Chapter 86 - Chapter 86: Ancient History

The darkness beneath the Vatican was not the absence of light, but the presence of time. It was a cold, heavy silence that had absorbed the whispers of millennia, stored in the endless rows of shelves that stretched into the impenetrable gloom of the Archivum Secretum. The air itself tasted of old knowledge, of vellum, dust, and the deep, damp earth that had sealed these secrets away from the sun.