Fay had given Tabulae her first real insights into the human body back on the road from Ironbuck Mine to the Goldkeep Crownmarkets.
Tabulae had crammed every scrap she could, not from panic but from hunger.
She loved studying. The books big sister Fay carried were too detailed to belong to ordinary cultivators, pages dense with the kind of knowledge that made physicians uneasy.
Tabulae had told her grandfather Biscuit again and again that Radeon and Fay were not regular sect folk.
She said they were from a top force on the continent.
No one listened.
Not because her logic was bad, but because she was thirteen, and because she was a girl in an age that treated a girl's certainty like wind.
Her words went in one ear and out the other.
Now people carved Radeon's name into stone and raised temples like he had always been inevitable.
The same mouths that dismissed her called it coincidence. Tabulae's jaw tightened.
"Ridiculous. Absolute buffoons," she murmured.
