He kept reading, deeper into the night than he meant to, until his lantern oil was half gone and his eyes ached from the cramped, urgent handwriting of Margin Keepers long dead. And then, tucked into the endpapers of the last volume on the shelf, he found something that made the cold of the chamber feel suddenly much colder.
A single loose sheet, recent — the ink still faintly sharp, not decades old like everything around it. A schedule, written in a code he recognized only because he had seen fragments of it before, on papers he was never supposed to have found.
*The Final Revision — commencement at the closing moments of the Foundation Festival.*
No further detail. No explanation of what a "Final Revision" actually was. Only the name, and the date, and beneath it, a small symbol he had seen once before, carved into a doorframe he had walked past a hundred times without understanding what it meant.
Kael sat very still in the dark for a long moment.
