Coffee in hand, she sat down at her desk and carefully opened an old tome. She’d borrowed it from the Ministry Library the previous Friday. It’d been sitting there ever since, untouched, begging for her to envelop herself in its many hand-written pages. They were coming loose from the spine, some illegible from stains of what appeared to be a mixture of blood and tea, but that only meant its teachings had been read by many. She relished the smell of the aged ink.