By the time the Captain gave me access to the Inquisition Archives, I'd almost forgotten that I had asked for it. It took him much more than a week, and every time I reminded him, he gave me vague excuses. There were so many things I was doing anyway, the experiments with grandpa, the microscopy work with that stupid button, the books I was studying, that I just stopped bothering him at some point. I was becoming an expert in theoretical magic, in both light and dark branches of it. Maybe the first such expert in Kalmar, since theoretical magic is such a useless field anyway, used more by philosophers and armchair academics than practical mages.
The Captain took me to the outskirts of Ashford in his government-assigned car. The Inquisition building, which held the Archives, had originally
