Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop, The Medical Room, The Open Air, The Training Ground
Date/Time:10 Frostforge, 9942 AZI — First Light
Realm:Lower Realm
The workshop smelled of ink and wet paper and the scorch of an essence-lamp left burning all night.
Eden had not gone to bed. That was obvious from the doorway — the bench cleared of everything normally on it and covered end to end in trial pages, and her hair tied back twice, which she only did when she had already given up on it once.
"Forty-one attempts at one page," she said, without looking up. "They're all wrong, and I can tell you why in four hours, or you can look at them and work it out in one minute, which is more efficient and also more annoying."
It took less than a minute.
Every page was beautiful. Every one had been made by a person who could already read, for a person who could already read, and not one of them knew what to do with a child who had never understood that a mark could be a sound.
