The Marquis Jean-François of the Blood Chastain dipped his quill into his ink bottle, scribing the last few words the silversaint had spoken. The pages were filled with his story now, word by word, line by line. Gabriel thought it strange, and in truth, a kind of wonderful; that all he was and would ever be could be distilled into a few elegant lines on a page. The summation of his youth and his glory, his love and his loss, his life and his tears, captured like an errant moth and bound as if by magik into so small and plain a thing. The simple wonder of books.
