Quiet had never been so quiet. In the small, stonewalled room a now too-terrified noble had provided, Felix finally allowed the trembles to come out. The bravado he'd displayed in the Scriptorium, the icy calm that had stripped bare a thousand years of lies, was gone, replaced with chilly, hollow exhaustion. His own hands, which had held the Codex so tightly, now shook as he poured a cup of water. The cup rang against the rim of the pitcher, a faint, pathetic sound in the stifling quiet.
The Scriptorium's chaos still echoed through his mind—the wails of scholars, the turn of pages re-writing themselves, the total collapse of Archivist Theron. He had not simply won a trial; he had performed an act of intellectual deicide. He had slain a god named Official History, and the fallout was an et
