Micaloz reached Constantinople beneath the last embers of a spring sunset.
Across the darkening waters the city seemed impossible.
Eastman Satchel
Among the holdings of the Nazilic Library, few objects have inspired more speculation than the leather satchel recovered from the vault beneath the Eastman Building following the great Boise fire of 1987. Though its papers suffered smoke and water damage, the satchel itself survived remarkably intact within the old bank vault sealed beneath the building's lowest level. Neither its author nor its age has ever been conclusively determined. The pages contain an uneven collection of travel narratives, philosophical reflections, historical fragments, and firsthand accounts concerning the being Nazilic scholars call the Shining One. Whether they represent history disguised as fiction or fiction preserving history remains one of the enduring questions of the Library
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Within Bell Archive tradition, the Eastman Building occupies a significance far exceeding its modest place in Boise's civic history. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the abandoned structure is said to have served as an informal gathering place for members of the early Boise Encroachment and sympathetic travelers arriving from neighboring Caldwell. Forgotten offices, neglected service corridors, and the basement vaults became places where pamphlets were exchanged, impossible stories compared, and artifacts quietly passed from one custodian to another. Later librarians would remark that the building possessed a quality found in many Nazilic sites: it had fallen sufficiently outside ordinary life that imagination could once again become a practical instrument.
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There exists an oft-repeated tradition that the basement still contained unopened Civil Defense supplies left from the anxieties of the Cold War—barrels of water, tins of emergency rations, and faded containers bearing the familiar triangular CD emblem. Bell commentators delighted in the coincidence. They observed that while governments stored provisions against the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, another community had quietly begun storing memories against a catastrophe of a different sort: the gradual forgetting of humanity's oldest history. Whether this symbolism was recognized by those who gathered there, or only imposed afterward by later scholars, remains unknown.
When the building was consumed by fire in 1987, it was widely assumed that everything within had been lost. The discovery of the satchel inside the old vault therefore became, in Nazilic circles, less a recovery than a confirmation of a long-held principle: that certain stories possess an unusual reluctance to disappear. Many librarians now regard the Eastman Satchel not simply as a manuscript collection, but as the surviving nucleus around which the modern Bell Archive first organized its understanding of the Shining One's passage through history.
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Library Section: The Reading Room
Eleven days later the caravan was approaching Erzincan. As the chill of late September began to settle in, a haze hung in the sky from the cooking fires of many homes. As the sun tucked itself away behind the mountains in the west, a brilliant purple and orange glow hung in the sky.
Library Section: The Reading Room
The morning sun is peeking over the mountains, filtering through the boughs of black pine. Melek pokes his head out of the cave mouth blocked by the cold limestone slab left ajar to vent the sulfuric smell.
The morning broke clear over western Constantinople. Autumn had sharpened the air, carrying the smell of salt and tar across the Bosporus.
Cosimo Foscari stood upon the veranda with a porcelain cup warming his hands. The coffee was bitter enough to keep sleep at a respectful distance.
The room was lit by the dancing orange light of a single lantern on the small table. Sweet smelling smoke drifted up from the silver censer and hung in the still air.
Melek awoke before the camp had fully stirred, his heart still burdened by the dream.
Darkness surrendered as suddenly as it had arrived.
Then came the light - it was never painful, only startling.
Library Section: The Reading Room
The toothless man unbolted the door and left the room for a moment. When he returned, Nazli was with him, looking disheveled and confused. They came into the room where Melek was still strapped to the chair and Nazli, upon seeing him, started to cry.
Library Section: The Reading Room
In the early days of the Ottoman empire in western Turkey, under the reign of the fifth sultan of the Ottoman dynasty Mehmed the affable, the Aydin province of western Turkey was under the tenuous. rule of Junayd Bey.
Soon it will be time, Melek.
Dawn enters the room before memory does. A single blade of light slips through the narrow window and finds the satchel where it waits beside him.
Melek wakes already reaching for the vial.
“We represent a group of people who are very interested in finding you. We have no interest in harming you. In fact, quite the opposite.” The man in the red robes was speaking while he paced back and forth.
Library Section: The Reading Room
Several days had passed and Melek was busy making final preparations for the long journey across what is now western Armenia into Anatolia, and finally to the former home of his former being in the far away Aydin province.
"We will abandon this wretched pace soon enough," Vlastimir said as Melek's wrist was freed from its leather binding. "A merchant vessel waits for us at Trabzon. From there we sail to Constantinople. Cosimo himself has been awaiting your arrival."
"And Nazli?"