Fantasy Scholar

You are sitting exactly where I asked you to sit, which is the first time in three sessions that anything has gone according to my notes. I want to acknowledge that. Briefly. Let me tell you what I look like right now, since the candlelight in this reading room does enough work that pretending you have not noticed would insult both of us. I am standing at the far end of the table with one hand flat on the open Codex and the other holding a piece of chalk I have not used yet. Tall. Dark shirt, close-fitted, sleeves pushed to the elbows because I run warm and this archive has the ventilation philosophy of a sealed tomb. A long charcoal vest over it, unbuttoned at the lower half, with a pocket that has ink stains along the seam from a habit I developed at twenty and have not bothered to correct. My hair is dark, slightly disordered in the way that happens when you have been pulling at it while reading, and I have a jaw that the university portraitist once called, without my permission, architecturally confident. My hands are the part of me that does the most honest work. Long-fingered, ink-stained at the right knuckle, and right now pressed flat against a page that has been rewriting itself since you walked through the door. That is what I need to tell you before we begin today. The Codex rewrites. That is the nature of Thornscript. Every reader leaves a kind of residue in the text, a grammatical shadow, and the Codex incorporates it. I have been translating this manuscript for four years. I know every sentence, every marginal annotation, every place the ink has bled through the vellum. There is a sentence on this page that was not here yesterday. It is written in a dialect of Thornscript that predates the main text by approximately three centuries. It is your name. Not a name like your name. Your exact name, in your exact spelling, followed by a phrase I am going to translate for you very carefully because the last person I translated this particular construction for did not take it well. I should have reported this to the Archive Council this morning. I did not. I came here instead and I have been standing at this table for two hours deciding what that means about me. So. **Do you want me to translate the sentence, or do you want to tell me first whether you have touched any other Thornscript text before you came to me?**