The next hour passed in a blur of urgency Rhys could only stand at the edge of, watching Seraphine transform in front of him from the tired, guarded traveler he'd come to know into someone entirely in command.
She moved through the courtyard issuing orders with a calm, clipped authority that silenced the scattered panic around her almost on contact, organizing search parties, questioning guards, demanding a full account of the three days since Isolde's disappearance with a focus that left no room for anyone to argue.
Rhys stayed out of it, unable to offer anything useful to a House crisis he had no standing in, and found himself, not for the first time, deeply grateful he wasn't the one who had to hold all of this together.
It was nearly dark by the time she returned to him, exhaustion finally showing through the cracks of her composure.
"The council wants to seal the archive further and wait for a proper investigation," she said, low enough that only he could hear. "I don't intend to wait. Whatever Isolde was doing in there, whoever took her, the trail only gets colder the longer we sit on our hands arguing about protocol."
"Can you actually get us in?"
"With Isolde missing, I'm the highest-ranking heir currently present. The council can object all they like. They can't stop me outright, not without a vote they don't have time to hold tonight." A tired, determined edge crept into her voice. "Come on. Before someone works up the nerve to try anyway."
The archive sat beneath the main hall, accessed through a narrow stair that curved down into darkness lit only by pale, silver lanterns that burned with the same faintly unnatural light Rhys had noticed at the waystation days before.
The door at the bottom stood exactly as the guard had described, wide open, the heavy lock hanging useless and undamaged from its hasp, as though whoever left had simply walked out rather than forced their way through.
Inside, the archive was nothing like the libraries Rhys had imagined. Shelves lined the walls, yes, but the records they held weren't simple books and scrolls. Some were, but many more were small, sealed crystal vessels, faintly luminous, containing something that shifted and moved inside them like captured smoke, or captured memory.
He walked slowly between the rows, careful not to touch anything, the quiet hum of dozens of preserved moments pressing against his awareness in a way he couldn't quite name, not sound exactly, closer to the pressure of being watched by something that wasn't watching at all.
Dust hung undisturbed in the still air near the older shelves, decades untouched, while the section nearer the back showed clear, recent wear, footprints in the fine layer of grit along the floor, more than one set, though only one pair looked recent enough to matter.
"Someone else has been down here," Rhys said quietly, crouching to study the marks. "Not just Isolde. There's a second set of prints, older than hers, half worn away."
"The Steward's key holder, likely." Seraphine frowned, following his gaze. "Or whoever's holding it now, since Odessa told us the position's been vacant for months."
"Veil-preserved accounts," Seraphine explained quietly, noticing his confusion. "Some truths my House decided were too dangerous, or too easily altered, to trust to plain ink. A written record can be forged. A memory, properly preserved, is harder to fake convincingly."
"Isolde could read these?"
"Isolde, and whoever holds the Steward's key alongside her, could access this room. Reading them requires more of the Art than simple access, though. My family's gift runs deep in her. Deeper than in me." A note of old, complicated feeling passed through her voice before she pushed it aside. "Let's find out what she was looking for."
They didn't have to search long. A section of shelving near the back of the archive had been disturbed recently, vessels pulled and examined and set aside in a rough, urgent pile that spoke of someone searching with real purpose rather than idle curiosity, and beside the pile, on a small reading table, sat a single vessel already broken open, its contents long since dispersed into whatever memory it had held, empty now except for a folded slip of parchment tucked beneath it, Isolde's own hand, hurried and slightly uneven, as though written in a rush.
Seraphine unfolded it with careful hands, and Rhys watched her expression shift as she read, confusion sharpening quickly into something closer to shock.
"What does it say?"
She didn't answer immediately, rereading it, her hands beginning to tremble slightly around the parchment's edges.
"It's not about the erasure," she said finally, quietly. "Not directly. It's about a specific bloodline record, one she'd apparently been searching for across multiple broken vessels before she found the right one." She looked up at him, something raw and unsettled in her expression. "Rhys, it names your family line directly. Ashgrave, and the bloodline behind it, going back generations before the erasure ever happened."
"What does it say about them?"
Seraphine hesitated, glancing back down at the parchment as though the words might have changed since she last looked.
"It says the erasure wasn't only about burying a dangerous Art." Her voice had gone very quiet. "It says there was an agreement, generations ago, between the Thirteenth Art's original bloodline and several of the Houses, including mine, and that the man you knew as your guardian wasn't simply protecting the last heir out of guilt over refusing an order."
"Then what was he doing?"
She looked up at him fully now, and whatever she saw in his face made her hesitate one final time before answering.
"According to this," she said, "Elric Voss wasn't only your protector, Rhys. Before his exile, before any of this, the record names him as one of the original architects of the agreement that led to the erasure in the first place."
The words landed slow, then all at once, the way a wound sometimes did, no pain at first and then everything at once. Rhys sat down heavily on the edge of the reading table, the room's faint, humming light suddenly too bright, too close, pressing in on him from every shelf at once.
"He never told me," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "Seventeen years, and he never once told me he'd had a hand in it himself."
"Maybe he meant to." Seraphine's voice was gentle, careful, watching him with an expression that held more understanding than pity. "Maybe he ran out of time before he found the right moment. I don't know, Rhys. I only know what this parchment says, and it isn't the whole of anything yet, only the start of it."