Satisfied that the replication spell is underway, he returns to the basket for a nub of wax, which he drags across the table. He taps each in turn, and as they flare and disappear, he looks back over his shoulder to where a misty squarish shape has appeared on one of the shelves. Once the book-looking well-loved, but not overly fragile-is securely laid out, he takes four small silver coins from the basket, each polished to a mirror, and places them at its corners. Carefully, the archivist carefully lifts the journal out of its packing crate. On one of these, his supplies have been laid out: a basket of spell components, a notebook, an archival pen. There aren’t many shelves, just those for the most recently replicated documents, and only a few tables. Gentle magical lights glow in sconces against the wall, bright enough to read by but too dim to do any damage to even the oldest paper. Several monks have prepared the smallest reading room for him. To uncover a new primary source more than eight decades after the events of the Ruidian Solstice is unexpected and thrilling. The discovery of a new item belonging to a member of Bell’s Hells is far from an everyday occurrence, and as the foremost scholar of Predathos, he has read, cataloged, annotated, and written papers on every relevant document that has made its way to the Rexxentrum archive. When the archivist first opened the shipment, unfolded the accessions paperwork, and saw Laudna’s journal listed there among the contents, he cleared the rest of his day.
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