The Senior Registrar was a woman named Aldric Pen.
Alpha Caius Voss had expected an ancient bureaucrat: someone with decades of wear and a slow, cautious demeanour. But the woman who arrived at his private office at nine o’clock the following morning was barely forty-five. She wore sharp reading glasses pushed back into her grey-streaked hair and carried the absolute, terrifying composure of someone who had spent her life managing volatile archives others considered dangerous. She stepped through his double doors with a heavy leather binder, dismissed her junior clerk at the threshold with a flick of of her wrist, and wore the expression of someone long accustomed to midnight summons from the Alpha.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Registrar Pen," Caius said, his voice a grave
