He had known, in theory, that the magic was real.
He had known this since the second day in Elyndor, when Miron had mentioned it in passing, when Lysera had referenced it in her explanation of the Prophecy's structural role. He had filed it as relevant context and continued his audit work, which was about documentation rather than magic, about what was written rather than what the writing did.
He understood the relationship between the two, in the abstract. Text that functioned as a binding, text that produced a legal or administrative reality simply by existing and being correctly maintained. This was not so different from what contracts did, or constitutions, or articles of incorporation: they made things real by writing them correctly. The mechanism was more literal in Elyndor, more direct, less mediated by institutional enforcement and more mediated by something he had no prior framework for. But the principle was similar.
What he had not fully internalized, until the seventeenth day in Elyndor, was the implication.
Miron sat across from him in the small reading room off the main Archive corridor, with notes from his eleven years of linguistic research, and explained the implication carefully.
He said: The binding enchantments on Veylwood require, for their maintenance, the regular recitation of the text on which they were originally established. This is what the Blue Moon ceremony is. It is a maintenance ceremony. It keeps the enchantments current by re-presenting the foundational text to the magical structure that the text created.
Renji said: And the foundational text is the Prophecy.
Miron said: The foundational text is whatever was used in the original binding ceremony. If the original binding ceremony used the Veylwood Covenant, as I believe it did, then the foundational text is the Covenant. If the foundational text is the Covenant, then the enchantments were built around the Covenant's specific language. Around what the Covenant actually says.
He said: And the Blue Moon ceremony uses the Prophecy, which is a modified version of the Covenant.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: So the ceremony is presenting a modified version of the text to an enchantment structure that was built around the original.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: And the enchantments are still working.
Miron said: Yes.
He was quiet for a moment. He said: Why are they still working if the text being presented does not match the text the structure was built on?
Miron said: That is the question I have been unable to answer from the linguistic records alone. My hypothesis is that the enchantments are running on the original text, not on the ceremony. The ceremony supplements and maintains the enchantments, but it is not the source of the enchantments. The source is the original binding, performed once, with the original text. That binding is still active. The ceremony maintains the field, but the field's core is the original text, running continuously.
He said: So the ceremony is doing something different from what people think it is doing.
Miron said: The ceremony is reinforcing the edges of an enchantment whose core is something else. If you remove the ceremony, the edges would weaken. But the core would remain, because the core is the original binding and the original binding was done correctly.
He said: What text is the core running on?
Miron said, carefully: The Veylwood Covenant. The original. With all the language the Prophecy no longer contains.
He said: Language about the Drakonir.
Miron said: Language about the Drakonir as partners in the covenant. As co-signatories. As parties whose participation in the maintenance of Veylwood was part of the binding.
He said: The enchantments require both parties.
Miron said: That is what the original covenant language implies, yes. A binding covenant between two peoples, maintained jointly.
He said: And the ceremony as currently constructed only invokes one party.
Miron said: Yes. The ceremony invokes Elyndor's participation. It does not invoke the Drakonir's, because the Drakonir have been written out of the text. The ceremony is incomplete. It reinforces the edges of the enchantment but cannot fully maintain them, because the core requires joint participation and only one participant is showing up.
He said: The forest is getting weaker.
Miron said, quietly: Yes. Slowly. Over three hundred years. The decay is gradual enough that it has been attributed to natural variation, to weather, to the ordinary processes of an ancient ecosystem. But the records of the forest's state over the last three centuries, if you compare the earliest measurements to the current ones, show a consistent and gradual decline.
He said: A decline that began approximately three hundred years ago.
Miron said: Yes.
He sat with this for a moment.
He said: The thing the Prophecy says the hero needs to fix is a problem that the Prophecy itself created.
Miron said: Yes. That is what I believe.
He said: And the solution the Prophecy prescribes, killing the Black Dragon, which is the Drakonir people, would make the problem worse, not better. It would permanently remove the other party from the covenant, making joint maintenance of the enchantment impossible.
Miron said, with the expression of a man who has been sitting alone with this conclusion for eleven years: Yes. The Prophecy is a prescription that would destroy what it claims to save.
He looked at his notes. He looked at Miron. He said: This is the whole thing, is it not. This is why it matters. Not just that the document was falsified, but what the falsification does.
Miron said: The falsification removed one party from a bilateral covenant and converted that party into an enemy that the other party was tasked with eliminating. The elimination of the enemy would permanently break the covenant. The breaking of the covenant would leave the enchantments without the joint participation they require. The enchantments would fail. Veylwood would decay.
He said: And the person who modified the Prophecy must have known this.
Miron said, carefully: Must have known some of this. The modification was sophisticated enough that it cannot have been done in ignorance of what the Covenant said and what the enchantments required.
He said: What does someone gain from making the forest decay?
Miron said: From the decay itself, nothing obvious. But from being the person who controls the interpretation of why the forest is decaying, and what the solution to the decay is, and who is authorized to pursue that solution. From that, quite a lot.
He wrote: the modification was not an accident and it was not theological revisionism. It was a mechanism for creating a problem that only one person could identify, and then controlling the solution to that problem. The problem is real. The forest is declining. The solution that was engineered to follow from the problem would make the problem permanent. The person controlling this is doing so not because they want the forest to fail but because they want to be the person who saves it. On their terms. Through their mechanism. Forever.
He put down the pen.
He said: I need the original Covenant. The complete text. Before I can do anything else, I need to know exactly what it says.
Miron said: I know.
He said: I know where it is.
Miron looked at him.
He said: In the altar. In the shrine. In the box Elirane saw when she was twelve years old.
Miron was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: You are going to go get it.
Renji said: Yes.
Miron said: That is going to be very complicated.
Renji said: Yes.
Miron said, and he sounded, for the first time in Renji's experience of him, not nervous but something else, something that was adjacent to nervous but pointed forward rather than backward: Tell me what you need.
He sat with the implications of what Miron had told him for the rest of that afternoon and into the evening.
The Prophecy was a prescription that would destroy what it claimed to save. He had written this sentence and read it back and the sentence was accurate. It was also, he thought, the most complete description of the mechanism he had encountered: not just a falsification, not just a policy architecture built on that falsification, not just a three-hundred-year program of concealment. All of those things, and additionally: a prescription that would make the problem it claimed to address permanent if it were ever actually implemented.
The hero kills the Black Dragon. The Black Dragon is the Drakonir. The Drakonir are the other party to the Veylwood Covenant. The covenant requires both parties for the binding to be fully maintained. Eliminating the Drakonir eliminates the covenant's other party. The covenant, without both parties, can no longer function as originally designed. The enchantments, built on the covenant, begin to fail. The forest decays.
Thalion Orr, if he drew the Lunaryth Sword and went out to fulfill the Prophecy as written, would trigger this sequence. Not knowing that he was triggering it. Not knowing that the Prophecy he was fulfilling had been designed to produce this outcome.
He thought: this is a very long game. Three hundred years of setup for a specific, irreversible action. And the person who set it up has the patience of someone who has been managing this for three centuries and has no reason to expect to ever stop.
He thought: unless the action never happens. Unless someone, before the ceremony, establishes what the original Covenant says and what the Prophecy has done to it. Unless the comparison is made available in a context where it cannot be suppressed.
He thought: this is what we are doing. This is the timeline we are on.
He found Miron the next morning and said: I need to know something.
Miron said: Ask.
He said: The enchantments on Veylwood. You said they are running on the original text of the Covenant. Not on the ceremony. Not on the Prophecy. On the original binding.
Miron said: That is what I believe.
He said: If the original binding is restored, if the covenant is publicly acknowledged and both parties affirm it, would that stabilize the enchantments?
Miron said: That is the hypothesis my research points toward. The enchantments are declining because the maintenance ceremony is incomplete. If the ceremony were made complete, including both parties, the decline should stop.
He said: And if the covenant were publicly established as the foundational document, replacing the Prophecy?
Miron said: Then the ceremony could be redesigned around the covenant. Which would include both parties. Which would make it complete.
He said: Could the redesign happen in ten days?
Miron was quiet for a moment. He said: The ceremony is fixed in its form. Changing the form of a major ceremony is not something done in ten days.
He said: I am not asking about changing the form. I am asking about what happens if the foundational document is changed. If the covenant replaces the Prophecy as the acknowledged basis of the ceremony, even if the ceremony itself continues in its current form, does the ceremony become more effective?
Miron thought about this for a long time. Then he said: I do not know. My research suggests the enchantments are running on the original text regardless of the ceremony. If the covenant is publicly acknowledged, the ceremony might recognize both parties even in its current form, because the invocation of the foundational text would invoke the parties to that text.
He said: Might.
Miron said: I do not have certainty on this point. I have a hypothesis that seems well-supported but that I have not been able to test.
He said: If we establish the covenant as the foundational document during the ceremony, we might stabilize the enchantments.
Miron said: We might.
He said: And if we do not establish it, the ceremony proceeds as planned, with the incomplete invocation, and the enchantments continue to decline.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: And if the hero fulfills the Prophecy and eliminates the Drakonir.
Miron said, quietly: Then the enchantments fail. Not immediately. Over decades. But fail.
He wrote, that evening: the timeline is right. We have to do this before the ceremony. Not to prevent the ceremony but to change what the ceremony is built on. We need the document. We need to read it. We need to understand it. And then we need to present it in a way that makes the ceremony an acknowledgment of the covenant rather than an enactment of the Prophecy.
He wrote: I do not know yet how to do the last part. I am working on the first parts. The last part will become clearer when the first parts are complete.
He wrote: Caerion knows about the covenant. He has known for three hundred years. He has maintained the Prophecy because it serves a purpose that the covenant does not: it concentrates authority. A covenant requires two parties. A prophecy requires only one interpreter. He has been the interpreter.
He wrote: I need to understand what he will do when the covenant is produced. That is the unknown I cannot resolve from the current evidence. That is the thing I need to plan for.
He found Lysera the following morning and told her what Miron had said about the enchantments and the covenant and the Drakonir.
She listened with the quality of attention she brought to things that confirmed what she had suspected and added something new to the confirmation. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: My mother believed the original covenant named both parties. She believed the enchantments required both parties. She believed the ceremony as currently performed was incomplete.
He said: Miron's research confirms all of that.
She said: She died believing the forest would eventually fail because of what Caerion had done.
He said: She was right about the mechanism. The forest is declining.
She said: She did not know how to stop it.
He said: We might.
She looked at him.
He said: If the covenant is restored and acknowledged during the ceremony, even in the ceremony's current form, the invocation of the foundational document might invoke both parties to that document. Miron believes this is possible.
She said: Might.
He said: Yes. Might. It is not certain. But it is the best option we have in the time we have.
She said: And the Drakonir.
He said: We need to find them. We need to know if they are willing to participate.
She said: They are out there. Beyond the forest borders. I have seen the edge of their territory, once, years ago. She paused. I did not go close. I did not know, at that point, whether knowing more was safe.
He said: It is now.
She said: Yes. She picked up her pen. She set it down again. She said: My mother spent thirty years trying to fix this from inside the institution and was removed for trying. I have spent sixty years continuing what she started, more carefully. We have nine days.
He said: Yes.
She said: Then let us use them well.
He thought, after the conversation with Miron, about the specific practical problem of the Drakonir.
Everything he had established pointed to the Drakonir as the other party to the covenant. Miron's linguistic research confirmed it. The oldest texts Lysera had found confirmed it. The nature of the covenant itself, as described in the indirect references in the administrative records, confirmed it.
But the Drakonir had not been parties to any acknowledged process in Elyndor for three hundred years. They had been defined, by the modified Prophecy and by the administrative protocols built around it, as hostile entities to be opposed rather than as political actors to be engaged with. Three hundred years of that definition had produced three hundred years of a relationship that was not a relationship: not diplomacy, not trade, not correspondence, nothing that would tell him what the Drakonir thought about the covenant or whether they still considered themselves bound by it.
Miron believed they did. He believed this based on the persistence of the Drakonir script and language, which he had been tracking in the limited materials available to him, and on the nature of the covenant itself. A covenant was not something you simply stopped holding yourself to because the other party had stopped holding themselves to it. A covenant had moral weight that persisted beyond the immediate relationship.
He thought: this is Miron's belief about the Drakonir, not the Drakonir's expressed position. I cannot know the Drakonir's expressed position without talking to them.
And to talk to them, he needed to find them.
He wrote: finding the Drakonir is not optional. They are the other party to the covenant. A covenant cannot be presented as restored without the participation of both parties. I need them, or I need to know whether they are willing and what form their participation would take.
He wrote: I have eight days. Finding the Drakonir and establishing communication in eight days is possible if they are close and if they are willing to be found.
He wrote: I believe they are both. The forest borders are where they have been for three hundred years. They have not moved. They have been waiting. For what, I will find out when I talk to them.
He sat with the conversation with Miron for a long time after it ended, turning over the piece that still did not fit neatly into the picture he had assembled.
The enchantments were running on the original text, not the ceremony. The ceremony supplemented but did not replace the original binding. If the original binding required both parties, the binding was currently functioning with only one party actively sustaining it.
The question that Miron had not been able to answer was: were the Drakonir still sustaining their half of the binding, even passively, even from a distance, even without any formal acknowledgment that the covenant still existed.
This was not a question he could answer from the Archive. It was not a question the documents could answer. It was a question that required either talking to the Drakonir or finding some evidence of what they were doing with regard to the forest and its enchantments.
Lysera had mentioned seeing the edge of their territory once. He needed to know more. He needed to know whether they had maintained any of the old covenant practices, whether they had their own copy of the covenant text, whether they were aware that Elyndor had falsified the document and named them as enemies.
He could not get those answers from the Archive. He could get them from the border, if he could find a way to approach it without the Nightroot Guard treating his approach as a hostile incursion.
He thought: this is another thing that requires Elirane. Or Lysera. Someone with the standing to request a border approach without it being classified as military action.
He added this to the list of things to discuss at the next meeting. The list was getting long. The days were getting fewer. He continued making the list because making the list was the next correct step.
You've reached the end of this chapter
He had known, in theory, that the magic was real.
He had known this since the second day in Elyndor, when Miron had mentioned it in passing, when Lysera had referenced it in her explanation of the Prophecy's structural role. He had filed it as relevant context and continued his audit work, which was about documentation rather than magic, about what was written rather than what the writing did.
He understood the relationship between the two, in the abstract. Text that functioned as a binding, text that produced a legal or administrative reality simply by existing and being correctly maintained. This was not so different from what contracts did, or constitutions, or articles of incorporation: they made things real by writing them correctly. The mechanism was more literal in Elyndor, more direct, less mediated by institutional enforcement and more mediated by something he had no prior framework for. But the principle was similar.
What he had not fully internalized, until the seventeenth day in Elyndor, was the implication.
Miron sat across from him in the small reading room off the main Archive corridor, with notes from his eleven years of linguistic research, and explained the implication carefully.
He said: The binding enchantments on Veylwood require, for their maintenance, the regular recitation of the text on which they were originally established. This is what the Blue Moon ceremony is. It is a maintenance ceremony. It keeps the enchantments current by re-presenting the foundational text to the magical structure that the text created.
Renji said: And the foundational text is the Prophecy.
Miron said: The foundational text is whatever was used in the original binding ceremony. If the original binding ceremony used the Veylwood Covenant, as I believe it did, then the foundational text is the Covenant. If the foundational text is the Covenant, then the enchantments were built around the Covenant's specific language. Around what the Covenant actually says.
He said: And the Blue Moon ceremony uses the Prophecy, which is a modified version of the Covenant.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: So the ceremony is presenting a modified version of the text to an enchantment structure that was built around the original.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: And the enchantments are still working.
Miron said: Yes.
He was quiet for a moment. He said: Why are they still working if the text being presented does not match the text the structure was built on?
Miron said: That is the question I have been unable to answer from the linguistic records alone. My hypothesis is that the enchantments are running on the original text, not on the ceremony. The ceremony supplements and maintains the enchantments, but it is not the source of the enchantments. The source is the original binding, performed once, with the original text. That binding is still active. The ceremony maintains the field, but the field's core is the original text, running continuously.
He said: So the ceremony is doing something different from what people think it is doing.
Miron said: The ceremony is reinforcing the edges of an enchantment whose core is something else. If you remove the ceremony, the edges would weaken. But the core would remain, because the core is the original binding and the original binding was done correctly.
He said: What text is the core running on?
Miron said, carefully: The Veylwood Covenant. The original. With all the language the Prophecy no longer contains.
He said: Language about the Drakonir.
Miron said: Language about the Drakonir as partners in the covenant. As co-signatories. As parties whose participation in the maintenance of Veylwood was part of the binding.
He said: The enchantments require both parties.
Miron said: That is what the original covenant language implies, yes. A binding covenant between two peoples, maintained jointly.
He said: And the ceremony as currently constructed only invokes one party.
Miron said: Yes. The ceremony invokes Elyndor's participation. It does not invoke the Drakonir's, because the Drakonir have been written out of the text. The ceremony is incomplete. It reinforces the edges of the enchantment but cannot fully maintain them, because the core requires joint participation and only one participant is showing up.
He said: The forest is getting weaker.
Miron said, quietly: Yes. Slowly. Over three hundred years. The decay is gradual enough that it has been attributed to natural variation, to weather, to the ordinary processes of an ancient ecosystem. But the records of the forest's state over the last three centuries, if you compare the earliest measurements to the current ones, show a consistent and gradual decline.
He said: A decline that began approximately three hundred years ago.
Miron said: Yes.
He sat with this for a moment.
He said: The thing the Prophecy says the hero needs to fix is a problem that the Prophecy itself created.
Miron said: Yes. That is what I believe.
He said: And the solution the Prophecy prescribes, killing the Black Dragon, which is the Drakonir people, would make the problem worse, not better. It would permanently remove the other party from the covenant, making joint maintenance of the enchantment impossible.
Miron said, with the expression of a man who has been sitting alone with this conclusion for eleven years: Yes. The Prophecy is a prescription that would destroy what it claims to save.
He looked at his notes. He looked at Miron. He said: This is the whole thing, is it not. This is why it matters. Not just that the document was falsified, but what the falsification does.
Miron said: The falsification removed one party from a bilateral covenant and converted that party into an enemy that the other party was tasked with eliminating. The elimination of the enemy would permanently break the covenant. The breaking of the covenant would leave the enchantments without the joint participation they require. The enchantments would fail. Veylwood would decay.
He said: And the person who modified the Prophecy must have known this.
Miron said, carefully: Must have known some of this. The modification was sophisticated enough that it cannot have been done in ignorance of what the Covenant said and what the enchantments required.
He said: What does someone gain from making the forest decay?
Miron said: From the decay itself, nothing obvious. But from being the person who controls the interpretation of why the forest is decaying, and what the solution to the decay is, and who is authorized to pursue that solution. From that, quite a lot.
He wrote: the modification was not an accident and it was not theological revisionism. It was a mechanism for creating a problem that only one person could identify, and then controlling the solution to that problem. The problem is real. The forest is declining. The solution that was engineered to follow from the problem would make the problem permanent. The person controlling this is doing so not because they want the forest to fail but because they want to be the person who saves it. On their terms. Through their mechanism. Forever.
He put down the pen.
He said: I need the original Covenant. The complete text. Before I can do anything else, I need to know exactly what it says.
Miron said: I know.
He said: I know where it is.
Miron looked at him.
He said: In the altar. In the shrine. In the box Elirane saw when she was twelve years old.
Miron was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: You are going to go get it.
Renji said: Yes.
Miron said: That is going to be very complicated.
Renji said: Yes.
Miron said, and he sounded, for the first time in Renji's experience of him, not nervous but something else, something that was adjacent to nervous but pointed forward rather than backward: Tell me what you need.
He sat with the implications of what Miron had told him for the rest of that afternoon and into the evening.
The Prophecy was a prescription that would destroy what it claimed to save. He had written this sentence and read it back and the sentence was accurate. It was also, he thought, the most complete description of the mechanism he had encountered: not just a falsification, not just a policy architecture built on that falsification, not just a three-hundred-year program of concealment. All of those things, and additionally: a prescription that would make the problem it claimed to address permanent if it were ever actually implemented.
The hero kills the Black Dragon. The Black Dragon is the Drakonir. The Drakonir are the other party to the Veylwood Covenant. The covenant requires both parties for the binding to be fully maintained. Eliminating the Drakonir eliminates the covenant's other party. The covenant, without both parties, can no longer function as originally designed. The enchantments, built on the covenant, begin to fail. The forest decays.
Thalion Orr, if he drew the Lunaryth Sword and went out to fulfill the Prophecy as written, would trigger this sequence. Not knowing that he was triggering it. Not knowing that the Prophecy he was fulfilling had been designed to produce this outcome.
He thought: this is a very long game. Three hundred years of setup for a specific, irreversible action. And the person who set it up has the patience of someone who has been managing this for three centuries and has no reason to expect to ever stop.
He thought: unless the action never happens. Unless someone, before the ceremony, establishes what the original Covenant says and what the Prophecy has done to it. Unless the comparison is made available in a context where it cannot be suppressed.
He thought: this is what we are doing. This is the timeline we are on.
He found Miron the next morning and said: I need to know something.
Miron said: Ask.
He said: The enchantments on Veylwood. You said they are running on the original text of the Covenant. Not on the ceremony. Not on the Prophecy. On the original binding.
Miron said: That is what I believe.
He said: If the original binding is restored, if the covenant is publicly acknowledged and both parties affirm it, would that stabilize the enchantments?
Miron said: That is the hypothesis my research points toward. The enchantments are declining because the maintenance ceremony is incomplete. If the ceremony were made complete, including both parties, the decline should stop.
He said: And if the covenant were publicly established as the foundational document, replacing the Prophecy?
Miron said: Then the ceremony could be redesigned around the covenant. Which would include both parties. Which would make it complete.
He said: Could the redesign happen in ten days?
Miron was quiet for a moment. He said: The ceremony is fixed in its form. Changing the form of a major ceremony is not something done in ten days.
He said: I am not asking about changing the form. I am asking about what happens if the foundational document is changed. If the covenant replaces the Prophecy as the acknowledged basis of the ceremony, even if the ceremony itself continues in its current form, does the ceremony become more effective?
Miron thought about this for a long time. Then he said: I do not know. My research suggests the enchantments are running on the original text regardless of the ceremony. If the covenant is publicly acknowledged, the ceremony might recognize both parties even in its current form, because the invocation of the foundational text would invoke the parties to that text.
He said: Might.
Miron said: I do not have certainty on this point. I have a hypothesis that seems well-supported but that I have not been able to test.
He said: If we establish the covenant as the foundational document during the ceremony, we might stabilize the enchantments.
Miron said: We might.
He said: And if we do not establish it, the ceremony proceeds as planned, with the incomplete invocation, and the enchantments continue to decline.
Miron said: Yes.
He said: And if the hero fulfills the Prophecy and eliminates the Drakonir.
Miron said, quietly: Then the enchantments fail. Not immediately. Over decades. But fail.
He wrote, that evening: the timeline is right. We have to do this before the ceremony. Not to prevent the ceremony but to change what the ceremony is built on. We need the document. We need to read it. We need to understand it. And then we need to present it in a way that makes the ceremony an acknowledgment of the covenant rather than an enactment of the Prophecy.
He wrote: I do not know yet how to do the last part. I am working on the first parts. The last part will become clearer when the first parts are complete.
He wrote: Caerion knows about the covenant. He has known for three hundred years. He has maintained the Prophecy because it serves a purpose that the covenant does not: it concentrates authority. A covenant requires two parties. A prophecy requires only one interpreter. He has been the interpreter.
He wrote: I need to understand what he will do when the covenant is produced. That is the unknown I cannot resolve from the current evidence. That is the thing I need to plan for.
He found Lysera the following morning and told her what Miron had said about the enchantments and the covenant and the Drakonir.
She listened with the quality of attention she brought to things that confirmed what she had suspected and added something new to the confirmation. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: My mother believed the original covenant named both parties. She believed the enchantments required both parties. She believed the ceremony as currently performed was incomplete.
He said: Miron's research confirms all of that.
She said: She died believing the forest would eventually fail because of what Caerion had done.
He said: She was right about the mechanism. The forest is declining.
She said: She did not know how to stop it.
He said: We might.
She looked at him.
He said: If the covenant is restored and acknowledged during the ceremony, even in the ceremony's current form, the invocation of the foundational document might invoke both parties to that document. Miron believes this is possible.
She said: Might.
He said: Yes. Might. It is not certain. But it is the best option we have in the time we have.
She said: And the Drakonir.
He said: We need to find them. We need to know if they are willing to participate.
She said: They are out there. Beyond the forest borders. I have seen the edge of their territory, once, years ago. She paused. I did not go close. I did not know, at that point, whether knowing more was safe.
He said: It is now.
She said: Yes. She picked up her pen. She set it down again. She said: My mother spent thirty years trying to fix this from inside the institution and was removed for trying. I have spent sixty years continuing what she started, more carefully. We have nine days.
He said: Yes.
She said: Then let us use them well.
He thought, after the conversation with Miron, about the specific practical problem of the Drakonir.
Everything he had established pointed to the Drakonir as the other party to the covenant. Miron's linguistic research confirmed it. The oldest texts Lysera had found confirmed it. The nature of the covenant itself, as described in the indirect references in the administrative records, confirmed it.
But the Drakonir had not been parties to any acknowledged process in Elyndor for three hundred years. They had been defined, by the modified Prophecy and by the administrative protocols built around it, as hostile entities to be opposed rather than as political actors to be engaged with. Three hundred years of that definition had produced three hundred years of a relationship that was not a relationship: not diplomacy, not trade, not correspondence, nothing that would tell him what the Drakonir thought about the covenant or whether they still considered themselves bound by it.
Miron believed they did. He believed this based on the persistence of the Drakonir script and language, which he had been tracking in the limited materials available to him, and on the nature of the covenant itself. A covenant was not something you simply stopped holding yourself to because the other party had stopped holding themselves to it. A covenant had moral weight that persisted beyond the immediate relationship.
He thought: this is Miron's belief about the Drakonir, not the Drakonir's expressed position. I cannot know the Drakonir's expressed position without talking to them.
And to talk to them, he needed to find them.
He wrote: finding the Drakonir is not optional. They are the other party to the covenant. A covenant cannot be presented as restored without the participation of both parties. I need them, or I need to know whether they are willing and what form their participation would take.
He wrote: I have eight days. Finding the Drakonir and establishing communication in eight days is possible if they are close and if they are willing to be found.
He wrote: I believe they are both. The forest borders are where they have been for three hundred years. They have not moved. They have been waiting. For what, I will find out when I talk to them.
He sat with the conversation with Miron for a long time after it ended, turning over the piece that still did not fit neatly into the picture he had assembled.
The enchantments were running on the original text, not the ceremony. The ceremony supplemented but did not replace the original binding. If the original binding required both parties, the binding was currently functioning with only one party actively sustaining it.
The question that Miron had not been able to answer was: were the Drakonir still sustaining their half of the binding, even passively, even from a distance, even without any formal acknowledgment that the covenant still existed.
This was not a question he could answer from the Archive. It was not a question the documents could answer. It was a question that required either talking to the Drakonir or finding some evidence of what they were doing with regard to the forest and its enchantments.
Lysera had mentioned seeing the edge of their territory once. He needed to know more. He needed to know whether they had maintained any of the old covenant practices, whether they had their own copy of the covenant text, whether they were aware that Elyndor had falsified the document and named them as enemies.
He could not get those answers from the Archive. He could get them from the border, if he could find a way to approach it without the Nightroot Guard treating his approach as a hostile incursion.
He thought: this is another thing that requires Elirane. Or Lysera. Someone with the standing to request a border approach without it being classified as military action.
He added this to the list of things to discuss at the next meeting. The list was getting long. The days were getting fewer. He continued making the list because making the list was the next correct step.
You've reached the end of this chapter