I stopped just inside the doorway.
In my world, medieval chapels survived as fragments. Cracked pigments beneath museum glass. Smoke-blackened carvings displayed under careful conservation lighting. Historians spent entire careers trying to reconstruct how these places originally looked.
But here nothing had faded yet. The colors were still alive.
Father William kept the psalter in the family chapel behind the altar, accessible but not displayed publicly. He looked deeply unhappy when Aldwin and I arrived together, and more unhappy still when Aldwin explained why we were there, but he produced the manuscript with the weary resignation of aman who understood that the Baron’s eldest son rarely accepted refusal gracefully.
Aldwin stared at the psalter for a very long time without speaking.
Autumn light slanted through the narrow windows and caught dust in the air above the manuscript pages. Watching it, I found myself wondering again,why me?
“It looks ordinary,” Aldwin said finally.
“Most extraordinary things do,” I replied, pulled back to the moment. “That’s part of how they survive.”
He glanced at me. There was actual curiosity in his face now rather than suspicion.
“Is that true where you come from?”
“Usually. The things that survive centuries tend to look unimpressive. Worn. Fragile. Ordinary.” I looked down at the manuscript. “The extraordinary parts hide inside them.”
Aldwin looked back at the psalter.
“And you think trying to use it would be dangerous.”
“I think trying to use something we don’t understand is dangerous.” I folded my arms. “And I think wanting to go backward and fix things is a very human impulse.”
He looked at me again.
“Why?”
Because the things we most want to change are usually the things that shaped us. Because grief rewrites memory until it starts resembling regret. Because people rarely understand the cost of removing pain from their own lives.
Instead I said, “I don’t know whether the past can be changed,” I said carefully. “But even if it can, the things you’d try to erase would alter everything afterward, including yourself.”
The silence stretched long enough that Father William cleared his throat pointedly near the doorway.
Aldwin stepped back from the altar.
“I’m not finished thinking about this,” he said.
“I know.”
“But for now it remains a question rather than a plan.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Please keep it that way.”
He studied me for another moment, his expression unreadable, then turned and left the chapel, his boots echoing sharply against the stone floor.
Father William exhaled heavily once he was gone.
“He’s going to become a problem,” he muttered.
“He already is one,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t become an ally.”
“Those are not always different things,” Father William observed dryly.
* * *