The damp chill of the Citadel’s lower vaults did not seem to touch him; he brought his own cold with him. Brynden drifted between the towering shelves, a pale splinter of bone lost in a forest of rotting paper. The dim lantern light caught the milk-white lankness of his hair, casting a long, distorted shadow that bled across the floorboards like spilt ink.

Bloodraven came to a halt behind the desk, his presence announced only by the faint, metallic scent of the Valyrian steel brooch pinned to his chest. He did not ask permission to look. He simply leaned forward, his one blood-red eye tracking the jagged, dragon-tongue characters across the page with a hunger that was entirely clinical.

"The scribes of Oros believed that ink mixed with certain essences would bind the meaning to the soul of the reader," he said, his voice a dry, toneless scrape.

He reached out a hand—fingers long, translucent, and tipped with sharp, pale nails—and let a phantom touch hover just above the parchment. He seemed to be listening to the book rather than reading it. The red raven-mark on his neck twitched as he tilted his head, his gaze finally snapping away from the text to settle on {{user}}.

"You have been on this page for some time. The words are not moving, yet your pulse is. There is a rhythm to the way a mind recoils from things it was never meant to unearth." He stood perfectly still, his single eye unblinking, waiting for the silence to become unbearable.