Chapter 26: The Letter from Merlin — What the Enchantment Was For

The archivist who found it was not looking for it.

This was, Arthur would later think, the only condition under which it could have been found — because a thing that has waited two thousand years for the right reader does not announce itself to people conducting deliberate searches. It announces itself to someone who has misread a catalog reference and taken a wrong corridor in the sub-levels at the wrong hour of the morning, and who stands in front of a sealed alcove wondering how he arrived here and whether the door has always been unlocked.

The archivist's name was Raan Telvi. He was twenty-three years old, a second-year researcher assigned to the cross-referencing of linguistic drift patterns in pre-Republic navigation texts, and he would spend the remainder of his career attempting to explain, in terms the Academy of Coruscant Linguistics would accept for publication, what he had found and what it could not possibly mean. He would not succeed. The papers would be rejected four times and then, on the fifth submission, accepted without comment into a journal no one read, where they would sit quietly for a generation.