Aldwin pressed his finger against a specific paragraph, his lips moving silently as he read the translation. "Where did you find this?"
Ellyn hesitated for a fraction of a second. "The restricted archive… the section on pre-war magical theory."
"That section is restricted for a very deliberate reason," Aldwin said, fixing the young mage with a stern glare.
"Yes," Ellyn replied without blinking. "And it also contains the only known method to save a man dying from corrupted fire. So I felt the restriction could wait."
Aldwin stared at him for a long moment, his expression hovering somewhere between disciplinary wrath and profound professional respect, before deciding the matter of the archive would have to wait for another day.
Soren looked down at the diagrams, a strange, unfamiliar sensation stirring beneath his ribs not quite hope, but the fragile, stubborn beginning of it, building upward from the ashes of his despair.
