Arion's office had stopped looking like an office sometime before lunch.
The main desk was still visible beneath two tablets, a half-finished budget report, three folders from the infrastructure ministry, and the remains of a coffee neither he nor Dean could remember making, but almost every other surface had been surrendered to Dominic.
Paper covered the long conference table.
Some of it had been preserved in archival sleeves so carefully that even breathing too close to the edges made Dean feel vaguely criminal, while other documents were later copies produced when the originals became too fragile to handle. Digital records occupied one of the wall displays, arranged beside scanned letters, old medical entries, military reports, household accounts, and several sections of imperial correspondence that had apparently survived a century only because generations of archivists had been too frightened to throw anything away bearing an emperor's signature.
