"You weren't supposed to find that," a soft voice whispered.

Elias looked up. Standing by the mahogany shelf was a woman in a grey wool coat, her eyes fixed on the vellum. She didn't look like a scholar; she looked like a shadow that had stepped into the light.

As he reached the section on Modern Hoaxes , his breath hitched. Tucked between pages 322 and 323 was not a printed map, but a hand-drawn diagram on translucent vellum. It depicted a series of underground chambers beneath the very streets of Oxford where he sat.

Before he could answer, she turned and vanished into the stacks. Elias looked back at the vellum. The ink was indeed shimmering, as if the map was still being drawn by an unseen hand. He realized then that the book wasn't just a history of societies—it was a recruitment manual for the one that still remained.