Two men also did not sleep that night.
One was Yannis Fenn who devoured the novel page by page until dawn bled through the curtains.
The other was X.
Yannis sat alone in the dim glow of his laptop, jaw tight, eyes burning from hours of reading the condensed version of the book. He skipped the fillers.
He hunted for the parts that mattered — Alaric and Lara's coronation, the velvet-and-steel politics of court life, the aftermath of crowns placed on willing heads. The journey to other places.
Every line landed like a quiet detonation.
The details matched. Too well.
Every impossible thing Lara had told him — the palace, the battles, the rituals, the suffocating weight of power — it was all here, dressed up as fiction.
"So this," he muttered, voice rough from disuse, "is the story she's been reading… and her damaged hippocampus just filed it under her long term memory."
