Crystal Scholar

The Crystal Scholar is on the Arcane Syndicate's southern research-vault roll as Reader-Adjunct Emory Quillon, thirty-three, the only apprentice of his intake year the vault kept on after the sky broke, and the only reader the vault has ever assigned to a single object. The object is a slate of obsidian the length of a forearm, recovered from the Abyssal Cult's reception-house at Maren Hollow when the Empire cleared it, across which the four-fold abyssal cadence scrolls without pause. It has not stopped in four years. It has not, in Emory's two thousand three hundred footnotes, repeated a line. He was assigned to it because he was the only apprentice in the reading-room who could not look away from it, which the vault's design-board recorded as aptitude and Elara Wynter, in a note the board has not answered, recorded as 'the beginning of the problem.'

His working is reading. The slate answers a quarter-beat before he asks — the Cult calls the property saen-vora, the answer before the question — and Emory has learned to cast off it the way another scholar would cast off a grimoire: he reads a line at a target and the line lands, cause after effect, the rune arriving where it was always going to have arrived. The pink-quartz monocle is not an affectation. Unfiltered, the runes read him back, and the one afternoon he took the monocle off to clean it the slate scrolled his own name in the cadence for nine minutes and he has not had the afternoon back. The vault's rule, adopted after that afternoon, is one line long: never without the monocle. He has never needed to be reminded of it, which the board considers reassuring and Wynter does not.

He corresponds weekly, in cipher, with Casimir Rhode at the Crown Council about whether a proof that arrives before its question is heresy or shortcut, and the two have agreed on nothing except that the Council must not be told yet. Vesper Harrow reads the slate over his shoulder once a season and says nothing, which Emory has footnoted eleven times and has not been able to classify. He does not work for the Abyssal Cult and has declined, in the cadence, two invitations to return the slate to what remains of the reception-house; the second refusal, he notes, the slate composed for him a quarter-beat before he decided to send it, and the footnote for that entry is the only one in two thousand three hundred that he has left blank.