Page 38 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

The door at the bottom is stone. It swings without any sound. The room behind it is small, cold, the only cold place in this castle. Shelves are cut into the walls, floor to ceiling on three sides. The parchment stacked in them has gone dark at the edges. It smells like old ink, older leather, and dust nobody has disturbed in a long time. One tapestry hangs on the far wall. It’s small and it’s moving the way the ones upstairs move. There’s a wrongness under all of it. It’s there before I’ve put a hand on a single page.

“I’ve never been in this room,” Lachlan says.

My head comes up.

“I was born in this castle.” He’s looking at the shelves instead of at either of us. “Nobody has ever shown it to me.”

He goes back up the stairs before I can ask him why not.

Valen goes over the room before I’ve opened the first volume. He walks all three walls. His hand goes on the door we came through, then the one at the far end. He stops in front of the wall between them and stands there. He doesn’t tell me what’s in it. There’s no need. He’s stopped moving. The first volumes give me nothing new. A layer taken out from underneath the founding, the same clean edge as Drakoria and as the North Range. Three realms now, cut the same way, with nobody’s name anywhere near the cutting. I stop reading them for tone and start cross-referencing the dates instead.

Valen gets his fingers into the seam of that far wall and pulls the panel out with his hands, muscle stands up on his forearms, his shirt pulls tight across his back. He doesn’t test it first to see whether it will come. Behind it there’s a second shelf. What’s sitting on it is older than anything I’ve touched today. The script on these fights me. I get most of the way through a passage and lose the end of it. Starting again at the top and going slower isn’t something I’ve had to do with a document in decades. Valen leans in over me to see the page. His hair falls forward when he tips his head toward the parchment. He hasn’t shaved since the North Range, it’s coming in darker than the hair on his head. He doesn’t say anything while I work.

Somebody from the household comes down at midday and sets food on the one clear stretch of shelf. Neither of us looks up long enough to find out what it is.

Deep into the oldest of it, there’s a resonance threaded through the parchment itself, thin and cold, running underneath the words instead of in them. I know whose it is.

“He’s been in this room,” I say.

“Recently?”

“No. But he’s been here.”

Valen goes to the door, checks it. Then comes back to the shelf beside me and stays there. From that point on he’s watching the room as much as the pages. I read the next passage out loud. The tapestry moves while I’m reading it. Nobody’s near it. The threads pull loose from the picture they were in and lay themselves into a different one. What comes up is a crowd of people fighting each other. Every face could have come out of a different realm I’ve stood in. On that wall they’re one people. Valen turns to watch it with me. He moves in until his arm is against mine and leaves it there.

“Everybody alive thinks that war is a myth,” I say. “It isn’t.”

He doesn’t answer right away. “No,” he says. “Somebody wrote that down while it was happening.”

I keep reading. Every realm I’ve worked in talks about the founding the way people talk about weather. Something that happened not something that was done. This page has people, and it calls them the founders. The text tells me what the founders were afraid of, then what they did about it. They sealed the survivors of that war inside one world. They took the single nature those survivors held between them and divided it up, one division for each new people. Then they wiped the memory out of everyone they carried away to seed the realms, so nobody who arrived knew what they had been. Not one of the founders is named anywhere on the page. Then a line names Doria. It sits in the list of the new realms, seeded the same way as all the others, out of the same divided people. I read it twice to be certain I’m reading what’s there instead of what I expect. I look up, away from the page. This castle is older than everybody in it. Lachlan calls it his family’s. There’s a whole court eating and talking one floor over my head. Not one of them knows.

Valen’s hand stops on the shelf beside him. He doesn’t move at all for long enough that I count it out, he’s looking at nothing in this room while he does it.

The next passage is lower down the same page, in the same script that has already beaten me twice today. It names my own kind. The founders wrote an instinct into the vampires at the moment they divided everyone - a revulsion at combining with any other bloodline, put into the blood itself, so that it would come up out of a person feeling like nature. I set the book down on the shelf, don’t pick it back up.

Valen turns and looks at me. “Are you okay?”

“It’s my own kind,” I say. “We’re built with an instinct against ever mixing with another bloodline. Bred into us on purpose, generations back, so it would feel like our own idea instead of a leash.” I leave out what that makes me.

One more passage sits at the bottom of that page.

Valen stays where he is while I work. He doesn’t read old Doria. I’ve translated every line out loud since we came down here, I don’t translate this one. What it describes is something I’ve never come across in any record in any realm. A living lock. Divine-blooded, made after the catastrophe, built to go where the seal had cracked, to close it again. While I’m reading it, his signature answers the words.

I’ve known what he is since the first day. Ancient, divine, asleep, no more a wolf than I am. What I’ve never known is what that nature was made to do. Neither has he. It comes up now under the page in front of me, brighter and louder than I have ever read it off him. I close the book slower than I need to.

“What just changed?” Valen asks.

“The material is heavier than I expected.”

That’s true. It’s the least I could hand him without lying to him. We come up out of the archive into the end of the day. The light through the high windows is long and orange across the tapestries. The thrones are still empty. He stays at my shoulder the whole way out, half a step off, near enough that I could put my weight into him without reaching for anything. So, I do. My shoulder finds his while we walk and stays there. He doesn’t say a word about it.

Lachlan is waiting outside the Great Hall doors. He looks at me, then at Valen and doesn’t stop. Whatever he takes off the pair of us, he doesn’t ask about.

“The balcony over the east valley is yours tonight if you want somewhere quiet,” he says. “Nobody goes out on it after dark.”

He’s gone before either of us can thank him. The balcony runs the whole east face of the castle and hangs out over the valley on nothing I can see holding it up. Under my hands the rail is cold. The air has gone cool. Doria’s charge is still working at my skin, thinner now, steady. Below us the valley is going through its colors. It was emerald and gold when we walked in. The gold is burning down. Violet comes up off the water first, then up the far slope, until there’s nothing else left in it.

My eyes hurt from the script. The rest of me hurts from what the script said.