In the Archive
The next morning, Lark was sitting in the common room with a cup of tea she did not remember pouring when Rion appeared in the doorway.
She hadn’t slept well. Darian’s words had helped.
They had eased the sharp edge of loneliness enough to let her drift off eventually, but her dreams had been restless, and she had woken before dawn with an ache behind her eyes that no amount of tea seemed to be able to cure.
She had been staring out the window at the terraced streets of Springhope, watching the early light creep across the rooftops, when the sound of footsteps made her turn.
Rion looked better than he had the day before.
The exhaustion that had dragged at his features was still there, but it had receded slightly, pushed back by a night in a proper bed with his wolf at his side.
The eyepatch suited him, she realized. Pippa had been right.
It made him look like someone who had come through the fire, changed but not destroyed.
“I’d like to go with you,” he said. “To the archive. If the offer still stands.”
Lark set down her tea. She was careful to keep her expression neutral, not letting him see how much those words meant to her. “It stands.”
“Good.” He hesitated in the doorway, his hand resting on the frame as though he needed the support.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.
About dark aetheria. About finding answers.
” His eye met hers, and for a flash she saw the old Rion there, the scholar who had spent his life chasing knowledge through dusty archives and forgotten libraries. “I want to help. If I can.”
“Then let’s go find some answers.”
The archive was housed in a sprawling stone building that seemed to have grown organically from the mountainside over centuries of additions and expansions.
Morena had arranged access for them, and the archivist who greeted them at the entrance seemed more pleased than inconvenienced by their arrival.
“Visitors who actually want to read,” she said, her weathered face creasing into a smile.
“What a novelty. Most people only come here when they need to settle property disputes.” She led them through a series of corridors that grew progressively older and dustier until they emerged into a vast chamber lined floor to ceiling with shelves.
Lark stopped in the doorway and stared.
She had seen libraries before, small collections in the places she had lived, what seemed like the entirety of Rion’s house, but nothing like this.
The room stretched back into shadow, shelf after shelf of books, scrolls, and bound journals disappearing into the gloom.
Ladders on rails allowed access to the upper reaches, and scattered throughout the space were tables, chairs, and reading stands, all of them empty and waiting.
Beside her, Rion made a sound. It was soft, barely audible, but it was the first genuine sound of pleasure she had heard from him since that last night in Autumncrown, before the battle.
When she looked at him, his eye was wide, his lips slightly parted, his whole body leaning forward as though drawn by an invisible force.
“Centuries of records,” the archivist said with evident pride.
“Everything from the founding journals to last year’s council minutes.
If it was written down in Springhope, it’s here somewhere.
” She gestured toward the desk near the entrance.
“I’ll be over there if you need help finding anything specific. Otherwise, you’re welcome to explore.”
She shuffled away, leaving them alone in the vast silence of the archive.
Rion took a step forward. Then another. His hand reached out to touch the spine of a book on the nearest shelf, his fingers tracing the faded lettering with reverence.
“Where do we start?” Lark asked.
“The older sections.” His voice had changed, she realized.
It was stronger, more animated, the flatness that had characterized his speech for the past few weeks beginning to fade.
“If there’s information about the fundamental nature of aetheria, about how corruption works and how it might be reversed, it will be in the foundational texts.
The theoretical work on which everything else was built. ”
He was already moving deeper into the archive, his eye scanning the shelves, his pace quickening despite the fatigue that still pulled at him. Lark followed, content to let him lead.
They found the oldest section in the back corner of the chamber, where the shelves gave way to stone alcoves carved directly into the mountain.
The books here differed from the others; their bindings cracked and faded, their pages yellowed with age.
Some were not books at all but scrolls, carefully preserved in wooden cases that bore inscriptions in scripts Lark did not recognize.
Rion stopped before one of the alcoves and stood there, breathing it in. The dust, the age, the accumulated weight of centuries of thought and discovery.
“This is it,” he said. “This is where we start.”
They worked for hours.
Rion selected volumes with the expertise of an academic, pulling books from shelves and stacking them on the nearest table until Lark worried the aged wood might collapse under the weight.
He read quickly, his eye moving across the pages with an intensity that seemed to shut out the rest of the world, occasionally making notes on scraps of parchment the archivist had provided.
Lark made herself useful. She fetched books from shelves at his direction, returned volumes he had finished to their proper places, kept his water cup filled from the pitcher the archivist had left for them.
It was not work she was suited for, this patient scholarly pursuit, but she found she didn’t mind it.
Not when she could watch Rion come back to life with every page he turned.
“This one next,” he said, pointing to a shelf above his head without looking up from his current text. “Third from the left, the one with the green binding.”
Lark climbed the ladder and retrieved it. “You know, I’m feeling less like a research assistant and more like a very underpaid servant.”
Rion’s eye flicked up from his book. For a heartbeat, humor sparked in his expression. “Underpaid implies you’re being paid at all.”
“Exactly my point.” She dropped the green-bound volume on the table beside him with slightly more force than necessary. “Perhaps I should negotiate better terms.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But it will be expensive.” She settled into the chair across from him, propping her chin on her hand. “Possibly ruinous.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile, but closer than anything she had seen since his rescue. “I’ll consider myself warned.”
They fell back into their rhythm, Rion reading and taking notes while Lark fetched and carried and occasionally made pointed comments about the dust and the cold and the apparent inability of scholars to organize anything in a manner that made sense to normal people.
Each time she complained, that twitch appeared at the corner of his mouth.
Each time, she tucked it away as a victory.
This was how it had been before, she realized.
Before the Ashen Enclave, before the torture, before everything fell apart.
They had traded barbs and challenges, had pushed at each other’s edges, and had found connection in their friction.
She had missed it, had not even realized how much until now, watching it slowly resurface in the space between them.
The afternoon light was fading when Rion went still.
Lark had been returning a stack of books to their shelf, her back to him, when she heard his breathing change. She turned to find him bent over a slim leather journal, his hand pressed flat against the page as though holding the words in place.
“What is it?”
He didn't answer immediately. His eye moved across the page again, then again, as though he could not quite believe what he was reading.
“Rion.” She crossed to the table and looked down at the journal. The handwriting was old, cramped, and difficult to read in the fading light. “What did you find?”
“Notes. From one of the founding scholars. She was studying the nature of aetheria itself, trying to understand its fundamental properties.” He looked up at her, and his eye was bright with wonder. “She wrote about corruption. About dark aetheria.”
“What did she say?”
Rion looked back at the journal. When he spoke, he read the words aloud, his voice gaining strength with each sentence.
“All aetheria is, at its essence, neutral energy. It holds no intent, no purpose, no moral weight. The witch who shapes it imparts these qualities. Fire is not inherently destructive, nor is healing inherently good. They are expressions of will imposed upon a substrate that accepts all impositions equally.” He turned the page with trembling fingers.
“If this is true, then corruption is not a fundamental state, but an imposed one. Dark aetheria is not aetheria that has been transformed into another substance. It is aetheria that has been shaped toward darkness by a will that chose darkness.”
“And if it was shaped toward darkness,” Lark said slowly, understanding beginning to dawn, “then it could be shaped away from it.”
“Not shaped. Transmuted.” Rion’s finger found a passage further down the page. “She writes here about the theoretical possibility of returning corrupted aetheria to its neutral state. Of stripping away the imposed intent and leaving only the pure energy beneath. She calls it transmutation.”
Morena had used that word as well. “Did she figure out how to do it?”