Chapter 784: The Patterns Are Showing
Chapter 784: The Patterns Are Showing
Zion watched Tharionson carefully. "My Prince, we need the contents of Article Seven.""I know," Tharionson said. "Everything turns on it. The first Crescent woman’s execution, Serah’s case, the missing records, these deaths. Whatever was buried there is not dead. Mother said as much."
They returned to the shelves with renewed urgency, searching not for clean copies now, but for fragments. Obsolete summaries. Clerk notations. Drafts. Transfer records. Legal commentaries. Internal disputes. Anything that had not been important enough to erase or had been hidden under a title too dull for whoever altered the main records to find.
Hours passed in the archive chamber.
The afternoon light that had existed when they entered was long gone from the world above, and the lamps around them burned lower, casting warm pools of light over open pages and leaving the shelves beyond them in patient shadow. Dust gathered on Tharionson’s sleeves. His eyes burned. Zion removed his coat at some point and draped it over a chair before continuing through a row of administrative ledgers so old that half the labels had faded into brown scratches.
They found many useless things. References to execution protocol. Debates over whether rank should affect containment conditions. Crescent objections to Solara’s handling of royal privacy. Solarian objections to Crescent-appointed examiners entering Ilis. Lists of destroyed drafts that were probably not destroyed at all, merely moved. Nothing gave them Article Seven.
Then Zion called from the far table.
"My Prince."
Tharionson crossed the chamber. Zion had opened an old ledger that seemed, at first glance, to be nothing more than a summary of inter-kingdom legal handling during the years after the Third Demon War. But on one page, beneath an abbreviated reference to Severance supplemental authority, there was a partial phrase written in formal summary language.
Paternal Identification and Bloodline Containment.
Tharionson leaned over the page. "Article Seven?"
"It does not say the article number directly," Zion said, "but the placement and reference code match the missing section."