The library bends for no one, yet sometimes its riddles appear in the simplest accidents. What begins as a quiet meal becomes the moment the Sepulcher of Echoes reveals a fragment of its path.
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The air has settled, though none of us speaks of what happened in the aisle. Richard carries the silence like armor. He will not admit aloud what we all saw, yet I can tell the moment carved itself deep into him. The fire in his voice is gone, replaced by something colder, something sharper.
Bianca does not press him further. She only touches her belly more often, as though the child within her needs reassurance or perhaps offers it to her. I see it plain: Richard has not been convinced by argument, nor by her insistence. He has been convinced by fear. And men who bend to fear act quickly.
By the next morning, his resources are already in motion. He scours the Labyrinth with us, speaks with the robed scribes who haunt its upper galleries, and even dispatches messages beyond these halls to contacts I will never meet. His wealth moves quietly but thoroughly, like a tide sweeping through hidden channels. And I cannot help but think that this child, not yet born, already commands an empire's reach.
But it was not Richard who made the first true discovery.
It happened in the simplest of ways. During our meal, Bianca set her book too close to her cup, and a careless elbow toppled it. Coffee spread in an instant, soaking the open pages. She gasped, fumbling for a cloth, dabbing and wiping in a rush. I thought nothing of it. A ruined text in a library of thousands is nothing new.
Yet the Labyrinth stirred.
A sudden draft swept through the hall, though no doors opened, no windows cracked. The book's pages fluttered wildly, flaring as if caught in a storm until they stilled on a single spread. The stain she had tried to wipe away remained, dark and imperfect, yet shaped by accident or design into a rough outline.
We bent over it together, the three of us. The stain had bled through to reveal lines that did not belong to the book's original script. A map, faint but clear enough, stretched across the parchment. And where the coffee mark spread deepest, a circle glowed faintly, highlighting a section of the Pale Expanse.
Bianca whispered, "There. That's where it is."
Richard said nothing, but his jaw tightened. He saw it too.
As for me, I write this with unease. For if the Sepulcher reveals itself through accidents, what hand guides such accidents? Chance does not turn wind into cartography. No. Something else stirs these events, and I begin to wonder whether we seek the Sepulcher, or it seeks us.
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Christopher sees it clearly now: the Sepulcher does not wait to be found. It chooses its moments, its witnesses, even its means of revelation. Richard may claim resources, and Bianca may spill coffee, but Heaven turns both into a map. The question remains whether they follow it, or it follows them.