They found the second name on Verin's list buried deep in the bone-sunk ledger of Magra Vale's personal archive: Elia Varn, a former apprentice from the last generation before the Purge. Her name had been thought lost, scratched out from every registry, her life swallowed in the fire that took the Varn enclave north of the Frostline.
Except it hadn't.
Elia had survived. And more than that—she'd vanished on purpose.
The journey north was short, but harsh. Fog rolled down the ridgelines like something with weight and memory. Ashra guided the group over cracked stone bridges and long-forgotten paths, her knives never far from reach. Liran kept the pace brisk, alert to every shadow.
They found Elia not in ruins but in a forge.
The old ironworks of Fenhollow stood half-collapsed at the edge of a gully, its chimney cracked and weeping soot. But the fire still burned. Smoke curled thinly from the stacks, and at its heart they found her: a wiry woman with burn scars on her arms and sparks in her eyes, working molten metal like it was clay.
She saw them coming.
"Thought it'd be one of you lot eventually," she said without turning. "Carrion? No? Hm. Then that bastard's ghost must be cleverer than I thought."
Corwin stepped forward. "We're here about the Circuit."
Elia stopped her hammer mid-swing. Turned. And looked directly at him. Not past him. Not through.
At.
"You've got Verin's eyes," she said. "And his curse. Poor boy."
What followed was half-meeting, half-interrogation. Elia tested them—words, intent, knowledge. At one point she tossed a live ember at Corwin, who caught it without thinking, his fingers shielding it with alchemical pressure.
She smiled at that.
Eventually, she let them into the back of the forge. There, in a vault dug into the earth itself, lay the fragments of her work: incomplete glyph lattices, scrolls sealed in brass tubes, a fragment of the Philosopher's Circuit etched into an orichalcum disk.
"It doesn't lead to a place," she told them, touching the disk. "It opens one. A conceptual door. When you find the rest, the world will shift."
Liran frowned. "Shift how?"
"Like memory returning."
They stayed that night. Took notes. Copied what she would allow, memorized the rest.
But something followed them home.
Liran noticed it first: a scent