Art’s POV
In the basement room beneath the old human courthouse, accessible only through a loading dock that hasn’t been used since the nineties. The single overhead bulb flickers, casting long, jittery shadows across rows of broken shelves.
The local archive smells like dry rot and forgotten things.
Rowan is hunched over an enormous oak table in the center of the room. He doesn’t look up when I walk in. He just keeps smoothing out the edges of a massive, yellowed book.
"You're early," he grunts.
"You said sunrise."
"I said before sunrise. There's a difference." He taps the paper with the stump of his left hand. "Come look at this."
I walk over. The table is covered in ward maps. Not the modern digital overlays the guild uses, but the original hand-drawn schematics from when the
