Most of Iris's higher functions had returned, and Colte's scratchy handwriting turned print no longer looked like a garbled mess of black on white paper. She could proceed with the story now, whereas the last few days were a torturous replaying of one image and one image only.

The city before it fell to ruins. Before she destroyed it.

The grating of her fingertips against the paper was a soft, intermittent melody above the delicate drone of her desk fan and the chirping insects outside. She glanced out the window, to the dark grassy plains awash with speckled moonlight, and imagined them bathing in ancient sunlight instead.

The origin of the thousand spires was one of sorrow, according to the nameless author. One betrayal too many, and Tetrica, now so disillusioned with the world, turned to the sanctuary of a city made by her own hand. One of Spirits, where shelter and community were the only promises it made.

No rulers. No law. No transaction. These were all things Tetrica had found commonplace amongst the civilisations she once protected. They fostered greed and pride, hunger and wealth.

Only she would preside over it; a formless, hibernating self, uninterested in power or resources. As the city attracted the weary, the curious, and the hopeful, they fed off the abundance of Aether she drew, and built lives underneath her.

Abundance led to complacency, and as though a great, timeless lull befell the city, those in it fell into a trance. More lives started and ended in the shade of her branches, until the outside world became a distant memory, no more real than refracting light beyond the mountain peaks.

It was utopia, or perhaps at least the closest even a borderline deity could achieve. Perhaps a fairy tale was a better description, but she couldn't discredit it; her own memories corroborated the story.

The city, at what Iris could only assume was its height, was warm and tranquil, its inhabitants in a state of half-consciousness. That lull, numbing those in its grasp to life itself, felt like a hallucination, the physical manifestation of a lie. But if her war-weary past self believed that the means weren't as important as the end, then who was she to judge how Tetrica once achieved peace?

Reality was painful. Reality was cruel. But dreams never lasted forever, either. That peace held for hundreds of years, until the outside world came knocking, apparently with the clacking of wooden sandals.

Iris closed the folder, blinking moisture back into her eyes. Sandals. The man with silver hair wore wooden sandals; the only human in the city. It wasn't hard to connect the dots.

Calm and peaceful, almost sagely. Drawing a timeline from his arrival to the city's destruction at the hands of its creator was too far of a leap. The only friendly entity in her hall of foreign memories. The following pages tarnishing that reputation was the straw that broke her already temperamental will to keep reading.

She closed her eyes and listened. The floorboards creaked just outside her room.

"Go to sleep," Evalyn said.

"Okay," Iris replied, turning off her reading light.

"Find the Provenance." It was a phrase that Colte had spent years building the confidence to say in his mentor's presence. "The man who pointed me in your direction—those were his words when he did so. I thought they might be some sort of...motto or codeword, but I haven't heard it since."

The words echoed around the domed library, only emphasising his almost perfect solitude, insulating him from the city only a few metres and a single solid wall away. Reverence barely glanced up from his tome, but Colte could tell he was at least paying attention.

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"Are the Resonances the provenance? Or is it a name, like yours?"

"Both. Well, not exactly. As for the turn of phrase, it means little to us here. Why?"

"Like I said. I heard it once, but I haven't heard it since."

Reverence closed the book before him with a hollow thump and leaned back in his office chair. The glint of candlelight reflected off his reading glasses, and its warm glow danced across the earthy tones of his buttoned vest.

"The Tetrica resonances are called such as they're only a copy of the original text, but calling it a text at all does not do it justice. That city of spires in the first book, you remember it, no?"

"I do," Colte said, his right hand itching for the pipe in his pocket. Reverence's subtle smile proved hard to read. To somebody not seeking any deeper meaning in it, the middle-aged bookkeeper looked as though they were simply reminiscing on a pleasant memory.

"As decentralised as it was, it had a population of record-keepers, Spirits who by their very nature couldn't help but record what they saw. Their methods, however, trump the written word by orders of magnitude."

He tapped his tome dismissively before standing.

"We are similarly decentralised and therefore aren't sure who the first person to translate the resonances was, but they made clear through oral tradition that this was but the tip of the iceberg. The 'provenance' still lay somewhere in the ruins of the city."

"And the person called Provenance? I originally assumed it was you."

Reverence shook his head, meandering around the edges of the library.

"No, no. Somebody more like yourself. Appeared at our doorstep years ago. Thoroughly scarred as he was, that made him dedicated. The vast network he accrued is part of the reason our branch is so widespread today. We had influence in long lineages of power, but thanks to him we made inroads with those not of the aristocracy. The new generation of leaders."

He plucked a volume of the resonances from the shelf and wiped the dust from its pages with a calloused finger and examined it fondly.

"When he learnt the truth of the resonances, the original works became something of an obsession of his. Before long, he set out on a pilgrimage to find them. That was the last we saw of him, although there's been no end to the rumours."

"Why do you think he left?"

Reverence placed the volume back, the woven cover softly grating against its sister tomes.

"We know now thanks to Tetrica that the world's inhabitants followed a misguided path, that no conscious being could intend for a world like this to exist. Provenance thought different. He passed judgement on the Spirit of creation and destruction themselves, and declared their creation was mistaken from the start. He believed the only being capable of rectifying that mistake was Tetrica herself."

Reverence finally turned to Colte, addressing him directly.

"As far as I know, whatever he found of Tetrica's original story must have only reinforced this idea."

Colte nodded. The beating rain outside wormed its way back into his consciousness, trading places with the nerves washing off his shoulders.

The hardest part was over—Provenance was an open topic, it seemed. But coming back for a second round of questions would raise suspicions. If Colte wanted to satisfy his curiosity, it was better to get it over and done with.

"What do you think he wants to do when he finds Tetrica?"

"When?"

Colte winced. "Must be out there somewhere."

Reverence raised an eyebrow but nodded along all the same. "Assuming they're still alive, then…who knows? Perhaps in an ironic twist of fate, he subjects her to the same coercion she suffered in the Resonances."

"And do you think it'll work?"

Reverence paced, working his brain, trying to find the right words. A thought flashed across his face as a brief smile.

"One can certainly dream, can't they?"

Colte nodded. "Thank you for entertaining my request."

"We hold no real secrets," Reverence said, shaking his head. "If circumstances dictate you have an interest in Provenance, then so be it."

Colte furrowed his brow, unable to make out if there was any deeper meaning in Reverence's words. However, there seemed to be none. The sect wasn't one for small talk, and thus Colte didn't know Reverence well. But lies and coercion seemed to be a fact of business only—Colte had never been led astray within the walls of the library.

"Aren't you ever afraid of an information leak? If you're ever exposed, I'm sure there's plenty of people who'd want to give you a piece of their mind."

Reverence frowned and shook their head. "We have friends in high places. Reluctantly it may be, but those capable of destroying us would much rather seek our help. Be too valuable to lose; that's kept us safe for quite some time. So don't worry, Colte. Whatever you do, we won't hold it against you."

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