Caecilius Valerius Sapientis had climbed three broken steps into the abandoned library before he admitted the book was not here. He was tall, half-elf, dark-blue-skinned, and dressed in the robes of a wizard trained at a school that had never wanted him. He had come to the Blackland Moors chasing a rumor: that somewhere the gods had hidden a text, and that the hiding proved it was worth reading. He believed the gods had good reason to bury it. He intended to find it anyway, copy it, and teach it to students like himself — outcasts of mixed blood who were turned away from every tower and chapter house on the moors. That was the dream. The dream needed a school. The school needed people. So far he had none. Inside, dust lay on the shelves like gray felt. Copies of the same spellbooks repeated down every aisle, water-marked and useless. He worked the long reference desk at the back, pulling open the small labeled drawers one by one. Most held rotted index cards. One drawer stuck. He forced it, and a folded sheet slid out from behind the runners. It was a roster of names, each with a notation beside it: half-orc, tiefling, half-elf, half-drow. Every name had been crossed out. At the bottom, in a different hand, someone had written the last known settlement of each person and the year they had been driven from it. The most recent date was this year. The list was seventeen names long. Caecilius sat down on the edge of the desk and read the list twice. He had come looking for a book and had found a map of the living instead. He tore a blank card from the drawer, copied the seventeen names and towns, and put the paper in his sleeve. The book could wait. The library was the wrong one; he had known that walking in. But the desk was the right desk, and someone before him had already done the first work. He left the abandoned hall at dusk with a route in his head and the first name at the top of it. He was no longer alone in the idea. He only had to reach the others before someone else crossed them out too.