The second Thursday session started differently from the first.
Professor Seris had rearranged the desk between their sessions — the books were the same, the restricted documents in the same locked drawer, but the surface had been cleared of everything except two items. A single document he didn't recognize and a cup of tea that had been sitting long enough to stop steaming.
She was already reading when he arrived. She finished the paragraph before acknowledging him.
"Sit," she said. "I want to talk about methodology before we touch anything else."
He sat.
"You've been reading the Seven Wars annotated edition as a historical text," she said. "That's the wrong approach."
"What's the right approach."
"Read it as a legal document." She set down what she'd been reading. "Every historical record produced by an institution is primarily a legal document — it establishes what the institution claims happened. The history isn't the point. The claim is the point."
He processed this. "Then the gaps aren't oversights."
"The gaps are the most legally significant parts." She picked up the document on the desk and slid it across to him. "Read the third paragraph. Don't draw conclusions. Just read it."
He looked at it. Old handwriting — not archaic, just pre-standardization. He could read it but slowly.
"I don't have authorization for this," he said.
"No," she agreed. "You don't."
He read the third paragraph.
The language was careful — legal language, technically accurate while communicating as little as possible. Something was being described. Not an outcome. A condition. Something that existed before the twelve gods' intervention in the Erasure War that the official record didn't account for.
He read it again.
He wasn't sure what he was looking at. The language was too careful, too deliberately constructed around something it wasn't saying directly. He could feel the shape of what was underneath it without being able to name it.
He looked up.
"What is this describing," he said.
"That," Seris said, "is the right question." She reached across and took the document back. "Come back next Thursday with four things: who benefits from the official version, what would make the gaps deliberate, what the document protects its author from, and what it would look like if it were telling the truth."
"You're not going to tell me what it says."
"I just did. You read it."
"I don't know what I read."
"Yes you do." She locked the document in the drawer. "You know the shape of it. You just don't have the context to name it yet. Get the context."
He left the session with his notes and a question he couldn't fully form yet.
Something in the Erasure War chapter that the official record built its entire claim around — and a pre-standardization fragment that described a condition the claim didn't account for. He didn't know what the condition was. He knew it mattered.
He walked back through the academy turning it over.
You look like someone handed you a locked box, Nythera said.
Someone did.
Are you going to open it.
He thought about the shape of what he'd read. The careful language around something that wasn't being said.
When I have the key, he said.
He kept walking.