Chapter 41: The First Page of the Rest
The process of disentanglement was a quiet, deliberate surgery, performed over a season of softening sunlight and crispening air. It was the careful unpicking of their own myth from the fabric of the new reality. The world needed its Rememberers to be a story, a fixed point in its new cosmology. Elara and Kaelen needed to become people again.
With Thaddeus's fanatical, meticulous assistance, they formalized the transition. Parchments were drawn up, not by imperial scribes, but in the clear, precise hand of the Athenaeum. The "Academy of Mnemonic Studies" was chartered as a sovereign sister institution to Lys, with The Open Page as its founding campus. The Emperor, seeing the strategic and intellectual value of a stable, secular body to study the Calming, provided an endowment with surprisingly few strings attached. His signature was a flourish of pragmatic approval.
