4345.97 · April 7, 2025 AD
What The Stones Remember
The heavy door groans open on hinges that haven't moved in decades. Beyond it, a chamber that shouldn't exist—vaulted ceilings, shelves laden with maps and relics, lanterns that flicker to life beneath Douglas's steady hand. This was a Jacobite command post. A Guardian sanctuary. Now it holds letters signed by Stewart sisters, tunnel routes marked in faded ink, and truths that rewrite everything Daniel thought he knew about soil, coffee, and a place called Clivilius.
The sanctuary exhales centuries of stillness as they cross its threshold.
Lantern light climbs stone walls to reveal shelves packed with Edinburgh's hidden history—maps annotated in multiple hands across generations, relics tarnished by time but carefully preserved, wooden chests holding secrets no museum has ever catalogued. Douglas moves through the space like a man returning home. The Campbells move through it like trespassers in their own ancestry.
Maeve finds the letters first. Elspeth Stewart. Violet Stewart. Names from centuries past, writing about soil that must be protected, legacies that must endure, pacts made with families whose descendants would never fully understand what they'd inherited.
Daniel's hands shake as he reads. The connections multiply—his greenhouse, his coffee plants, his family's distinctive cultivation methods, all threads leading back to bargains struck before his great-grandparents were born, to soil that came from somewhere called Clivilius.
Then Nathan and Douglas produce their Portal Keys.
Another world. Connected to this one. The source of everything that made the Campbell plants unique.
Daniel wanted answers. Now he has them.
The question is what they'll cost to keep.
