Cresswell sat long into the night. His candles were little more than wicks now. Barely alive and casting more shadow than light. Scrolls littered an oak table with centuries of patina darkening the wood.

His chamber, like that of The Amanuensis, was devoid of spies. No secret tunnels or listening posts dwelt behind the walls. His scrying glass remained covered lest it betrayed him.

The crow had morphed into something more. Old fragments hinting at dark times soon after chronomancy appeared. Nothing firm, just touched upon what pieces he could join together. So much was heavily marked, as if someone, at some time, was trying to redact information.

All he could deduce was that out of war came peace. Nothing unusual in such an outcome, but here it was, the entrapment of a dark sorcerer.

At least, a fabled conjurer’s bubble is what he interpreted from the glyphs, a sphere designed to snare someone and cast them out.

One old script defied translation. By Cresswell, at least. My first thoughts were that it predated the Elder Magi. Nuances in the runes used. Nothing within his archive had anything close. Its edges showed restoration. They were cracked and twisted leather that defied age. At some point, a skilled scholar attempted to stabilise the medium upon which the markings sat, using a new ink to overlay what faded with time. If it was an older civilisation, that was a more significant loss than the Elders.

It looked important. Why else would an artisan take so much care to preserve this particular scroll and insert it into his Guilds library, lost in time, like so many artefacts, to be unearthed centuries later? Would it not have been sensible also to include the mechanism to translate it?

His mind wandered to the problem. What if it did? If it were a long-established warning or description of the crow, it was far older than anything he knew of. Logic told him it must have a companion, written by the same Scribe that restored this scroll. Why do that if they never understood what it meant? Why then place it inside the one Guild that could change history? One where an aberration in its ranks could twist time when deployed to correct an error. If it rested within the thaumaturgical archives, it would be part of a collective history and something to research by scholars more learned than him. Perhaps more documents lay unread throughout the Keep, even in the Vault. Not lay unread, he thought, hidden.

That was when his eyes widened, the Vault.

Could this scroll be read from within its Library? If it genuinely recorded everything, would this type of tune exist somewhere? It might even have the record of who laboured to save this one and who placed it here.