Page 546 - Fourth Wing

begin to think.

Really, truly think.
If venin exist, we’d have record. And yet there weren’t any copies of The

Fables of the Barren in the Archives—the one location Navarre should

have a copy of every book written or transcribed in the last four hundred
years, which means Dad didn’t just give me a rare book…but a forbidden

one.

Four hundred years of tomes and not a single one—
Four hundred years. But our history spans over six. Everything is a copy

of an earlier work. The only original text in the Archives older than four

hundred years—around the time we fell into war with Poromiel—are the
original scrolls from the Unification over six hundred years ago.

It only takes one desperate generation to change history—even erase it.
Gods, Dad spelled it all out for me. He’d always told me scribes hold all

the power.

“Yes,” Tairn says as we curve around the last peak, its jagged top bare of
snow from the summer heat, and the mountainside outpost of Athebyne

comes into view at the same time as the Cliffs of Dralor. “One generation
to change the text. One generation chooses to teach that text. The next

grows, and the lie becomes history.”

He banks left, following the curve of the mountain, then slows as we
approach the outpost’s flight field.

My hands grip the pommels when we land in front of the looming

structure perched on the side of the last peak in this range. Its design is
identical to Montserrat, a simple square fortress with four towers and walls

barely thick enough to launch a dragon. The military is nothing if not

uniform.
I unbuckle from my saddle and slide down his foreleg. “And somehow

we’re supposed to be able to concentrate on the War Games,” I mutter,
adjusting my pack on my shoulders, thinking about a trading post that may