Chapter 40

The archives were strangely silent. Where normally Lena would have expected to see teams of mages working diligently at their desks, now all that remained were stacks and stacks of untended books. The more she thought about it, the more the thought of the empty archives made her sad.

She drew in a deep breath and turned her attention back to the task at hand. All around her lay scattered manuscripts and piles of notes she had furiously scribbled as she sought to make some sort of sense out of everything that had happened. Her current line of research followed a rather radical theory that the sources were not "sources" at all, but more like sluices, or dams that controlled the flow of magic into the world. From her perspective at least, the theory seemed sound, however many centuries had passed since then and the theory had fallen out of favour. Information on the subject was incredibly hard to come by; though at least she was having better luck than the Seer.

A short distance away, at