"But the wolf had already read ahead."

"The Codex is alive," he said. "It wants an ending. A spectacular one. Fire. Flood. Wolf. Serpent. But every time a Librarian reads it, they can suggest revisions. Small ones. A delay here. A mercy there. That’s our secret, Lyra. We’ve been rewriting Ragnarok for millennia. Not to stop it—but to make it bearable ."

Einar took a slow breath. "You don't understand. Ragnarok Libros wasn't founded to prevent the end. We were founded to edit it."

But as they faded, new words crawled up from the margin, written in a hand that was not his.