Part Seventy-Eight — The Scholar’s Price

Pieced together later, from what we eventually learned of how Vance actually came to agree.

　Cassian's letter reached her private tower after three separate attempts — the first two returned unopened, the third accompanied by a small sum of coin generous enough to at least guarantee a proper reading.

　Ophelia Vance was older than her reputation suggested, silver-haired but sharp-eyed, the particular vitality of someone whose mind had simply refused to age at the same pace as everything else about her.

"A functioning barrier of the scale you describe," she said, once Cassian had been granted an actual audience, weeks later, "constructed by a single source rather than institutional effort. That's not merely rare. That's nearly unheard of, in recorded history."

She's interested.

Good. Exactly what Selwyn hoped for.

"The Church would be grateful for your expertise," Cassian said, careful, diplomatic. "Resonant disruption, specifically, if the historical account we've located proves applicable."

"It might," Vance said, something distant and calculating entering her expression.

"It might indeed."

　What Cassian didn't know — what none of the Church properly understood, that day or for a long while after — was the specific weight behind Vance's sudden, genuine interest.

　She'd spent decades of her considerable life studying dimensional seals, an obsession that had cost her, in various ways, most of the relationships and reputation she might otherwise have built.

　One seal specifically had occupied more of that obsession than any other — a working she'd contributed to, personally, in her considerably younger years, sealed into a remote mountain range under circumstances she'd never fully discussed with anyone since.

A mountain range that, if the Church's own description of this anomaly's territory holds any accuracy, sounds remarkably similar to the one I helped seal away, all those years ago.

　She said none of this to Cassian.

　She simply agreed, with the careful, measured enthusiasm of a scholar delighted by a professional puzzle, and left the Church with the distinct impression that her cooperation was purely academic.

"She's agreed," Cassian reported to Selwyn, some days later. "Genuinely enthusiastic, from what I could tell. Scholars of her caliber apparently don't encounter puzzles of this scale often."

"Good," Selwyn said. "What does she require to actually attempt the working?"

"Time to properly study whatever readings we can gather from the barrier's edge, without breaching it prematurely. And a small, discreet team to accompany her when she's ready to attempt the disruption itself — enough to handle whatever's inside, if her working succeeds, without so large a presence that we risk provoking exactly the kind of response that cost us two units already."

Careful.

Same patient approach Selwyn's maintained throughout.

"Assemble that team," Selwyn instructed. "Seraphiel, Aldric, Cassian, Valerius — the same four who first found the barrier's edge. You already have the most direct experience with this specific threat."

　Vance spent the following weeks exactly as she'd promised — studying, measuring, gathering readings from a careful distance, the same patient thoroughness she'd have applied to any genuine academic puzzle.

　But beneath that careful academic patience, a different calculation ran quietly alongside it, one she kept entirely to herself.

If this truly is the same seal — if whatever's contained there is still exactly where I left it, all those years ago — I need to know.

I need to see it myself, confirm it's held, before I can finally let myself stop wondering whether that decision was the right one.

The Church believes I'm helping them capture an anomaly.

Let them believe that.

What I actually need lies considerably deeper than whatever creature they think they're hunting.

　She said nothing of this to Selwyn, to Cassian, or to any of the four knights slowly preparing to accompany her.

　She simply continued her careful, patient research, waiting for the moment her readings told her the working was ready to attempt —

　and for the moment, not far behind it, when she'd finally learn whether the choice she'd made decades ago still held, or whether it had, at some point she hadn't yet discovered, quietly begun to fail.