What the Fire Foretells
“You came,” Drina says, without surprise, her voice like the crack of thawing ice.
Riding Out
The frost has not lifted when she rides to the camp—a sunken hollow of wagons and woodsmoke, dogs stirring beneath canvas, a fire holding off the morning chill. The women look up from their work and go quiet in a way that is not silence exactly, more a reverence with suspicion folded into it.
She dismounts without knowing what story she has become in their eyes.
The Matriarch
Drina takes her time with the small talk—weather, the camp, nothing that matters—before the matriarch’s gaze drops, almost absently, towards what she already knows.
Before the next moon, there will be two heartbeats instead of one.
The fire pops. Somewhere behind them, someone begins a wordless, sorrowful tune, and she can no longer tell whether it is the cold or the omen that has settled into her bones.
The Gate, Unremarked
Back at the house, smaller loyalties keep the world turning. Roger’s youngest has taken to the gate like a coat cut for an older brother—careful not to tug at the sleeves. Old Lenny insists the gate answers to his voice alone, and grumbles about help he does not need, but his real complaint is quieter: he knows exactly where Wolfgang goes when he is not in the stables, and says nothing.
At Overton, discretion has never required blindness.
Some news arrives with fire and a wordless song. Some arrives as a man at a gate, choosing not to ask a question he already knows the answer to.
Continue the journey. Start the series here → The European Records
© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.
Author’s Note
The Songbook is not a cipher key in the ordinary sense. It is an instrument of recognition.
In Quantum Jump, While Quantum Jumping with Mikhail, she helps Airmid write down the knowledge of the 365 herbs: their names, seasons, preparations, dangers, affinities, and the forms of healing they carry. What later survives as the Voynich Manuscript is not nonsense or an unsolved cipher, but a record made deliberately difficult to read by anyone without the right inheritance.
That is why the Songbook can open the Voynich Manuscript.
The real Voynich Manuscript—Yale’s Beinecke MS 408—is a fifteenth-century illustrated codex written in an unknown script whose language and purpose remain undeciphered. Its parchment has been dated to the early fifteenth century, and no proposed solution has achieved scholarly verification.
The Songbook passes through that inheritance. It holds the patterns, refrains, correspondences, and remembered order needed to return the manuscript to meaning. It does not translate word by word. It teaches its keeper how to recognise what the pages are doing.
The Songbook remembers the way in.
The Memory Cartographer 