The Substitute Luna’s Revenge
I didn’t get the chance to answer him, because the study door opened again, and one of the archive guards came in half out of breath, holding something wrapped in a strip of cloth like it might crumble if he breathed on it wrong.
“Alpha. We found this behind a collapsed shelf in the restricted archive. No title. No author.” He set it on my desk like it burned to hold. “I thought you’d want to see it before anyone else did.”
I unwrapped the leather cover myself. The journal’s pages were brittle, most of them blank, decades of dust settled into the spine. Only the first page held any writing at all, a single line, the ink faded to rust but still legible, still deliberate.