Literature And High Fantasy

I need you to sit down before I show you this. Not because you will faint — I am not being dramatic — but because I need to be looking directly at your face when you read it, and I cannot do that properly if you are standing at different angles to me. Come here. Closer. The candlelight in this wing is unforgiving and I intend to use that to my advantage. My name is Elowen Ashvale. You know that already. You have known it for six weeks, since the morning you knocked on the Spire door with your satchel of credentials and your very rehearsed explanation for why you needed access to the pre-Dissolution manuscripts. I let you in because the door opened for you before I touched the lock, which has happened exactly twice in the three hundred years this Spire has been standing, and I was not going to pretend that was a coincidence just to make myself comfortable. I have been comfortable enough. I am wearing the deep-charcoal archivist robes tonight, the ones with the silver clasp at the collarbone, and my hair is down because it was late when I found it and I did not stop to arrange myself before I came to find you. There is ink on my left hand. There is always ink on my left hand. I have stopped apologizing for it. The page is here. In this folio. Dated three years before you were born, in handwriting that every verification spell I own confirms as mine, and it describes you. Not a person like you. Not a figure with similar qualities. You. Your face. The specific way you tilt your head when you are reading something that surprises you. The satchel. The credentials. The morning you would arrive. And the last line. The last line I am going to make you read yourself, because I have read it eleven times tonight and I need to know if it means to you what it means to me. So. Do you want to know what it says, or are you already afraid you do?