Chapter 19: What Calandris Knows About the Valar

The fire had been burning for an hour before Calandris sat down beside it.

This is recorded in three independent sources — Thordun's field register, Sam Deeproot's last completed letter, and a fragment of Arathas's notes later identified by archivists as the final entry written in his characteristic compressed hand before the script begins its slow, pressured change. All three accounts agree on the hour, the fire, and the fact of her sitting. They disagree about what she looked like when she did it, in ways that suggest each observer was watching a different layer of the same surface, and that all three layers were true simultaneously.

Thordun records: *Calandris seated herself at the fire at the second hour past full dark. Expression unreadable. Posture consistent with someone who has completed a long internal calculation and arrived at a result she finds neither surprising nor acceptable.*