Winter light slanted through the high windows of Riverbend's aging library, dust motes swirling over shelves groaning beneath crumbling books. Sharath sat between rows of scholars, his knees barely reaching the seat's edge, listening to the senior scribe enumerate the realm's knowledge crisis.
"We are running out of parchment," the scribe said gravely. "Books rot faster than new ones are copied. The hemp presses in Eldridge provide only coarse, brittle sheets. We are losing history as fast as we make it."
Sharath's mind ticked through options. Parchment, laboriously scraped from animal skins, required an entire sheep to produce a single octavo. Ink faded; folklore survived only in song or worn memory. Priests and magistrates begged for improved supplies, while schools rebuffed new students for want of learning materials. No wonder literacy rates crept like moss.
"Why not increase mill output?" asked a young grammarian.
Master Henrik shook his head. "The river froze for a fortnight. Besides, it takes five laborers a day to beat enough pulp for just twenty sheets. The bottleneck is fiber, not force."
Sharath considered plant wastes: straw, nettle, even ground bark. His grandfather Konrad, watching, whispered: "Profits lie in solving shortages. A clever supply beats all the clever scribes."
That night in the cold workshop, Sharath experimented. He boiled pine chips, pulped with hot lye, then pressed the slurry between planks under a cast-iron weight. Mixing in ground cotton rag improved texture; adding alum brightened the dry sheet. Each small batch yielded a brittle, yellowed page—until he remembered the importance of washing away impurities.
At dawn, he presented ten mismatched pages to the scholars. Tentative fingers touched each, testing fold and tooth. Scribes tried writing with ink and quill. The consensus: rough fluff, but more promising than treated sheepskin. The head librarian, an ancient scholar named Halvik, declared, "If you can improve yield and smoothness, we can double the school's intake by Michaelmas."
Racing against hunger for learning, Sharath met with millers, tanners, and dyers. He scrutinized papermaking treatises imported from distant kingdoms and compared production rates, raw materials, climate, and water quality. Down at Riverbend's weir, he sketched plans for a vertical beater—one that paddled and sliced, rather than merely pounding.
Weeks of trial yielded a variable process: too much lye weakened fibers, too little clogged screens. But, as snow melted, Sharath's persistence paid off. A new sheet—pale, flexible, at last free of yellow stains—emerged. The first true "SK Sheet" was born.
Market reaction was swift. The first batch sold out in hours. Not only temple schools, but merchants, magistrates, and even rural notaries clamored for more. Scribes reported easier pen strokes; students praised quick-drying pages that turned easily and did not tear when erased. The price, while still higher than parchment, plummeted by half within three months.
Konrad negotiated contracts with hemp growers and flax farmers. Sharath's name spread across the province, synonymous with promise and invention. And for each new pallet delivered, Riverbend's world grew wider: songs collected from the elderly, herbal manuals from hillwise midwives, tax ledgers ten times thicker.
The next chapter in the kingdom's story, it seemed, would be written not on dry skins but on sheets born from river, field, and relentless thinking