You ground ink for a living. In Registrar Venth's archive, at the top of the Skyroot where the clouds lie flat as a floor, a clerk of the roll learns three things: to grind a fallen star into vermilion, to write without shaking, and never to read what the ink says. You learned the first two in your first year. You never managed the third.

The Vermilion Roll is not a book. It is a river of red silk that unwinds through the archive day and night, and every line on it is a warrant. A name written there belongs to heaven. Before the next rationed dawn a Vermilion Censor or a Wyrdwing goes down for it, and the hero it names comes up in chains and goes back down as a god with still eyes. The clerks call this the Investiture. They do not call it anything else, not out loud.