Cael Orin had a favourite chair.
I noticed it before I understood it — the specific chair at the end of the Hold's archive table, angled toward the window, worn on the right armrest from decades of a hand resting there while reading. Every time I came to the archive he was in it or had clearly been in it, and every time I suggested sitting in it myself something in his expression managed to communicate an entire position on territorial rights without him moving his face very much at all.
I sat in the other chair.
This Tuesday, the file I needed was on the high shelf.
I stood. Reached. Failed by three centimetres.
Cael did not move from his chair. He simply produced a footstool from under the table the way you might produce a pen from your pocket — no comment, no ceremony, just the qui
