Six Days on the Auction Clock
On the day the Vale estate should already be sealed shut, Cassian discovers the archive has been formally re-entered into the estate record and placed on a six-day auction clock. Denied access by Archivist Elowen Rake and mocked for his low academy rank, he forces a seal-verification challenge in front of hostile witnesses, uses his damaged family inheritance to crack a warded archive seal, and recovers one authenticated fragment at visible personal cost. He then publicly reads the amended line that points to a hidden edit in the Vale record, turning the page into immediate leverage while Elowen tries to recast it as unsafe and incomplete. Cassian leaves with the fragment in hand, but the new notice makes the timer feel like a legal weapon: six days until the archive is sold, erased, or burned, and the first buried name is already peeking through the ink.