Chapter 38 #2
Vareena took it from her and examined the stitching more closely. Then she swore. That got my attention more than anything else had. “There should be another leaf.”
“Could it have fallen out?”
“No.” She opened the binding farther. A narrow strip of parchment remained caught beneath the thread. It had been cut cleanly.
Kieran came around the table and bent closer: “One leaf?”
“At least. Possibly two pages of text.” Dax no longer looked amused. “Right in the middle of the prophecy.”
Emrin pulled the other versions closer again. Cindralith had the scraped line. Umbrael replaced the shared-blood section with a warning. Tharellan’s surviving fragment stopped before the same general point and resumed afterward.
She marked the place on her notes. “They all break here.”
I looked at the Codex. “You know what was there.” Nothing. “You have to.” Still nothing. Heat gathered under my ribs as irritation sharpened into anger. “You knew the prophecy before I was born. You spoke it to my mother.”
Kieran looked at me.
I didn’t return it.
The Codex answered:
YES.
“Then tell me what’s missing.” The word vanished. “Tell me.”
NO.
I gripped the edge of the table. “You warned my parents about me before I had even been born, and now you’re doing the same thing everyone else apparently did. Deciding which parts of my own life I’m allowed to know.”
Silver moved across the page:
I DID NOT REMOVE THEM.
“Then restore them.”
A pause:
I CANNOT.
That stopped me. Not will not. Cannot. “Why?”
The book stayed silent. “Why can’t you?”
Eventually, another sentence appeared:
WHAT WAS TAKEN CANNOT BE RETURNED MERELY BECAUSE YOU HAVE LEARNED TO WANT IT.
“That is spectacularly useless.”
“Not entirely.” Kieran had moved closer. His attention was fixed on the wording. “It said taken.”
Eiryx understood before I did. “Not lost.” The records suddenly looked different. No longer broken copies damaged by time. Evidence.
Raiden leaned back from the table. “So someone deliberately removed the same part everywhere.”
“Maybe not one person,” Vareena said. “Some of these alterations happened centuries apart.”
“But the target is the same,” Lidia said.
That was what mattered. Elyndor had cut pages.
Cindralith had scraped words away. Umbrael had replaced them.
Tharellan had preserved a version that conveniently skipped the same section.
Whatever this was, it had started long before my mother.
“They were changing the story before Aurenya was even born.” I had spent weeks treating the erasures around my parents as though they were the center of everything.
Their names, their relationship, the records of where they had gone inside the Sanctum.
My existence.
But this was older.
Someone had cared about controlling Starborn history hundreds of years before I existed.
Vareena sank into her chair and rubbed at her temple. “Elyndor used to keep major records in three places. The palace archive, Council archive, and royal chapel. At least according to my father.”
“Could another copy still exist?” Raiden asked.
“Maybe. The Council archive might have one, but if the palace version was deliberately changed, I wouldn’t assume the Council copy escaped it.”
“And the chapel?”
Vareena looked at me.
“Destroyed when the palace fell.”
Lidia had gone back to studying the Cindralith parchment. “What if we’re asking the wrong question?” I looked at her. For once, she held my gaze. “We keep asking what the missing lines said. The Codex clearly isn’t going to hand them over. What if we figure out who removed them?”
Emrin nodded. “Physical alterations can be dated approximately. Ownership records might tell us who had access.”
“Restoration records too,” Vareena said.
Raiden shifted closer to her. “Cindralith temples keep them. If this copy was scraped after it entered the temple collection, there might be a record of when the damage first appeared.”
“Can you get it?”
“I can try.”
His injured shoulder bumped the chair and his face tightened before he could hide it. Vareena got up without saying anything, retrieved a folded cloth from the supply cabinet, and wedged it between his shoulder and the wooden chair back. Raiden stared at her. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Then stop looking at me like that.” He adjusted against the padding. A minute later, he was no longer wincing. I looked down before Vareena caught me watching.
Dax had already dragged the Tharellan material toward himself. “We still have old regional records at home.”
Emrin gave him a look. “The archives you spent half your childhood avoiding?”
“I was eight.”
“You were seventeen when Father last made you catalogue them.”
“That feels unnecessarily specific.”
“I was there.”
He sighed. “Fine. Our family keeps older land and boundary records. Some predate what Verdant has here.”
Emrin’s amusement faded as she considered it. “He’s right. If copies circulated outside formal religious or court collections, ours may have references the Sanctum doesn’t.”
“Can you get them?”
She and Dax exchanged a look. “Yes,” Emrin said. “It may involve explaining why we suddenly care about records neither of us has voluntarily opened in years.”
“That sounds survivable.”
Dax looked unconvinced.
Eiryx tapped the Umbrael transcription. “This warning can be traced.”
Kieran immediately moved beside him. “How?”
Eiryx showed him a tiny notation beneath the archive mark. “This copy passed through court custody before it came here.”
Kieran read it once. “Crown archive.”
Dax looked up. “As in your father’s?”
“Technically.”
The reminder that Kieran was not merely from Umbrael but belonged to its ruling blood still felt strange whenever it surfaced in ordinary conversation.
I had seen him in training leathers more often than anything resembling court attire.
Seen him bleeding, exhausted, angry. Seen him naked under a sky my magic had somehow made inside his Shadow.
Prince still felt like a word attached to another person.
“Can you access it?” I asked.
“I can get to parts of it.”
“Parts?”
“My father does not keep every royal record in one room with a key hanging beside the door.”
Eiryx pointed to a second notation. “This one left crown custody before it reached the Sanctum.”
Kieran’s attention sharpened. “Where did it go?”
“Doesn’t say here.”
“I can get the royal catalogue.”
Eiryx looked at him. “If you request it officially, your father’s people will know.”
Kieran looked almost offended by the suggestion. “I wasn’t planning to request it.” That sounded considerably more like him.
Eiryx pulled a sheet toward himself and copied the transfer mark. “I’ll follow it after it left the court.”
“How?” I asked.
He finished the mark before answering. “I know where to look.” It was the sort of answer Eiryx gave whenever a useful document appeared from somewhere it probably should not have.
He knew strange things about locked archives and private collections, knew which names mattered even when they were buried beneath others.
Kieran seemed to accept that without explanation, which meant the explanation involved enough history that neither of them intended to share it.
Dax studied him. “You just know where vanished Shadow records go?”
Eiryx looked up. “Sometimes.” Dax seemed ready to ask more.
Kieran cut him off without looking over. “Don’t.” Eiryx didn’t thank him. He copied one final symbol and tucked the paper inside his jacket. Kieran watched him do it. “You’re not following it alone if it leads outside the Sanctum.”
“I usually work alone.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
Eiryx met his eyes. A silent understanding passed between them, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with the rest of us. “I heard you.”
Apparently that was the best Kieran was getting. His jaw worked once before he returned to the royal notation. “Fine. I’ll handle anything still inside crown records. You find where this went afterward.” That settled it.
For the next hour, the table became less a collection of old books and more a map of what had been done to them.
Emrin built a timeline. Vareena and Raiden compared Elyndorian and Cindralith dates.
Dax searched the Tharellan fragments for regional family marks.
Lidia inspected bindings and parchment, finding two later repairs we had dismissed earlier.
Kieran worked through the Umbrael material with the ease of someone raised around its court language.
Eiryx watched what had happened outside the official trail.
For the first time, nobody was waiting for the Codex to tell us what to think.
And for the first time, it struck me that I wasn’t carrying it alone.
Lidia was bent over the removed Elyndorian leaf when I said her name.
She looked up cautiously. I almost apologized again before I topped myself.
I had already said I was sorry. Repeating it until she forgave me would only make her responsible for making me feel better.
“You caught the binding before any of us.”
She glanced down at the book. “It looked wrong.”
“You were right.”
A small pause. “Thanks.” Then she returned to the page. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was enough for tonight.
Eventually Emrin pushed back from the table and rubbed cramped fingers. “We need an older anchor. Otherwise we can’t tell which differences are translation and which are deliberate changes.”