A Small Discovery

I've been spending a lot of time down among the dustier shelves in The Great Library of the Absented, shelves where the thick leather bindings of the books have been untouched in decades, perhaps centuries, and where the heavy chains that keep the books from wandering are flecked with red rust.

This morning, in the middle of clearing away an unusually heavy covering of dust from one of the thicker books, I stumbled upon a small and very delicate scroll, tucked away.  Much of what was written on it was indecipherable and much of what could be deciphered was gibberish but the few fragments that did make sense threw up what might be a very interesting possibility: it seems that when Arbor Vulpa stole the great gem known as the Heart of the World (a tale that begins here) he may have left a tiny sliver of the Heart behind.  What happened to that sliver I don't know for certain but other documents, as old or even older than the one I happened to find this morning, lead me to think that it may somehow have found its way into hands which meant, perhaps still mean all these hundreds of years later, to change the fate of Otherwhile itself.  It's an exciting discovery and one I intend to follow up.  In the interim I hope you'll excuse me if I continue to be a little slow in delivering the tale of Vyolla Who Sings.  Poor Vyolla, her story deserves my full attention and it would be wrong for me to give it anything less.