He went into Veylwood on the twenty-first day, which was not in his original plan but had become necessary when Fen led him there.
He had not intended to follow Fen into the forest. He had been in the corridor outside the Archive's east wing, thinking about the sword trial and the bilateral mechanism and the next steps toward the shrine visit, when Fen had appeared at the end of the corridor and looked at him with the amber-eyed attention that meant, in his accumulated experience of the fox, that something required his attention and Fen had decided he was the person whose attention it required.
He had followed.
Veylwood, from the inside, was nothing like it appeared from the palace windows.
From the windows it looked like a forest: luminescent, large, organized in the way that very old forests were organized, which was to say not organized at all in any human sense but following the logic of something that had been doing what it was doing for long enough that it had developed its own internal coherence. From inside it was something else. The scale was different: trees larger than buildings, with canopies that met overhead at a height that made the forest's interior feel like the inside of a cathedral with living walls. The light came from the trees themselves, or from the moss and the lichen that covered them, a cool green-blue that was the opposite of the Archive's warm sourcelessness. The ground was soft. The air was different in quality: denser, greener, carrying information his nose could register but his vocabulary could not fully categorize.
He walked.
Fen walked ahead of him at the specific pace the fox used when it was showing him something rather than going somewhere for its own reasons: steady, unhurried, frequent pauses to confirm he was still following.
He was aware, walking into Veylwood, of what Miron had described: the decline. It was not dramatic. It would not have been visible to someone who had not read the measurement records, who did not know that the luminescence of the trees should have been brighter and the moss cover denser and the sound of the forest fuller. But he had read the records, and he knew what to look for, and he could see it: a faintness where there should have been vividity, a thinness where there should have been depth.
He walked for perhaps forty minutes. He did not know the forest's geography well enough to understand where he was in relation to the palace or the Archive. He followed Fen and trusted that Fen knew where they were going.
They arrived at a clearing.
The clearing was not natural, or not only natural: it had the quality of a space that had been maintained, kept clear of the encroaching undergrowth in a way that suggested the clearing was the point rather than an incidental gap in the canopy. At its center there was a stone, low and wide, with markings cut into its surface that he recognized immediately: the same kind of purposeful text-like markings that covered the Archive's walls, but older, the edges of the carving softened by weather and time in a way the Archive's interior markings were not.
And sitting on the stone, apparently waiting, was a person he had not met before.
She was shorter than the Elyndor elves he had encountered, with a different physical quality: denser somehow, more substantial in a way that was about weight of presence rather than literal mass. Her clothing was different from anything he had seen in the palace, made of materials that fit the forest rather than the court. Her eyes, when she looked at him, were dark and steady with the quality of patience that had been tested and had held.
She said, in English that was accented differently from Miron's, from a different source language: You are the one who has been looking at the documents.
He said: Yes.
She said: My name is Ravenna. I speak for the Drakonir in matters of the covenant.
He was quiet for a moment, processing this. Then he said: How did you know I would be here?
She looked at Fen, who was sitting on the stone beside her with the air of a fox that has made excellent arrangements. She said: Fen has been moving between our territory and this forest for a very long time. We have had an understanding for longer than you have been alive.
He said: What kind of understanding?
She said: Fen shows us when someone worth speaking to has arrived. This has not happened often. He paused. She said: In thirty years, you are the first.
He sat down on the opposite side of the stone. He said: Then I should not waste the time.
She said: No. She looked at him steadily. You have found what was done to the covenant.
He said: I have found most of it. I have not yet found the original text.
She said: We have our half.
He looked at her.
She said: The covenant was bilateral. Both parties received a copy of the full text, sealed with both seals. The Elyndor copy has been modified and suppressed. Our copy has been kept. She paused. We have been waiting for someone to come who was looking at the documents carefully enough to understand what they were looking for. We have been waiting for a long time.
He said: How long?
She said: Three hundred years.
He wrote, that evening, the longest entry in his notebook since the first day: the Drakonir have their copy. The bilateral covenant has two extant originals: the one in the altar box that I have not yet been able to access, and the one that Ravenna holds. She knows what the Elyndor copy says, or rather what it no longer says. She has been waiting for a moment when the Elyndor side was ready to hear it. She has been waiting for three hundred years. The patience of that waiting is a different order of magnitude from even Lysera's sixty years or Miron's eleven. Three hundred years is the entire span of the falsification. They have been holding their copy of the truth for the entire length of the lie.
He wrote: I now have, for the first time, direct access to the original text of the Veylwood Covenant. Not through the altar box, which I still intend to access, but through Ravenna's copy. The case is complete. The bilateral evidence exists. The comparison can be made.
He wrote: I need to bring Miron. I need to bring Lysera. They need to see this too.
He returned to Ravenna in the clearing the following day, with Lysera and Miron, as he had written in his notes he would do.
The meeting was different from the first one. The first meeting had been a discovery: he had not known who she was or what she was going to tell him. This meeting was a working session, three researchers from one side of a three-hundred-year divide meeting with the representative of the other side to understand what they collectively had and what they intended to do with it.
Ravenna was prepared. She had brought the covenant document, wrapped in its preservation material, and she had brought the older of her two companions, whom she introduced as the Keeper of the Stone Record, the person who had held the Drakonir copy of the covenant since the previous Keeper had passed it on, in an unbroken chain of custody that went back to the original signing.
Three hundred years of chain of custody. He documented this. It was, from an evidentiary standpoint, the most significant thing she could have provided: not just the document but the documented history of its preservation, the names and roles of every person who had held it and in what capacity, the specific conditions of its storage and the specific checks that had been conducted periodically to ensure its integrity.
Miron spent most of the morning with the older Drakonir, comparing notes about the covenant's language and the linguistic evolution that had occurred in both the Elyndor and Drakonir traditions in the three hundred years since the covenant was last jointly acknowledged. Lysera spent most of the morning with Ravenna, asking careful questions about the Drakonir's experience of the three-hundred-year period and receiving careful answers that she documented with the precision she brought to all archival work.
He moved between both conversations, contributing where his perspective was useful and listening where listening was more valuable than contributing.
What emerged from the morning was a picture he had not fully had before: the three-hundred-year experience from the Drakonir side.
They had known, from the beginning, that something had changed. The joint ceremonies had stopped. The Elyndor representatives had stopped coming to the border meetings. The communications that had previously flowed through formal channels had dried up, replaced first by silence and then by hostility. They had their copy of the covenant. They had read it. They had understood that what they were reading described a relationship that the other party had, apparently, decided to end.
They had waited. They had held the document. They had maintained their own practices, the practices described in the covenant, the maintenance ceremonies conducted on their side of the border. They had not stopped the maintenance because the other party had stopped. They had continued because the covenant said both parties would continue.
For three hundred years, the Drakonir had been performing their half of the covenant maintenance alone, without acknowledgment, without communication, without any indication that Elyndor was aware of what they were doing.
He sat with this for a long time.
He said, to Ravenna: The forest has been declining because Elyndor's ceremony is incomplete. But it has been declining more slowly than it would have if both parties had stopped. Because you kept going.
She said: We made an agreement. We honor our agreements even when the other party does not.
He wrote: the Drakonir have been sustaining the covenant from their side for three hundred years. The decline in Veylwood's enchantments is the difference between full joint maintenance and the partial maintenance that one party alone can provide. The forest is declining not because both parties failed but because one party continued and one party was prevented from continuing by the falsification of the document they thought they were maintaining.
This reframed the entire situation. The Drakonir were not absent parties who needed to be invited back. They had never left. They had been present, continuously, on their side of a barrier that Elyndor had erected and maintained. The restoration was not about bringing them back. It was about removing the barrier.
He returned to Ravenna in the clearing the following day with Lysera and Miron, as he had written he would do.
The meeting was different from the first one. The first meeting had been a discovery. This was a working session, three researchers from one side of a three-hundred-year divide meeting with the representative of the other side to understand what they collectively had and what they intended to do with it.
Ravenna was prepared. She had brought the covenant document and the Keeper of the Stone Record, the person who had held the Drakonir copy since the previous Keeper had passed it on, in an unbroken chain of custody that went back to the original signing.
Three hundred years of chain of custody. He documented this. Not just the document but the documented history of its preservation: the names and roles of every person who had held it, the conditions of its storage, the periodic checks that had been conducted to ensure its integrity.
Miron spent most of the morning with the older Drakonir, comparing notes about the covenant's language. Lysera spent most of the morning with Ravenna, asking careful questions about the Drakonir's experience of the three-hundred-year period and receiving careful answers. He moved between both conversations.
What emerged was a picture he had not fully had before. The Drakonir had known, from the beginning, that something had changed. The joint ceremonies had stopped. The communications had dried up. But they had their copy of the covenant. They had read it. They had understood that the other party had decided to end the relationship. And they had continued their maintenance anyway. For three hundred years, alone, without acknowledgment, without any indication that Elyndor was aware of what they were doing. Because they had made an agreement. And agreements were worth keeping even when the other party stopped keeping them.
He had told Ravenna about the altar box and the covenant it contained before she told him about the Drakonir copy. He had told her because she deserved to know, and because the bilateral nature of the evidence required that both parties understand the full picture.
She had listened to his description of the altar box with the quality of attention of someone who already knew, in broad outline, that such a thing existed. She said: We knew the Elyndor copy was held somewhere. The old records referred to both copies existing, before the reference to both copies was removed from the records we could access. We knew our copy was here and we knew theirs should be somewhere.
He said: Did you look for it?
She said: We could not search the palace directly. We could observe from the borders, and we could receive what Fen brought us, but direct access to the palace's ceremonial spaces was not available to us.
He said: Fen brought you information.
She said: Fen brought us what Fen chose to bring. We did not direct the fox. We received what it offered.
He thought about this. He said: Fen has been independent of both parties.
She said: Yes. Whatever Fen's nature is, it is not on either side. It is on the covenant's side. It acts to maintain the covenant's conditions, not to serve either party's interests.
He thought about the fox sitting on the reading room table, biting the corner of the document with the restricted archive marking, showing him the symbol on the wall, being present for the conversation with Miron in the linguistic archive. Not serving him. Not serving the Drakonir. Moving through both sets of institutional spaces with equal ease, acting in service of the thing that both sets of spaces were supposed to be organized around.
He wrote: Fen is an actor in service of the covenant itself. This is not metaphorical. The fox has been moving between both parties for longer than Ravenna knows, facilitating the connections that needed to be made for the covenant to eventually be restorable. It showed me the restricted archive marking. It led me to Ravenna. It was present for the key conversations without directing them. This is a kind of agency that I do not have a prior framework for but that the evidence clearly supports. I will not claim to understand what Fen is. I will note that it has been consistently useful and has never led me toward anything that was not relevant.
He thought about what it meant to have found this in twenty-six days when others had been looking for it in different ways for decades and centuries. He thought about what had made the difference. Not intelligence, not special skill, though he had brought those. The difference was the entry point. He had come into the situation from completely outside the institutional structure, with no prior relationships to the people or the documents or the concealment, with a mandate that gave him access to the materials he needed and a role that made his questions procedurally legitimate. He had come in without the institutional investments that made the question impossible to ask. He had asked the question because he did not know it was impossible. He thought: the question was never actually impossible. It was just never asked from the right starting position before. He had been in the right starting position. He had asked the question. Here was the answer.
He had thought, during the morning in the clearing, about what three hundred years of waiting looked like from the inside of the culture doing the waiting.
The Drakonir had not been passive in their waiting. They had been doing the specific, practical work of maintaining their half of a covenant that the other party had decided did not exist. They had been conducting ceremonies in their own tradition, performing the rituals their side of the covenant required, keeping the practices alive. They had also been educating their children about the covenant, passing down the knowledge of its existence and its terms, ensuring that each generation understood what they were maintaining and why.
Three hundred years of children being told: there is a covenant. We signed it. We honor it. The other party has denied it exists, but the covenant exists anyway, and our obligation to it exists anyway, and so we continue. This is what we do.
The continuity of that teaching, across three hundred years, was itself a kind of evidence. You did not teach something for three hundred years across many generations if it was not important. You did not maintain the teaching if there was not genuine conviction that the thing being taught was real. The Drakonir's continued practice was the evidence of their conviction. Their conviction was the evidence of the covenant's reality on their side.
He wrote one more entry that evening about Fen. The fox had led him to the clearing and had been sitting on the stone waiting with Ravenna as if the meeting had been scheduled. He wrote: I do not know what Fen is. I have been calling it a fox because it has the form of a fox. It is clearly more than a fox. It moves through restricted spaces. It has maintained a communication channel between two parties who have not been in contact for three hundred years. It bites the corners of documents that need to be noticed. It attends conversations at which its presence shapes what is said. Whatever it is, it has been working toward this moment for at least as long as Lysera has been working toward it. Perhaps longer.
You've reached the end of this chapter
He went into Veylwood on the twenty-first day, which was not in his original plan but had become necessary when Fen led him there.
He had not intended to follow Fen into the forest. He had been in the corridor outside the Archive's east wing, thinking about the sword trial and the bilateral mechanism and the next steps toward the shrine visit, when Fen had appeared at the end of the corridor and looked at him with the amber-eyed attention that meant, in his accumulated experience of the fox, that something required his attention and Fen had decided he was the person whose attention it required.
He had followed.
Veylwood, from the inside, was nothing like it appeared from the palace windows.
From the windows it looked like a forest: luminescent, large, organized in the way that very old forests were organized, which was to say not organized at all in any human sense but following the logic of something that had been doing what it was doing for long enough that it had developed its own internal coherence. From inside it was something else. The scale was different: trees larger than buildings, with canopies that met overhead at a height that made the forest's interior feel like the inside of a cathedral with living walls. The light came from the trees themselves, or from the moss and the lichen that covered them, a cool green-blue that was the opposite of the Archive's warm sourcelessness. The ground was soft. The air was different in quality: denser, greener, carrying information his nose could register but his vocabulary could not fully categorize.
He walked.
Fen walked ahead of him at the specific pace the fox used when it was showing him something rather than going somewhere for its own reasons: steady, unhurried, frequent pauses to confirm he was still following.
He was aware, walking into Veylwood, of what Miron had described: the decline. It was not dramatic. It would not have been visible to someone who had not read the measurement records, who did not know that the luminescence of the trees should have been brighter and the moss cover denser and the sound of the forest fuller. But he had read the records, and he knew what to look for, and he could see it: a faintness where there should have been vividity, a thinness where there should have been depth.
He walked for perhaps forty minutes. He did not know the forest's geography well enough to understand where he was in relation to the palace or the Archive. He followed Fen and trusted that Fen knew where they were going.
They arrived at a clearing.
The clearing was not natural, or not only natural: it had the quality of a space that had been maintained, kept clear of the encroaching undergrowth in a way that suggested the clearing was the point rather than an incidental gap in the canopy. At its center there was a stone, low and wide, with markings cut into its surface that he recognized immediately: the same kind of purposeful text-like markings that covered the Archive's walls, but older, the edges of the carving softened by weather and time in a way the Archive's interior markings were not.
And sitting on the stone, apparently waiting, was a person he had not met before.
She was shorter than the Elyndor elves he had encountered, with a different physical quality: denser somehow, more substantial in a way that was about weight of presence rather than literal mass. Her clothing was different from anything he had seen in the palace, made of materials that fit the forest rather than the court. Her eyes, when she looked at him, were dark and steady with the quality of patience that had been tested and had held.
She said, in English that was accented differently from Miron's, from a different source language: You are the one who has been looking at the documents.
He said: Yes.
She said: My name is Ravenna. I speak for the Drakonir in matters of the covenant.
He was quiet for a moment, processing this. Then he said: How did you know I would be here?
She looked at Fen, who was sitting on the stone beside her with the air of a fox that has made excellent arrangements. She said: Fen has been moving between our territory and this forest for a very long time. We have had an understanding for longer than you have been alive.
He said: What kind of understanding?
She said: Fen shows us when someone worth speaking to has arrived. This has not happened often. He paused. She said: In thirty years, you are the first.
He sat down on the opposite side of the stone. He said: Then I should not waste the time.
She said: No. She looked at him steadily. You have found what was done to the covenant.
He said: I have found most of it. I have not yet found the original text.
She said: We have our half.
He looked at her.
She said: The covenant was bilateral. Both parties received a copy of the full text, sealed with both seals. The Elyndor copy has been modified and suppressed. Our copy has been kept. She paused. We have been waiting for someone to come who was looking at the documents carefully enough to understand what they were looking for. We have been waiting for a long time.
He said: How long?
She said: Three hundred years.
He wrote, that evening, the longest entry in his notebook since the first day: the Drakonir have their copy. The bilateral covenant has two extant originals: the one in the altar box that I have not yet been able to access, and the one that Ravenna holds. She knows what the Elyndor copy says, or rather what it no longer says. She has been waiting for a moment when the Elyndor side was ready to hear it. She has been waiting for three hundred years. The patience of that waiting is a different order of magnitude from even Lysera's sixty years or Miron's eleven. Three hundred years is the entire span of the falsification. They have been holding their copy of the truth for the entire length of the lie.
He wrote: I now have, for the first time, direct access to the original text of the Veylwood Covenant. Not through the altar box, which I still intend to access, but through Ravenna's copy. The case is complete. The bilateral evidence exists. The comparison can be made.
He wrote: I need to bring Miron. I need to bring Lysera. They need to see this too.
He returned to Ravenna in the clearing the following day, with Lysera and Miron, as he had written in his notes he would do.
The meeting was different from the first one. The first meeting had been a discovery: he had not known who she was or what she was going to tell him. This meeting was a working session, three researchers from one side of a three-hundred-year divide meeting with the representative of the other side to understand what they collectively had and what they intended to do with it.
Ravenna was prepared. She had brought the covenant document, wrapped in its preservation material, and she had brought the older of her two companions, whom she introduced as the Keeper of the Stone Record, the person who had held the Drakonir copy of the covenant since the previous Keeper had passed it on, in an unbroken chain of custody that went back to the original signing.
Three hundred years of chain of custody. He documented this. It was, from an evidentiary standpoint, the most significant thing she could have provided: not just the document but the documented history of its preservation, the names and roles of every person who had held it and in what capacity, the specific conditions of its storage and the specific checks that had been conducted periodically to ensure its integrity.
Miron spent most of the morning with the older Drakonir, comparing notes about the covenant's language and the linguistic evolution that had occurred in both the Elyndor and Drakonir traditions in the three hundred years since the covenant was last jointly acknowledged. Lysera spent most of the morning with Ravenna, asking careful questions about the Drakonir's experience of the three-hundred-year period and receiving careful answers that she documented with the precision she brought to all archival work.
He moved between both conversations, contributing where his perspective was useful and listening where listening was more valuable than contributing.
What emerged from the morning was a picture he had not fully had before: the three-hundred-year experience from the Drakonir side.
They had known, from the beginning, that something had changed. The joint ceremonies had stopped. The Elyndor representatives had stopped coming to the border meetings. The communications that had previously flowed through formal channels had dried up, replaced first by silence and then by hostility. They had their copy of the covenant. They had read it. They had understood that what they were reading described a relationship that the other party had, apparently, decided to end.
They had waited. They had held the document. They had maintained their own practices, the practices described in the covenant, the maintenance ceremonies conducted on their side of the border. They had not stopped the maintenance because the other party had stopped. They had continued because the covenant said both parties would continue.
For three hundred years, the Drakonir had been performing their half of the covenant maintenance alone, without acknowledgment, without communication, without any indication that Elyndor was aware of what they were doing.
He sat with this for a long time.
He said, to Ravenna: The forest has been declining because Elyndor's ceremony is incomplete. But it has been declining more slowly than it would have if both parties had stopped. Because you kept going.
She said: We made an agreement. We honor our agreements even when the other party does not.
He wrote: the Drakonir have been sustaining the covenant from their side for three hundred years. The decline in Veylwood's enchantments is the difference between full joint maintenance and the partial maintenance that one party alone can provide. The forest is declining not because both parties failed but because one party continued and one party was prevented from continuing by the falsification of the document they thought they were maintaining.
This reframed the entire situation. The Drakonir were not absent parties who needed to be invited back. They had never left. They had been present, continuously, on their side of a barrier that Elyndor had erected and maintained. The restoration was not about bringing them back. It was about removing the barrier.
He returned to Ravenna in the clearing the following day with Lysera and Miron, as he had written he would do.
The meeting was different from the first one. The first meeting had been a discovery. This was a working session, three researchers from one side of a three-hundred-year divide meeting with the representative of the other side to understand what they collectively had and what they intended to do with it.
Ravenna was prepared. She had brought the covenant document and the Keeper of the Stone Record, the person who had held the Drakonir copy since the previous Keeper had passed it on, in an unbroken chain of custody that went back to the original signing.
Three hundred years of chain of custody. He documented this. Not just the document but the documented history of its preservation: the names and roles of every person who had held it, the conditions of its storage, the periodic checks that had been conducted to ensure its integrity.
Miron spent most of the morning with the older Drakonir, comparing notes about the covenant's language. Lysera spent most of the morning with Ravenna, asking careful questions about the Drakonir's experience of the three-hundred-year period and receiving careful answers. He moved between both conversations.
What emerged was a picture he had not fully had before. The Drakonir had known, from the beginning, that something had changed. The joint ceremonies had stopped. The communications had dried up. But they had their copy of the covenant. They had read it. They had understood that the other party had decided to end the relationship. And they had continued their maintenance anyway. For three hundred years, alone, without acknowledgment, without any indication that Elyndor was aware of what they were doing. Because they had made an agreement. And agreements were worth keeping even when the other party stopped keeping them.
He had told Ravenna about the altar box and the covenant it contained before she told him about the Drakonir copy. He had told her because she deserved to know, and because the bilateral nature of the evidence required that both parties understand the full picture.
She had listened to his description of the altar box with the quality of attention of someone who already knew, in broad outline, that such a thing existed. She said: We knew the Elyndor copy was held somewhere. The old records referred to both copies existing, before the reference to both copies was removed from the records we could access. We knew our copy was here and we knew theirs should be somewhere.
He said: Did you look for it?
She said: We could not search the palace directly. We could observe from the borders, and we could receive what Fen brought us, but direct access to the palace's ceremonial spaces was not available to us.
He said: Fen brought you information.
She said: Fen brought us what Fen chose to bring. We did not direct the fox. We received what it offered.
He thought about this. He said: Fen has been independent of both parties.
She said: Yes. Whatever Fen's nature is, it is not on either side. It is on the covenant's side. It acts to maintain the covenant's conditions, not to serve either party's interests.
He thought about the fox sitting on the reading room table, biting the corner of the document with the restricted archive marking, showing him the symbol on the wall, being present for the conversation with Miron in the linguistic archive. Not serving him. Not serving the Drakonir. Moving through both sets of institutional spaces with equal ease, acting in service of the thing that both sets of spaces were supposed to be organized around.
He wrote: Fen is an actor in service of the covenant itself. This is not metaphorical. The fox has been moving between both parties for longer than Ravenna knows, facilitating the connections that needed to be made for the covenant to eventually be restorable. It showed me the restricted archive marking. It led me to Ravenna. It was present for the key conversations without directing them. This is a kind of agency that I do not have a prior framework for but that the evidence clearly supports. I will not claim to understand what Fen is. I will note that it has been consistently useful and has never led me toward anything that was not relevant.
He thought about what it meant to have found this in twenty-six days when others had been looking for it in different ways for decades and centuries. He thought about what had made the difference. Not intelligence, not special skill, though he had brought those. The difference was the entry point. He had come into the situation from completely outside the institutional structure, with no prior relationships to the people or the documents or the concealment, with a mandate that gave him access to the materials he needed and a role that made his questions procedurally legitimate. He had come in without the institutional investments that made the question impossible to ask. He had asked the question because he did not know it was impossible. He thought: the question was never actually impossible. It was just never asked from the right starting position before. He had been in the right starting position. He had asked the question. Here was the answer.
He had thought, during the morning in the clearing, about what three hundred years of waiting looked like from the inside of the culture doing the waiting.
The Drakonir had not been passive in their waiting. They had been doing the specific, practical work of maintaining their half of a covenant that the other party had decided did not exist. They had been conducting ceremonies in their own tradition, performing the rituals their side of the covenant required, keeping the practices alive. They had also been educating their children about the covenant, passing down the knowledge of its existence and its terms, ensuring that each generation understood what they were maintaining and why.
Three hundred years of children being told: there is a covenant. We signed it. We honor it. The other party has denied it exists, but the covenant exists anyway, and our obligation to it exists anyway, and so we continue. This is what we do.
The continuity of that teaching, across three hundred years, was itself a kind of evidence. You did not teach something for three hundred years across many generations if it was not important. You did not maintain the teaching if there was not genuine conviction that the thing being taught was real. The Drakonir's continued practice was the evidence of their conviction. Their conviction was the evidence of the covenant's reality on their side.
He wrote one more entry that evening about Fen. The fox had led him to the clearing and had been sitting on the stone waiting with Ravenna as if the meeting had been scheduled. He wrote: I do not know what Fen is. I have been calling it a fox because it has the form of a fox. It is clearly more than a fox. It moves through restricted spaces. It has maintained a communication channel between two parties who have not been in contact for three hundred years. It bites the corners of documents that need to be noticed. It attends conversations at which its presence shapes what is said. Whatever it is, it has been working toward this moment for at least as long as Lysera has been working toward it. Perhaps longer.
You've reached the end of this chapter