LUCY
The second torn book turns up less than twenty minutes after the first.
It's Amara who unearths it this time, wedged between two crumbling ledgers near the two stacks of books we'd nearly passed over. The title stamped along its spine reads On the Nature and Manifestations of Dragonkind Power, and for one hopeful second I actually believe we've found something useful—until she flips it open and the same jagged absence greets us.
Whole sections gone. Torn close to the spine, the edges too clean, too recent, to belong to age or decay.
"This is crazy." Amara shuts the book harder than it probably deserves and tosses it back into the crate it came from, then drops herself into the nearest chair with a groan that echoes faintly off the stone walls. "Why would someone do this?"
