The next morning, Eshaan did not return to the old archive.
For the first time since he had begun searching through Somadeva's records, he understood that another hour spent pulling manuscripts from shelves would probably give him nothing except another name, another date, or another piece of parchment that raised more questions than it answered. The words written by Somadeva had changed the problem itself. The Seats are not the repositories. They are the custodians. The repositories move.
He had read the sentence so many times that he could almost see the old scholar writing it.
Eshaan sat near the eastern window of his chamber with the copied records spread across the low table before him. Morning sunlight fell across the pages, illuminating the uneven ink and the small corrections made by different hands over the years. Beside them lay the letter from Mahesh, the wrapping cloth sent by Haridatta, and the broken piece of wax bearing the strange crossing-lines pattern.
