Vistra found it on an Emberday morning, three days after nothing happened.
Nothing, in this context, meant: no strategic log filed. No divine notification. No whisper-quartz dispatch from the garrison. No message from the Crucible's wildlife assessment committee. No addendum to the institutional creature management protocol that the Natural Affairs Bureau updated quarterly and that Vistra read cover to cover because the alternative was managing divine creatures based on information that was three months out of date.
Nothing happened. And then: a small wet thing was sitting on the flat stone at the edge of the dock.
She'd been writing.
The new Manual — the one that started where Morthan's had ended and where Morthan's hidden journal had begun — occupied her mornings the way the old Warden duties had occupied her grandfather's: with the particular mixture of obligation and obsession that came from recording something no one else was going to record if she didn't.
