Rhiannon still held Veyran in her grip, level with her eyeline. She was being gentle though, as if still deciding whether to release him or see what else she could draw out from him.

Across his entire body Veyran could feel her tension, that charge that comes from deep thought, when something clicks in someone's mind.

"What now?" he finally asked, squirming.

She lowered her hand to the level of her chest, still studying him. Genuine curiosity shone in her eyes, in contrast to her usual guarded expression.

"You've surprised me," Rhiannon confessed.

"Is this because I haven't bitten your finger yet?" he teased.

She smiled. "Because, despite the cages and controls imposed on you, your insights are... impressive." A grudging respect colored her tone, subtle but undeniable.

Veyran leaned back against her fingers, arms folded. "Well, I left the Deep to learn, and I've never stopped gathering knowledge. Even when your goons captured and put me to work on those… doodads. And as you can see, it's all kind of worked out... eventually," he said, flashing a triumphant smile.

At that, Rhiannon slowly lowered her hands then set Veyran down on the desk. He adjusted his footing on the wood, smoothing his robe as he stepped away from her hand.

She moved to the nearby table where her notes were scattered among the piles of books, the air still tingling faintly from their arcane lessons earlier.

"You've taught me more than just magic, Veyran," she admitted. "You've made me see how little I actually know about this world."

His eyes widened, genuinely stunned. "I believe that's the first time that I've heard you humble yourself."

"Savor the moment. That won't happen again."

He grinned. The tension between them had eased, shifting into something harder to define.

Turning to fully face him, her expression was thoughtful, no longer inscrutable.

"I think it's time I tell you what you've always wanted to know—where the arclith lode came from."

Auren navigated the seemingly endless spiral stairs and shelves of the stalactite with practiced ease. Pointing out texts tucked away in overlooked alcoves, he patiently guided Menna to sections she had never thought to explore during her previous perusing: astronomical charts, old surveys of the caldera's ecology and geology, transcriptions of oral traditions and early folktales.

"These are some of our oldest and most overlooked records," he stressed, delicately arranging a selection of documents on a desk in a private study booth. "Many dismiss them as legends or tall tales, stories not worth the attention of serious scholars. But hidden truths sometimes wear the disguise of myth. And myths rarely survive unless they resonate across time."

Menna's heart quickened as she gently unwrapped the ancient texts written in dense, archaic Shy script, her gloved fingers hovering over the fragile pages. "Few Shy have touched these in decades," Auren continued. "They predate much of what the Academy teaches today."

Menna eased open the first precious scroll, carefully deciphering the faded script. The texts spoke of a past vastly different from the academy's dry, officially sanctioned versions. She strained to interpret long extinct dialects and half-forgotten idioms. The deeper she went, the more fractured the records became. Still, patterns emerged.

Scattered references hinted at a fierce conflict well before the founding of any major Shy settlements in the caldera. More accounts, mixed up with zoological texts for some reason, spoke of the Shy's devastating battles with the kobolds. She kept having to tease out details obscured by time and embellished by generations of retelling.

While going through the works classified under music and poetry, she hit her breakthrough. She found a narrow, half-width scroll of moleskin vellum, stained and layered with dust. It looked ordinary, neglected, until she noticed the clasp keeping the scroll rolled up and fastened. Menna wasn't as proficient at identifying creature parts as a Sunshy, but knew enough to tell that it had been crafted from a kobold claw, and a small one at that. Maybe even a hatchling's. She paused, fingertips brushing the brittle edge of the scroll's seam, feeling anxious about unwrapping a record sealed with a memento of either violence, or perhaps, grief.

She unfurled the scroll with care. The calligraphy, though old-fashioned, was legible. As the verses unfolded, a melody began to play in her mind—simple, haunting, but tinged with sorrow. The words seemed to hum with a life of their own, as if the song had just been waiting to be made music again.

The Song of the Shy

When green grew thin and paths grew pale,

And louder fists reshaped the land,

The Shy withdrew, like mist in vale,

To shape a world with subtler hands.

Through hollowed ways they fled the fight,

And let old glories fade and fall

They chose the gloom, they chose the slight,

And found their peace beneath it all.

The song sang of retreat, but not just from conflict, hinting at a greater intent. The line on choosing gloom and slight lingered in her thoughts. It was oddly phrased, like an idiom she should have recognized but couldn't quite place. For now, she took it as a gesture of modesty, a poetic turn by a people seeking tranquility, however humble.

They sought the gleam-touched crystal,

That flowed through veins of rock and flame,

And from its hum, bright and brittle

They wove the wall that guards our claim.

The veil arose, a blaze divine,

To hold the wrathful world at bay

But we who dwelt behind its shine

Did watch our kin fall far away.

The crystal was clearly arclith. Menna recognized the substance beneath the poetry. The Shy had wielded it to create the veil, a barrier first meant to protect, but ultimately leading to separation and seclusion.

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For when the veil was raised in fire,

Its gate was sealed, its light made blind.

The laggard tribes, in grief entire,

Cried out, and none could turn the bind.

We heard their wailing through the stone,

Their voices thin as falling rain

But flame does not unmake its own,

And none could pass that gate again.

One by one, their calls grew still,

Like stars devoured by the dawn.

Their names are dust, their songs a chill

That lingers though their choirs are gone.

The sorrow was woven deep here. Among those left outside the Sunveil, were not merely enemies, but kin. The Sunveil had saved some, at the cost of others. Silence had followed, not just in song, but in history.

The caves had claimants more than they

The scaled ones, fierce, who fought as one,

Had long since carved the stone bound way,

Their broods asleep where warm veins run.

In narrow halls where heat held sway,

The two clashed hard for breath and space

Till our folk chose the deeper way,

And crossed the rift to yield their place.

The scaled ones were kobolds, clearly. But there was little animosity and even some admiration in the language, a recognition of their claim and strength. The kobolds needed warm caverns for their nests. Outmatched in both number and coordination, the Shy had yielded. They moved again, going deeper, across a rift. Would that be the Silverthread river? The pattern was becoming clear.

To pass through cracks the giants spurned,

To stretch the gleam that lit our lives,

Our stature shed, and thus we learned

The cost by which a small folk thrives.

At first, a lessening of form

A fitting down, no more, no less

But years below and pressure's storm

Did press us past what we'd confess.

Here, the truth cracked open. She recalled the word "slight" from the first verse, now fully understood. This wasn't humility, but a matter of physical scale. The Shy had made themselves smaller, at first just enough to survive, to slip through cracks, to use less arclith. But over generations, the change compounded. They became what they needed to be. And they forgot what they had once been.

Yet even sorrow has its tide,

And not all hearts could bear the deep.

Some weary ones no more would hide,

Nor trade the sun for safety's keep.

They rose not drawn by hope or lore,

But for their children yet to be

To give them sky, and something more

Than silent halls beneath the lea.

The middling kind in twilight groves

Found solace 'neath the dappled green;

While others climbed the grassy slopes,

To feel the sun they'd never seen.

Here was the turning point: the emergence of the Middleshy and Sunshy, though not named explicitly. They refused to stay hidden in the gloom, reaching toward a literally brighter future. They had broken the pattern, and in doing so, arrested the long descent.

The gleam once held all things in one:

Of star and flame, of stone and stream

But shattered now, its voices run

In fractured paths, in fading gleam.

Some veins lie sealed in ashen vaults

Some carved by streams where waters rushed

Some echo low through broken faults

But what they were lies cracked and crushed.

Menna suspected the Shy themselves had fractured something fundamental in the arclith of old, though whether by design or desperation, she couldn't yet determine. Was it to harness its power? Sustain the Sunveil? Or avert some greater ruin? The truth remained elusive. But whatever their purpose, its former integrity had been undone.

We shrank to make the veil endure,

To let its blaze protect the core.

Our world grew small, but still secure

A trade of less, to mete out more.

And still it feeds, and still it binds,

A hunger none dare voice aloud—

Its strength upheld by trust gone blind,

Our veil, our gift, our grief, our shroud.

Menna broke out in goosebumps. The Shy had diminished themselves, inch by inch, to help fuel the very veil that saved them. The Sunveil endured, but at great sacrifice. Shrinking down, living underground, were not signs of defeat. They were tradeoffs.

Let others take the sunlit sky,

Let louder kin rise bold and free

By forge's glow, meek and sly,

We vanished where none thought to be.

Though few recall the world we led,

Our light endures, where stars have fled.

Menna let the scroll rest in her lap, the kobold-claw clasp gently clicking softly closed. For a moment, she sat in silence, the weight of the verses pressing against her chest. This was not a song of conquests and triumphs, she realized, but of resilience—an unyielding light that had shone through generations, dimmed in darkness but never extinguished. The world beyond the caldera may now belong to whoever victor claimed it. Though this might have dulled the brilliance of her people's legacy, their light had never gone out.

The dazzling library, the gleaming city around her, even the obstinate academy she was railing against, all this was what they gained.

The scroll's claw clasp caught the glow from her arclamp, casting a sliver of shadow across the vellum. It wasn't just a fastening, but a symbol, a reminder, tucked away in plain sight.

She traced the lines with her fingertip, reading the verses again, now slower, more deliberately. She no longer sought meaning, but gaps, substitutions, cracks in the narrative. How did such an important, evocative document ever been missed?

Then it clicked. It never said arclith. Or even shards. Not once.

Every reference to veins and crystals was shrouded in the term the gleam. A word subtle enough to slip past scrutiny. And yet, for those who had ideas about what arclith was, the reference was unmistakable.

She felt a small chill settle along her spine.

They hadn't just told their story in song. They had layered metaphor over meaning. Everything was coded, but comprehensible to those who already found some pieces.

Had she not been reconstructing a more complete view of their history from the scattered fragments Auren had laid out, she never would have made the connections so easily.

This wasn't just a song. It was a cipher, a racial memory smuggled across centuries.

Someone wrote this knowing it might be the only way to preserve the truth. To erase the story, they'd have to silence the music. And that, she now understood, was harder to suppress than any text.

Looking at the scroll, feeling the grain of its vellum, she whispered, half in reverence, half in awe. "They sang it so they couldn't forget."

Rhiannon crossed to the drawer and retrieved the familiar ornate box. With deliberate care, she unwrapped the motherlode—the strange, solid mass of arclith unlike anything Veyran had seen in all his years in the caldera—and placed it between them.

"It wasn't mined," she explained. "It didn't come from a quarry, nor was excavated from underground. It was just… picked up. Half-buried in mud along the river, downstream from the caldera."

Veyran's eyes narrowed. "Are you certain?"

"After a flood, my men were repairing a bridge crossing the Greystone. They saw something gleaming in the dirt," she replied. "I've checked. There are no records of any form of mining in that area, at least not by us humans."

Hands clasped behind his back, Veyran slowly approached the shard,

"It doesn't make sense," he reasoned. "A shard this size, this stable… it should've come from deep, extremely deep veins. No shard from the surface should hold this much charge this long."

Rhiannon folded her arms. "But isn't that just what you were taught? Not a truth you've personally observed?"

He glanced up at her, frowning. "You're sure it was nowhere near a geothermal vent, a rupture or fault line?"

She shook her head. "It was sitting in sediment. The site was unremarkable. Just a bend in the river, shallow water, some trees and vegetation, decent fishing."

He looked again at the shard, not as a Deepshy miner or mage, but as someone who had spent years on the surface.

"This... breaks every rule I know."

"Then maybe your rules were written to hide the truth." Rhiannon contended. "Or preserve it. Just like our legends."

He couldn't argue, because she was right.

Rhiannon's voice regained its imperious edge. "We need to go to the site."

Veyran blinked. "What?"

"To the riverbank. To find out more about this lode's origins. Trace it back to the source."

He hesitated. "We? You mean you'd actually leave Greyhold? With me?"

"You're not as dangerous as I thought," she shrugged. "Or perhaps you are dangerous, just not to me."

He looked back down at the lode. If it truly came from the river, then there could be more—and not just arclith. Answers. Proof. Truths neither Shy nor humans had fully discovered nor understood.

"I… have to agree," he said finally. "We need to see things for ourselves."

Rhiannon turned and began tidying her notes. "We can leave in two days," she stated briskly, not as a question. "I'll call it a personal field inspection, checking on new sources for materials. I could even say you're helping me look for your fellow wayward Shy."

"And Ruth? She won't see through that?" Veyran asked.

Rhiannon smiled through pursed lips. "She'll suspect something, of course. But I doubt she'll override my authority. Not openly."

Veyran glanced out the window. "She's already watching us, I'm sure."

"Then we give her a show," she said coolly. "Let her believe I have you fully under control, ready to betray your friends. She won't expect us to pursue our own path. She trusts too heavily in what she thinks she knows of me. That will be her mistake."

"What do we do if she wises up and comes looking?" Veyran pressed.

Rhiannon replied, unruffled. "Let her," she said dismissively. "I know what I'm doing."

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