Chapter 13: Senator Palpatine's Gracious Welcome

The invitation arrived the following morning, delivered by a Senate aide whose shoes were too expensive for an aide's salary — Arthur noted this with the automatic precision of a man who had learned to read courts through their peripheral figures before their principal ones. The parchment was actual paper, cream-weighted and watermarked, not the data-tablet that seemed to serve every other official communication on this world. A deliberate choice. Someone had determined that a man from another age would receive paper as a form of respect.

Arthur sat with the invitation for a long moment in the small room the Temple had assigned him — sparse, functional, with a viewport that looked onto an interior courtyard where young initiates moved through forms in the early light. The paper was good. The handwriting was someone else's, a secretary's careful script, but the phrasing in the final line — *I find myself most curious about a mind that has navigated power in its most ancient forms* — that phrasing was the author's own. No secretary would choose that particular cadence unprompted.

He read it twice more. Then he folded it precisely along its original crease and placed it inside his cloak, against his chest, where it lay against the bandaging Vokara Che had applied four days ago and not yet replaced.