Chapter 30: How to Sell Recycled Paper Apocalypse
The city was just waking up when I left Lina's house with a full stomach, clean boots — for the first time in days — and a head pounding with dangerously hopeful ideas.
I had managed to score some warm bread, two slightly depressing slices of cheese, a hard-boiled egg (which I swear was gray on the inside), and, perhaps more importantly, the ridiculous feeling that everything was going to work out.
Lina had handed me the food with a look that suggested she was still considering poisoning me, but she gave it to me anyway. Maybe out of pity. Maybe because feeding me was easier than getting me to shut up.
I accepted it gratefully and chewed like a man who had escaped the gallows and still got breakfast. Even though the food was absurdly simple, after living off leaves and fruit for who-knows-how-long, it felt like a banquet blessed by the gods.
Ashveil's streets had that familiar smell of warm stone and stale yeast that only half-forgotten towns seem to have. The market was opening slowly, the beggars were reclaiming their fixed spots, and the newspaper vendor on the corner of the well was already shouting out reheated headlines like they were prophecies.
But I was on another wavelength.
I had come back with proof. Real proof. Corrupted runes, old contracts, sealed records — and even a chatty goblin willing to testify, although technically hidden in a young woman's basement mid-existential crisis. This wasn't just a good story. It was dynamite. It was history. It was power.
I reached Gideon Marlow's doorstep with the confident stride of someone carrying inconvenient truths, needing only pen and paper to set the city on fire.
Knock knock.
The door creaked open — as always — and there he was: old Marlow, tired eyes, shirt reeking of newsprint and yesterday's coffee, and his usual expression of a man who didn't trust anyone cheerful before 9 a.m.
"Morning," he said, with all the energy of a damp rock.