✧ Scene: The Archive Room, Cambridge

Weeks later, back in Cambridge, Aaric sat in the dim-lit archives beneath the faculty library.

The air was always colder here, filtered through old stone and time.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
That moment in Córdoba had unraveled something — not a thought, but a thread.
And he couldn’t ignore it.

He’d tried.
Resumed his lectures.
Pushed through his students’ essays with mechanical praise.
But every night, he found himself drifting back to that moment —
that stillness beside the mihrab,
and the figure of the woman who didn’t look at him — but knew.

And now, here he was.
Running his hands over records he’d once dismissed as irrelevant to his focus.

Family history wasn’t his field.
It was messy, subjective.
But something about his grandfather’s old box — stored and forgotten in the back room of the house — had unsettled him.

Letters. Notes. Clippings.
Some of them in Arabic.
Some Spanish.
One sealed envelope marked in his grandfather’s slanted English:

"For the one who remembers."

He hesitated before opening it.

Inside was a single sheet.
A rough sketch of an arch — unmistakably Andalusian — and beneath it, a line scrawled in faded black ink:

"Return to the house of breath. What was once lost will arrive without sound."

Aaric stared.
The phrasing jolted him.

"House of breath..."

He whispered the words aloud. They felt foreign and familiar — as if they belonged to a deeper part of his vocabulary.

He had never heard them before.
But he knew.

This wasn’t coincidence.
This was inheritance.