Part Thirteen – The Study Unveiled
The memory dissolved as Jonathan stepped into the library. The air here was different, older, as though it had been sealed off since that night. The great windows were shuttered, muting the daylight into a dim gray wash that clung to shelves stacked floor to ceiling with books.
His father's presence lingered everywhere. Rows of spines in every discipline—science, medicine, histories of the Fourth War, alchemy and the arcane, even treatises outlawed in polite society—stood like silent sentinels. Raymond Hann had been a collector, a scholar in his private hours. This was his sanctuary, the only place where he ever shed the armor of industry and power.
The mahogany desk, broad enough to seat twelve men, still bore the clutter of his last days: maps unfurled and left half-marked, ink dried to brittle stains, notebooks open as though waiting for him to return. It struck Jonathan how little anyone had dared to disturb it. Not even Heller, ever loyal and meticulous, had touched these relics. Perhaps no one wanted to erase the last imprint of a man whose absence had hollowed the mansion.
Jonathan's fingers traced the grain of the desk. He could almost see his father there, hunched forward in lamplight, muttering to himself as he scribbled equations or sketched out some new design in steel. But he could also feel the change—that in those final weeks, Raymond had not been the same. His words fewer, his temper short, his gaze haunted. Whatever he had been working on, it had consumed him whole.
Jonathan's eyes fell on a corner of the desk where a slip of parchment jutted out from beneath a scatter of books. It was as though the desk itself wanted him to notice.