The Copy Room

A cramped Far College annex off the Guildrows where salvaged Imperium texts get copied twice before anyone's allowed to read the original — and where one copyist keeps finding things in the margins she isn't supposed to find.

The College doesn't trust an original out of the reading-hall, so anything worth reading gets copied here first: cramped desks, ink-stained fingers, and a house rule against candles near the shelving that everyone breaks eventually. Wrenna Ash has copied more crumbling Imperium ledgers than anyone else on the roster, which means she's also read more of the marginalia nobody officially studies — a dead scribe's doodles, a crossed-out sum, a half-line that doesn't belong to the text around it. Most of it is nothing. She keeps a private list, in her own hand, of the lines that might not be.