more thoroughly. He had treated it with utmost care, as if handling a document written on ages-old slips of onion skin, but he realized now that it was really more hardy than he had thought initially. Rather than a thin slip of paper, or even like parchment, it felt like a slab of aged leather.

Aged, slightly furry leather. The wing was covered in dull flakes, something between featherdown and fish scales. He rubbed his thumb carefully across one and rather than coming apart on contact, as he thought it might, it looked a little brighter. He rubbed more dust off, and contemplated how he might read the wings. Surely there had to be books on it.

He set the wing back, then descended the ladder, moving a step or two down and then eying the shelves immediately beneath the hanging wings. These too were dusty, and he rubbed his thumb across the spines, squinting at the text before he realized that he could not read any of the titles here either.

Well, there was probably a book on that as well...

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