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things about his.
    “Hi, Kavok,” I say, looking into archives behind him. Drawers line the walls of the
     large room. The symbols on them are illuminated by hanging orbs, which are lit with
     magic. The combination of blue and white lightning inside them creates a steady, slightly
     tinted glow that doesn’t damage documents like the sun or lights from my world would.
     But that’s not the only thing that preserves the records in here. Kavok can, to a
     certain extent, control the weather. It’s a useful magic, one that’s in high demand.
     Farmers employ fae who can tweak the weather if there’s a drought, and the former
     king used to use them to darken the sky when he thought it would give the Court fae
     the advantage during anattack. Kavok, though, uses his ability to regulate the temperature of the archives.
     He keeps humidity out, too, and from what I’ve heard, some documents in here look
     like they were created yesterday even though they’re centuries old.
    “It’s good to see you,” he says. Then, his face brightens even more. “I found an earlier
     reference.”
    I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he turns to the desk that’s just to the
     left of the door. At least, I think there’s a desk under the mountains of papers,
     thick, leather-bound tomes, and haphazard stacks of anchor-stones. An entire alcove
     in here is set aside for storing the latter. Locations both here and on Earth are
     kept in drawers in case the king needed fae to fissure somewhere they’d never been
     before.
    After a minute of shuffling through the piles, Kavok looks up.
    “Come in,” he says.
    Carefully, I step over the threshold. I feel the atmosphere change when I do. It’s
     dryer and cooler than the corridor. “I thought humans weren’t allowed in here?”
    He shrugs. “New ruler, new rules. Ah, yes. Sixteen hundred ninety-one years ago—our
     years, not yours. That’s the earliest mention I’ve come across. It corresponds with…”
    He begins describing some kind of agricultural process, but I’m only half listening
     because I’m trying to figure out what reference he’s referring to. I haven’t spoken
     to him in months. He might have an impeccable memory, but I don’t. I can’t even remember
     the topic of our last conver—
    Oh.
    “You found a reference to a shadow-reader?” I ask.
    “Yes!” He looks up from the huge book in front of him and grins. “It’s 350 years earlier
     than Faem thought.”
    Faem, I think, was the previous archivist. The silver in Kavok’s eyes practically
     sparkles. His giddiness makes him seem even younger than he already looks. If he was
     human, I’d guess him to be in his midtwenties, so that means he’s probably pushing
     fifty, still a relatively young age for a fae. His hair is blond, just a few shades
     darker than Aren’s—most likely because he locks himself in here all day, every day—and
     it’s just long enough to be frazzled.
    In short, he’s the geekiest fae I know. I keep expecting him to push wire-framed glasses
     up on his nose.
    “What does it say about the shadow-reader?” I ask, interrupting his lecture on agricultural
     practices.
    “Oh, yes.” He clears his throat. “It doesn’t say this is the first shadow-reader,
     and I can’t validate the text’s authority, but it appears that there is little difference
     between his abilities and yours. The shadows only told him where a fae exited the
     In-Between, not where he entered it, and he, too, had to draw what he saw and name
     the nearest city or region out loud. But then, we come to a small discrepancy.”
    “Discrepancy?” I move closer to his desk, but he closes the text and rises.
    “Not with your abilities,” he says. “With ours. According to the author, only a few
     fae were able to fissure to the locations the shadow-reader mapped and named.”
    Now,
that’s
interesting.
    “Is it something fae learned to do over time?” I ask.
    “It’s implied that the