I was not as clever as I thought.
My seventh trip to the library — I'd become reckless, staying longer, carrying more books, taking risks that a three-year soldier should have known better than to take — was observed. Not by a fellow soldier or a patrol officer. By someone far more dangerous.
Commander Dhara.
Dhara was the commanding officer of the eastern garrison — my garrison. A woman of forty-five, veteran of the Border Campaigns, decorated six times, with a reputation for tactical brilliance and personal austerity that made her both feared and respected. She was lean, dark, with close-cropped hair and eyes that missed nothing. In three years under her command, I'd never seen her smile, never heard her raise her voice, and never — not once — known her to be wrong about anything.
She was waiting in my quarters when I returned from the library at 4 AM, carrying a satchel of books. She was sitting on my cot, the Codex open in her hands, reading with the focused attention of someone who already understood the language.
I froze in the doorway. My first thought was: this is how it ends. Court martial. Execution. A soldier caught with enemy texts, having deserted his post to loot a forbidden zone. There was no defence. The evidence was in her hands.
"Close the door," Dhara said. Not a command — a request. The distinction was unusual enough to obey.
I closed the door. Stood at attention, because that's what you do when your career is ending and you want to end it with dignity.
"Sit," she said.
I sat. On the floor, because she was on the only chair-equivalent in the room.
She held up the Codex. "Mayasura's chronicle. I last read this twenty-three years ago."
The world tilted. "Ma'am?"
"I found the library when I was nineteen. A patrol officer, like you. Saw the light, followed it, found the archive. Spent two years translating the basics." She set the book down. "I've been waiting for someone else to find it. Took longer than I expected."
"You — you've known? For twenty-three years?"
"I've known that the official history of the Three Realms is a fabrication designed to justify the Deva conquest of the Asura civilisation. Yes. For twenty-three years."
"And you stayed? In the army? Knowing —"
"Where else would I go?" She stood and walked to the window. The eastern sky was beginning to lighten. "The truth doesn't come with a plan, Vrik. It comes with a burden. I learned what you're learning now — that our civilisation is built on a genocide we've rewritten as a holy war. And then I had to decide what to do with that knowledge."
"What did you decide?"
"I decided to rise. To climb the ranks, to gain access, to position myself where the knowledge would be useful rather than just devastating. You can cry in a ruin, or you can build something with the stones."
