The Dust Archive was a place where sunlight went to die. Meaning, it was a dark, cavernous room filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves of unsorted records, the air thick with the smell of old parchment and the stagnant scent of secrets left to gather dust.
It looked similar to the Imperial Library, but only that this place was not accessible to the public, whereas the Imperial Library was open to all nobles.
Aurelian was already there.
He wasn't sitting at the grand desk in the center of the room. He was leaning against a stack of crates, a small, locked wooden box balanced on his knee.
He looked utterly at home in the gloom, his golden eyes seeming like the only source of warmth in the suffocating grey space. To Julian, the Emperor's presence was no more than a predatory looming in this dark space. And that 'warmth', well, it was a heat that made the skin on his neck prickle.
The Emperor noticed him approaching and raised his head.
