Page 77 of Ashen Souls

She blinked at me. “Sign in. No bags past the lockers. Pencils only.”

We stowed our things and stepped past the security gate into the main stacks.

Long wooden tables waited beneath harsh fluorescent lamps. Beyond them, a maze of towering metal shelves stretched into the shadows. Boxes and bound ledgers were stacked everywhere, labeled with dates and districts that meant nothing to me yet.

I didn’t have a search term. I didn’t even have a starting year.

I stopped in the aisle, overwhelmed by the endless rows of paper.

Whatever Daeren was... whatever bound us together... the proof of it was in here.

I could feel it.

20

By the time the lamps above the tables flickered for the third time, my neck ached and my eyes burned from reading too many names that meant nothing.

Harper dropped another heavy folder onto the table. A cloud of stale dust puffed into the air.

“I swear,” she muttered, “if one more nineteenth-century clerk misspells the same family name three different ways, I’m starting a feud with the dead.”

We’d been at it for hours. Birth records, land deeds, half-decayed town registries written in looping ink by men who clearly believed clarity was a moral failing. Vesbridge existed in fragments: renamed streets, vanished districts, churches built on top of older foundations.

Nothing about sigils or demons.

Nothing about me.

Harper slid a thin, battered ledger out from under a stack of zoning permits, pushing it across the wood. The leather cover was cracked, the title stamped in faded gold lettering.

Foundational Accounts — Pre-Charter Vesbridge

Beneath my sleeve, the skin of my left wrist flared with a sudden heat. The sigil woke up, throbbing against my pulse like a second heartbeat.

I reached out, my fingers hovering over the cracked leather before I opened the cover.

The pages were stiff, and the handwriting inside was different from the neat, bureaucratic cursive we’d been staring at all afternoon. The ink was faded brown, the language archaic and strange.

Harper leaned closer, squinting at the page. “What does it say?”

I traced the line with my finger, translating the old spelling as I went.

“Before the breaking of the world, this soil belonged to Vesper—the ruling heart of Aethrya.”

“Aethrya,” I whispered. “It was real. It was an empire. The most powerful of the old realms.”

The rest of the text was fractured. Broken pieces of lore with no context. It described Aethrya as a place where magic shaped law, and law shaped reality. A millennium ago, its society was built on two absolute pillars: Light and Order.

Harper exhaled, sitting back in her chair. “Okay. So Vesbridge wasn’t founded. It was… built over the ruins.”

“Yes.” I turned the page.

There was mention of a collapse. A severing. A sudden withdrawal of magic from that realm. But there were no details. No dates, no names of who caused the severing. Just a gaping hole in the history.

“That’s it?” Harper broke the silence. “That’s all they give us?”

I flipped to the final written page. The rest of the ledger was blank.

“Nothing.”