Chapter Thirty-Six
The answer rarely stands alone
Follow its path and truth is shown
Sobriety has left Rubi’s mind loud and inescapable.
Thoughts overlap, instincts sharpen, and she feels everything.
For the first morning in a decade, she has not picked up her flask.
Has not snorted dreamroot or sucked down brask.
Has not escaped from the harsh realities of her past choices and losses and heartbreaks.
Has not numbed the memories of the ones she left to die—the blood that’s permanently on her hands.
Twice already this morning she’s reached for substances that are no longer there.
Once for the flask at her hip. Once for dreamroot tucked into a pocket she emptied before sunrise.
The absence feels strange. Like phantom pain.
She has seen soldiers scratch itching arms that no longer existed, their bodies following routines long after the limb was gone.
Instead, she strides through the halls of Elarion Castle, making her way to the library.
The doors stand open, as they always do.
No guards. No wards she can feel. Just knowledge, laid bare and waiting for those patient enough to sift through it.
The air shifts as she crosses the threshold—cooler, quieter.
The scent of parchment and ink replaces the sharp bite of alcohol and heated tinctures, and for a fleeting moment, it feels like stepping into another world entirely.
Rubi does not slow to admire it. Libraries have never called to her the same way plants have.
She moves with purpose, boots striking stone with quiet intent as her gaze sweeps the towering shelves.
The library rises in tiers, ladders crisscrossing between columns of texts that stretch higher than most buildings.
Order lives here. Systems. Catalogs. A place designed for scholars who have the luxury of time.
But Rubi does not. Because somewhere beyond these walls, the world is already moving toward catastrophe again, and Rubi refuses to spend this collapse high as Stars too.
Her hands move before her mind fully catches up, pulling volumes from shelves without consulting the indexing tables. Apothecary records. Botanical compendiums. Dissertations on alchemical binding. She stacks them on the nearest desk, the pile growing uneven and precarious as she works.
The first book is useless.
The second offers theory, not application.
The third is worse—written by someone who has never handled the substance they describe.
Typical scholars. Forever hypothesizing and never experiencing.
Rubi exhales sharply through her nose and moves on.
Hours pass without her noticing. The light through the high windows shifts, softening from gold to pale ash, but Rubi does not lift her head to track it.
Her fingers are ink-stained now, the pads of them smudged from turning too many pages too quickly.
Books lie open in a loose semicircle around her, some facedown, others marked with scraps of parchment torn hastily from margins.
Seren would hate the way she folds the corners of pages. The way she annotates them.
Rubi doesn’t care.
None of it fits. Rubi resists the urge to sweep the entire godsdamned table onto the floor.
The binders described here dissolve cleanly. Break down in water. Respond predictably to heat. They behave the way compounds are supposed to behave—obedient to the rules of the body, to the logic of chemistry.
The substance she found does none of that.
Rubi stills, one hand braced against the table, the other hovering over an open page she has stopped reading.
She has been asking the wrong question.
She’s been asking what binds threvenar. But the very thought of doing so is biological warfare.
No one in their right mind would write a text on it.
She has been thinking like an apothecary.
But no one exporting a weaponized compound across kingdoms thinks like an apothecary.
They think like smugglers. Merchants. Empires.
The question is: how is it being moved? How would it be exported and imported without raising questions?
Because somewhere, somehow, a potent substance is being moved between kingdoms, and there has to be a record of it.
Her gaze lifts slowly, scanning the shelves again. Not for apothecary texts this time, but for something else entirely. Trade logs.
She needs to find the trade of plants she does not immediately recognize. Rare. Enduring. Exported by Caeloria.
Her movements sharpen.
She abandons half the books on the table and crosses the room, climbing a ladder without hesitation. Her fingers trail across the spines until they catch on a narrower volume, bound in sun-faded leather, its edges worn as if it has been handled more in transit than in study:
Trade Log: Exports
Meraset Harbor, Azhareth
Third Era – Volume IV
Rubi pulls it free.
Back at the table, she flips through it with practiced impatience, skimming past records of salt, metal, textiles. Caravan notes. Export logs. Marginalia scribbled in different hands. It is not until she reaches the latter third of the text that something slows her.
Resins.
She leans in.
The entry is brief. Almost dismissive. A note on Caelorian exports—a resin harvested from desert flora, valued for its durability, its resistance to heat and rot. Used in preservation, in wound-sealing, in the transport of unstable compounds across long distances.
She doesn’t immediately recognize it. Certainly not as a widely-used binder.
Rubi’s eyes track the line again. Slower this time, and she begins to catalog its properties:
Used to preserve. Hydrophobic.
Seals wounds. Natural coagulant.
Stabilizes reactive compounds. Resistant to degradation.
Her breath stills.
This is it.
Not written the way she would write it. Not described with the precision of an apothecary who has ground it beneath her own hands and discovered the full extent of its capabilities.
But the properties are unmistakable. The behavior she observed in the mortar, in the water, over flame—it all lives here, buried in the margins of a trade record no one thought to question.
Her finger traces the name.
The word catches. Not entirely unfamiliar—just buried. Something she’s heard once, years ago, in passing. Dismissed when Caelorian trade dried up, most likely—filed away as irrelevant, no longer accessible.
Ferralis Perforatum.
Ferralis Perforatum resin from Caeloria.
But what does that mean?
Rubi sifts through the archives of her mind, trying to access old Aevrish, a language lost when The Joining was formed and the continent split.
From the recesses of her memory, the remnants of the ancient tongue surface.
The closest translation is…
Iron that permeates.
The name suddenly feels less like a coincidence.
She huffs a laugh. When the scholars identified and named the resin, she’s sure they would’ve named it after the tree’s root system. And now? She’d wager they’d turn in their graves if they knew it was being used to permeate memory itself.
Ferralis Perforatum.
The word settles into her bones with quiet certainty. Something about the name. Iron. Permeates. Resin.
Of course.
She remembers it. Remembers that most people call it ironsap. A simple resin for simple issues.
It is not a binding agent in the traditional sense—no skilled apothecary would reach for it as a binder.
It does not dissolve cleanly as a resin because it was never meant to.
Finely powdered, though, it can remain suspended in liquid long enough to be consumed.
Learning that, though, goes far beyond the scope of every apothecary she’s ever known.
Goes far beyond its typical uses. Ironsap protects.
Preserves. Forces what it carries to endure conditions that would otherwise break it down.
Apothecaries have used it to seal wounds and support healing for as long as anyone remembers. When mixed with healing compounds like lunabark, it seals and heals wounds.
Seeing it on a trade log would never raise eyebrows.
No—it would be approved and cleared for entry in a heartbeat. Healing compounds pass inspections far more easily than military materials. No one questions medicine entering a kingdom.
Rubi flicks back through the books now that she knows exactly what she’s looking for.
Botanicals of the Known Realms.
Her fingers flick through the alphabetical pages, skipping large chunks, until she arrives at F.
Her eyes dart over the pages, hunting for the compound.
Ferralis Perforatum.
Common in the Matuli Desert of Caeloria—as she expected.
Advanced extraction technique required due to compound density, and therefore demanding a higher trade price.
Strongest known coagulation factor. Rubi swallows.
Her mind spins, taking in the information, trying to organize it.
And mostly, trying not to let her mind spiral downward.
How would she fight this? Fix this? Her chest tightens hard enough she thinks she might vomit across the pages.
Sobriety turns out to be profoundly convenient for panicking efficiently.
And then she finds exactly what she’s looking for.
Highest level clearance required for import and export.
Rubi leans back slightly, her mind already moving beyond the page.
Ironsap is not rare in Caeloria. But it is controlled. Harvested in specific regions. Traded deliberately. It does not move in small, unnoticed quantities—it travels in caravans, in shipments that require negotiation, protection, approval.
Which means it is accounted for.
Which means someone knows exactly where it is going.
And exactly when it’s received.
Rubi closes the book with a quiet, decisive thud.
She does not linger. Does not gather the scattered texts or restore any semblance of order to the table. The answer was never going to live in the books alone—it lives in the movement of it. In the hands that approve its passage.
Her boots strike the stone faster now as she makes her way deeper into the library, toward the upper tiers where Elandor tends to lose himself among his records.