the quality of someone who had been performing, slightly, since they entered the room, and had now decided to stop. She said: I want to know what you have found. What is actually wrong with the Prophecy.
He said: Why?
She said: Because the Prophecy tells me I am going to be given to a hero as a prize for killing a dragon. And I would like to know whether that is what is written in the original text, or whether it is another piece of the same thing you have been finding everywhere else.
He said: That is a specific question.
She said: I have had a long time to think about which question I most wanted answered.
He said: How old are you?
She said: Ninety-six. She looked at him. I know that sounds old to you. By my reckoning it is not particularly old. But it is old enough to have spent thirty years understanding clearly that my primary civic function is to be a reward in a narrative I did not write and was not consulted about. And I would like to know if that is what the original text says or if it is something that was added along with the other additions.
He said: I do not know yet. I have not found the original.
She said: But you think there is one.
He said: Yes.
She said: And it says something different.
He said: That is what the evidence suggests.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: I came to the Archive sometimes when I was young. One of my tutors used to bring me here for lessons in Elyndor's history. There was a room in the east wing used for tutorial sessions. One day, when I was perhaps twelve years old by human reckoning, I got separated from the tutorial group and wandered into the part of the Archive near the shrine for the Lunaryth Sword.
He said: The ceremonial section.
She said: Yes. I found a door in the base of the altar platform. I was curious. I tried to open it, and it opened, and I looked inside for a few seconds before my tutor found me and pulled me out. He wanted to know what I had seen. I told him there was a small chamber with stone shelves and on one of the shelves there was a box. He went very pale and took me immediately back to the main palace and told me I was not to return to that part of the Archive without permission. I was never given permission.
He said: You never told anyone else.
She said: Who would I have told? My tutors reported to the palace administration. The palace administration reported to the High Oracle. If that room was something the High Oracle wanted kept quiet, telling anyone would have accomplished nothing except alerting them that I had seen it.
He said: You were twelve.
She said: I was twelve and I had already learned, by watching my mother and my aunts, that the information you have about the people with power over you is something you keep carefully until you understand what to do with it.
He looked at her. He said: What was in the box?
She said: I do not know. I was twelve. I did not open it. I just saw it on the shelf, in the chamber, in the few seconds before I was removed.
He said: But you remember it.
She said: I remember everything about that day. The room smelled of stone and old paper. There were three shelves. The box on the middle shelf had a seal on it. I did not recognize the seal at the time. She paused, then said carefully: I would recognize it now. It was not an Elyndor seal. It was different. Older. Simpler.
He said: What did it look like?
She described it. He wrote it down. He looked at what he had written.
He said: I need to see that chamber.
She said: The altar platform is in the ceremonial shrine. Access is restricted to the ceremonial staff and to the Oracle's office.
He said: I know.
She said: I could provide a reason to visit the shrine. In my capacity as Princess of Leaves, I have rights to certain ceremonial spaces.
He said: Why would you do that?
She said, with something very direct in her voice, the directness of someone saying a thing they have been thinking for a long time: Because if the Prophecy does not require me to be given to a hero as a prize, I would like to know that. And if it does, I would like to know that too. Either way I would like to know what it actually says, rather than what everyone has been telling me it says for thirty years.
He said: That is a reasonable position.
She said: It is also a remarkable one, in this kingdom.
He said: Yes. He paused. I will let you know when I need access to the shrine.
She stood. She said: You are very careful about what you agree to.
He said: I try to be precise about the scope of agreements. It saves confusion later.
She said: That is either a professional habit or a character trait.
He said: Both.
She left with the same ease with which she had arrived, without ceremony, without the weight of significance that most people seemed to carry in and out of rooms in Elyndor. He sat with what she had told him.
He wrote: the box in the chamber. The seal she described is not an Elyndor seal. It is consistent with the description Miron gave me of Drakonir script characters. If the original Veylwood Covenant is the foundational document, and if it was a bilateral agreement, both parties would have sealed it. One seal for each. The Elyndor seal would be recognized. The Drakonir seal would not. That is why she did not recognize it at twelve. That is why no one has thought to ask about it. The document they are all looking for is there. It has been there. In the altar, in the chamber, waiting for someone who knew to look for it.
He thought about the box on the middle shelf. He thought about the twelve-year-old who had seen it and had been immediately removed and had spent eighty-four years keeping that memory carefully, not knowing what to do with it, until the right moment to do something with it arrived.
He thought: every piece of this has been preserved by someone who knew it mattered and did not yet have the means to act on it. Miron's eleven years of linguistic research. Lysera's sixty years in the Archive. Elirane's eighty-four years of a childhood memory held in careful trust. The information had been waiting for someone to put it together. He was putting it together.
He thought, after Elirane left, about the specific shape of the evidence they had assembled.
They had three lines: the documentary line, which he had built over eighteen days in the Archive; the linguistic line, which Miron had built over eleven years; and now the testimonial line, which Elirane had provided without realizing it was exactly what was needed to connect the first two to the physical object that would complete the case.
The documentary line said: the Prophecy has been modified. It says when and how and in what direction.
The linguistic line said: the modification changed the language used to describe a people, erasing their nature as a political entity and replacing it with a classification as a monster. It says what the original language meant and when the meaning was changed.
The testimonial line said: the original document exists, physically, in a specific location, in a sealed container with a seal that is not Elyndor's, in a chamber beneath the altar platform of the Lunaryth Sword's shrine.
Together they pointed at the same thing from three different directions.
Three lines pointing at the same thing, from three different starting points, was not coincidence. It was the structure of a fact.
He had spent his career building these structures. He knew what they felt like when they were complete and what they felt like when they were close to complete. This one was close. One more element: the document itself, in hand, legible, confirming what the structure predicted it would say.
He thought about the ceremony that was now ten days away. He thought about the timeline.
Ten days to get the document. To read it. To understand it well enough to know what it actually said and how it differed from what the Prophecy said. To assemble the comparison in a form that was presentable. To determine how to present it, to whom, and under what conditions.
Ten days was enough. He had done more in less time. The question was not the time but the access. The access depended on Elirane. Elirane had indicated she was willing to help. He would follow up with her tomorrow, with Lysera present this time.
He thought about Lysera's comment about Elirane. She and I have worked in adjacent spaces for many years. I have seen what the role costs her. She had said this with a kind of regret that was not about herself but about the relationship, about the sixty years of working adjacent to someone and speaking rarely and formally, about the conversations that had not happened because the institutional structure had not made them easy.
He thought: when this is over, those conversations can happen. That is one of the things that happens when a structure is corrected. The people inside it get to be different people, or at least get the option of being different people, because the structure that was constraining them in specific ways is no longer constraining them in those ways.
He was not sentimental about this in the abstract. He had corrected structures before and watched the people inside them be mostly the same people afterward, because most people were mostly the same regardless of the structures around them. The structures changed what was possible, not what was necessary.
But occasionally, when a structure had been constraining specific people in specific ways for a long time, removing the constraint produced something worth seeing. He thought that might be the case here.
He thought about Lysera and Elirane, and about what it might look like for both of them to have access to conversations that the current structure made either impossible or unnecessarily formal. He thought about Miron, who had been waiting eleven years for someone to listen to his research, and about what it would look like for his research to be acknowledged.
He thought: none of that is why I am doing this. I am doing this because the documents are wrong and the wrongness has consequences. But it would be a good result, alongside the necessary one.
He put his pen down. He went to sleep. He had work to do in the morning.
He thought, after Elirane left, about the specific quality of the information she had provided.
She had come to the Archive because she wanted to know what was wrong with the Prophecy. She had told him about the box because she had been waiting, for eighty-four years, for someone who would know what to do with the information. She had left with the understanding that he would contact her when he needed access to the shrine.
These were not the actions of a bystander. She had arrived with a specific piece of information that she had been holding for eight decades, and she had given it to the person she had assessed as most likely to use it correctly, and she had offered her assistance in accessing what was needed. This was the action of someone who had been a participant in this problem for much longer than she appeared to have been.
He thought: she has been waiting too. Not as long as Lysera. But in the same direction. The Prophecy had made her a symbol and she had been watching what being a symbol did to the people around her and the kingdom she lived in, and she had decided, at some point before today, that she was not going to remain purely a symbol when the moment came to be something else.
The moment had come. She had been ready for it.
He wrote: three people who have been waiting, for different lengths of time and in different ways, for something like this. Miron eleven years. Lysera sixty years. Elirane, in her own way, for decades. And me, eighteen days, which in this context is the shortest duration but which is also the one that brought the tools the others had been waiting for.
He thought: I did not choose this. I fell asleep at my desk and woke up here. But I think I was, in some sense that is not mystical but is about the specific shape of skills and situations, the right person for this moment. Not the only possible right person. But one of them.
He thought: I should stop philosophizing and plan the shrine visit. He picked up his pen and began making a list.
He followed up with Elirane the next morning, with Lysera present as he had promised.
The three of them sat in the small reading room off the main Archive corridor, and he explained what they needed: access to the altar platform in the ceremonial shrine, specifically to the hidden chamber at its base, specifically to the box on the middle shelf that Elirane had seen when she was twelve.
Elirane listened with the quality of attention of someone who had been thinking about this for eighty-four years and was finally getting to act on it. Lysera listened with the quality of attention of someone who was updating the picture she had been building for sixty years with new information from a source she had not previously known to consult.
Elirane said: I can arrange a ceremonial visit to the shrine. It is within my rights as Princess of Leaves. The visit will be noted in the ceremonial log, which the Oracle's office reviews.
Lysera said: We should assume Caerion will know about the visit.
Elirane said: Yes. But my ceremonial visits to the shrine are not unusual. I have visited three times in the last year alone. A fourth visit, for what will appear to be a routine devotional, will not necessarily raise questions.
Lysera said: The question is whether we can access the chamber without the access being obvious.
Elirane said: The chamber door is at the base of the altar platform. During a ceremonial visit, I would normally be alone in the shrine for a period of contemplation. The ceremonial staff withdraw. There is a window of approximately fifteen minutes.
Renji said: That is enough time, if we know what we are looking for and Miron is ready to translate.
Elirane said: I can arrange for the visit on the day after tomorrow.
Lysera said: That gives us two days to prepare.
Renji said: Yes. He looked at both of them. He said: Thank you. Both of you.
Elirane said, in the tone of someone who has been waiting a long time for something worth thanking someone for: Do not thank us yet. He said: No. But I intend to.
He wrote, after the planning meeting with Lysera and Elirane, a summary of what the shrine visit would need to accomplish.
First: locate the chamber in the altar platform base. Elirane knew where the door was. She had opened it at age twelve and had never forgotten the location.
Second: open the chamber. Whether the door was still unlocked or whether it had been secured in the eighty-four years since Elirane had found it open was unknown. He had made a note to bring appropriate tools, though he was uncertain what counted as appropriate tools for a door that might be magical in nature rather than mechanical.
Third: locate the box on the middle shelf. Elirane had described three shelves. The box was on the middle one. With the Drakonir seal.
Fourth: open the box. He had no information about whether the box itself was sealed or locked.
Fifth: read the document. This was Miron's role. He needed Miron in the shrine for the translation.
Sixth: document what the document said, in sufficient detail to be reproducible without needing the original document to be present for every subsequent reference to its content.
Seventh: restore the document to its location. He intended to restore it. The document was not something he had the right to remove permanently. He would need to return to it, or others would, but the first access needed to be a reading and documentation, not a removal.
Eighth: exit the shrine without alerting the ceremonial staff to what had happened.
This was a tighter operation than anything he had managed in his prior professional life. He was an auditor, not a covert operative. He had never planned a clandestine access to a secure location. He had, however, spent nine years finding things that people did not want found in places those people controlled, and the skills were not entirely different.
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