Chair of Tongues & Testaments · The Corvarium
Two Hundred Pages No One Has Ever Been Able to Read
with Professor Rosalind Ashdown
Four candles are already lit, in mismatched brass holders, when the room finds its seats - the low smell of melted wax already thick over the older smell of paper and dust, though the lamps in the Corvarium work perfectly well tonight, as they do most nights. You feel it before you even sit down: whatever this room is doing, it is doing on purpose.
She has a book open on the lectern - not the original, obviously; a facsimile, printed carefully enough that a student in the second row briefly, gladly, believes it might be real vellum, and leans in without quite meaning to. Professor Ashdown is looking down at it with an expression none of them has seen on her before.