Aronia lowered the notebook without closing it.
For a while, she simply watched.
Sonder remained seated upon the stone table.
The featherling floated lazily around her before returning for another taste of the honey-like substance. In a strange way, it was ordinary, or even boring.
Someone feeding their pet, nothing more.
It wasn't very often that a dangerous situation looked so mundane and harmless.
Sometimes, but rarely.
The vault was holding; the wards remained stable. Nothing suggested that Blackbird Sonder was attempting or even thinking about escaping. That didn't mean that she wouldn't try, or couldn't.
Aronia had no meaningful estimate of the sorceress's abilities.
She knew that Sonder carried mentally influential shards embedded into her staff.
She knew that she had crossed an unknown distance to reach the Archives.
She knew that she was an immortal banshee. And now, apparently, she was raising a dragon.
That was more than enough unknowns to make any researcher uncomfortable.
The temporary vault had served its purpose. It bought time. To ask questions and to think.
Time to prevent anyone from making a regrettable decision.
But it was not a permanent solution.
Vault Twenty-One had never been intended to contain a person indefinitely.
Nor should it.
Eventually, a proper prison would have to be arranged.
Somewhere designed for dangerous individuals rather than dangerous objects.
The staff would have to be separated from Sonder.
The shards extracted. Individually cataloged and then individually contained.
Preferably several corridors apart. She didn't think it was a good idea to keep them together. She should also separate the two shards that were already together in Vault Seventeen.
The thought alone promised an astonishing amount of paperwork, but that wasn't the thing she minded.
What she minded was how she would remove unknown magical artifacts from Sonder.
She may have been carrying them for years. Maybe longer, maybe shorter. Maybe she only had them for a few days. She couldn't be sure.
In any case, it would be complicated.
Aronia's eyes drifted back to Sonder from her notes.
Sonder dipped a finger into the small jar again.
Sireacht eagerly drifted over, making another tiny, contented coo before settling against her hand.
The sorceress carefully waited for the featherling to finish before offering another small amount.
Appearances had very little value in her profession. Looking harmless proved nothing.
Still, she found herself hoping, however cautiously, that this was one of the rare occasions where appearances were not entirely misleading.
Hope, however, was not a containment procedure.
Until she understood what the shards truly were, what they wanted, and how much influence they held over Blackbird Sonder, caution remained the only sensible course of action.
So, Aronia started with the most simple and direct way to gather the information she wanted.
She asked the sorceress.
"Sonder, do you know what these shards are?"