The group continued reading the notebook.
Lucien had not left them a desperate confession or some final sentimental page written by a dying hand that had already surrendered to fate.
He had left instructions.
How to return to the small world. Which items inside the room were essential. What not to touch carelessly. Who could go. Who absolutely must not.
The more they read, the stranger the room felt.
Every line in the notebook carried the same quiet insult toward death itself. Lucien had not treated his own end as a mystery. He had treated it as a logistical problem.
And by the time they reached the final page of the instructions, the expression in the room had changed.
Their grief remained.
But beneath it, something else had begun standing upright.
Purpose.
Luke closed the notebook only after rereading the last instruction twice. Then he lifted his gaze toward the shelf Lucien had specifically marked.
"There," he said.
They moved together.
