Office 7 sat at the end of a corridor that had stopped pretending to be decorated somewhere around the third door, bare stone giving way to bare stone until it ended in a single door with a brass plate too old to read by feel alone. Vane had been here twice before, both times for reasons that hadn't mattered as much as this one.
Sael didn't stand when he entered. She didn't tell him to sit, either — just nodded at the chair across from her desk while she finished the line she was writing, her pen never lifting, the words filling the page in the same cramped, certain hand he'd seen on a hundred marked assignments. A single lamp burned low at her elbow, angled to throw its light across the desk and leave the rest of the office in shadow. A ledger sat closed beside it, its spine cracked open to the same page so many times that the binding had given up trying to close all the way flat.
