They found the history in a drowned shrine beneath Veyra, in a room that smelled of salt and old incense and the breath of stone that had not seen light in a hundred years.
Sister Corvane was blind. She had been blind for so long that she no longer remembered color, only the weight of it. She was the last of the Hand of Humanity, a faction so old that even its name had worn down to a whisper. She sat on a broken altar while rain tapped the ceiling above like fingers on a coffin lid. Kaelen and the others listened. Lyra wrote. Roland stood guard. Alistair and Lysander kept to the shadows, where they could pretend they were not afraid.
And Sister Corvane told them the legend.
In the age before crowns, before walls, before the first king learned to sharpen a border into a blade, there was a wound in the world.
