Liora arrived within the hour, summoned by an urgent message Jasmine had sent the moment Ronan finished reading, and studied the ancient text with the same focused intensity she'd once brought to identifying the Hollowing. She set aside whatever business had occupied her that evening without a word of complaint, a small but telling measure of how seriously she took the discovery.

"I know this scroll," she said finally, her expression carrying a gravity Jasmine hadn't seen from her since the darkest days of the Hollowing crisis. "It's older than nearly everything else in this library. I catalogued it decades ago as an obscure fragment of moon-goddess mythology, incomplete and...