POV: Elara, Aethelburg Archivist (Third Class)
Dust motes danced in the slanted light of a reading lamp, the only movement in the Aethelburg's "Restricted Prophecies" wing. For Elara, this was not a side quest; it was her entire world. While others chased crystal shards, she chased context. A prophecy was a puzzle box of verb tenses and ambiguous pronouns, and she was the lockpick.
The main story was a noisy, distant thing. She'd heard the rumors, of course. A seeker was coming, carrying a fragment of the Crystal. It meant the Archives would soon be invaded by brutes and bureaucrats. But for now, the silence was hers.
Her current quest was a personal one: cross-referencing the "Canticle of the Sundered Star" with tax records from the Third Magitek Revolution. The prophecy spoke of a "heart of glass that beats in a chest of rust." The bureaucrats of the Revolution had meticulously recorded every magitek augmentation licensed in the Under-District. If she could find a record of a core heart-replacement using a crystalline focus... she could pin a metaphor to a person.
It was meticulous, painstaking work. And it was interrupted by the sound of too-confident footsteps.
She peered over her stack of folios to see a team of individuals who were very clearly not scholars. They moved with a patrolman's gait, their clothes too new, their eyes scanning the shelves not for knowledge, but for sightlines and cover. They were setting a trap. For whom, she didn't know, but their presence was a desecration.
One of them, a woman with severe features and ash-grey hair, approached her desk. "Archivist. We require the original schematics for the Spire District's structural wards."
Elara pushed her spectacles up her nose. "Requisition form 88-B, signed by a Director of the Magitech Institute or a Prelate of the Aethelburg Council, submitted in triplicate," she recited, her voice barely a whisper.
The woman's smile was thin and dangerous. "We are the Institute."
"Then you, of all people, should know the procedures," Elara said, meeting her gaze. "The forms exist for a reason. To separate the diligent from the disruptive."
The woman, Commander Valeris, held her gaze for a moment too long before turning away. The message was clear: the Archives were now a battlefield.
This changed her side quest. It was no longer just an academic exercise. The "heart of glass" was coming here, into a trap. Her research wasn't just about understanding prophecy anymore; it was about preventing it. Or, perhaps, ensuring it.
She waited until the faux-scholars had dispersed into the shadows of the stacks. Then, she pulled a fresh piece of vellum from her drawer. Not a requisition form. A map.
With a fine-nibbed pen, she began to draw. She charted not only the physical layout of the Restricted Wing but its psychic topography—the shelves that resonated with abjuration magic, the reading nooks that were dead zones for scrying, the old servant's passage that didn't appear on any official schematic. It was a map for a seeker who valued knowledge over brute force.
Her side quest had converged with the main story. She was no longer just an archivist. She was the keeper of the exit strategy. She finished the map, blotted it carefully, and slid it inside a volume of benign poetry entitled "Odes to a Tranquil Heart." She placed it on a cart of books to be re-shelved, in a section dealing with foundational myths.
The trap was set. But so was the key. Let the brutes have their ambush. She had just given the story a new path to walk. The highest peaks of history, she knew, were often scaled with the help of those who never left the library.