Lucius regained his conscious self after a while of quietly sobbing. The minute of silence was over, and now they needed to get back to work, after all emotions and rational thinking never worked together.
They moved to what remained of the table at the corner of the room.
Lucius set the journal down on the surface and opened it carefully, the wrapped cover resisting before giving way. The burned edges of the pages crumbled slightly at his touch, small dark fragments falling away from the margins.
He turned past the destroyed front sections, the first dozen or so pages were gone entirely, consumed from the outside in, leaving only partial lines at the centre of each page where the fire hadn't reached
Whatever Cophey had written at the beginning was lost, erased forever.
He kept turning until he reached the surviving sections and stopped.
