He needed records. Proof. Something more substantial than the whispers of drunkards and the sermons of zealots. He found the Whitebridge Scriptorium, a small, dusty annex to the main temple, filled with the scent of old parchment and beeswax. It was overseen by a single, elderly keeper named Brother Theron. The man had kind, myopic eyes behind thick spectacles and a genuine passion for history, and Arden, posing as a scholar from a distant land researching the Great War, found him eager to talk, delighted to have an audience.
"Ah, the Blades of Dawn!" Theron said, his eyes gleaming as he carefully unrolled a beautifully illuminated scroll on a felt-covered table. "The blessed companions of our Saint! It is a glorious tale, a symphony of light against the dark. Here," he pointed a trembling finger at a figure depicted as a muscular giant, "was mighty Borin, the Stone Fist, whose strength could shatter fortress walls with a single blow! A man of few words, but unwavering loyalty."
The illustration was vibrant, heroic. And utterly wrong. Borin had been dour, pragmatic, and ruthlessly efficient, not this jovial, simple-minded giant.
"And here," Theron moved his finger to a smiling, winking figure clad in dark leathers, "cunning Kaelen, the Shadow Fox, who could walk through shadows as if they were doors and steal the secrets from a demon's own heart! A scoundrel, perhaps, but with a heart of gold turned to the light."
Arden felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. Kaelen had been a selfish, opportunistic bastard, loyal only to the highest bidder or the most advantageous outcome. His "heart of gold" was a fiction.
"And the woman?" Arden asked, his throat uncomfortably tight. "Elara. What of her?"
Brother Theron's face softened with a practiced, tragic sympathy. He unrolled another scroll, this one showing a beautiful, ethereal woman with flowing hair, looking wistfully at a distant, glowing figure of Arlen. "Ah, the Weeping Maiden. Elara. A tragic, beautiful figure in our history. Her love for the Saint was a pure, mortal flame, but he, in his divine destiny, could not be bound to a single, mortal heart. She loved him from afar, a silent, devoted guardian, and when he ascended to his sainthood, her mortal heart could not bear the glorious weight of his absence. She faded away, a symbol of the pure, unrequited love that we should all hold for our savior."
The lie was so profound, so insidiously crafted, that it stole the air from Arden's lungs. Elara, his fierce, brilliant, stubborn Elara, who had argued strategy with him late into the night, whose laughter had been his favorite sound in the world, whose fierce passion had matched his own, whose tears at the end had been for him—she had been rewritten into a simpering, lovelorn maiden pining for her betrayer. The narrative was not just a cover-up; it was a desecration, a spiritual murder more complete than any physical death.
He stumbled out of the Scriptorium, the bright, clean sunlight of Whitebridge feeling like a mockery. The foundation of his denial, already cracked and crumbling, was now nothing but dust, blown away by the cold wind of truth.