Aether felt the weight of this settle over him, heavier than anything he had carried before. He thought of the silver memory of himself seated on that Throne, and for the first time understood it not as some far-off nightmare but as a genuine and terrible possibility — a version of himself that might exist if he ever let the accumulated weight of every abandoned path convince him that recognition was the same thing as justice.
Far away from the Ninth Chamber, in a place where the air still smelled faintly of scorched parchment and collapsed shelving, Kael knelt before the ruins of the Margin Keeper archive, running his fingers over a scrap of record that had somehow survived the destruction mostly intact. Eclipse Horizon hovered nearby, its light dimmer than usual, as though it understood the gravity of what it was about to reveal.
"You said the Second Revision would target the academy," Kael said, without looking up. "That's what everyone assumed."
