"Thank you. I apologize for the urgency." Peony waited until the door was shut behind her before continuing. "Yes, you have assumed correctly," she said, going to the desk and setting down the scroll, which was quite old and yellowed around the edges. She had had to bargain with the librarian to remove it from the stacks; such old and rare items were rarely permitted to leave the Tower.
"The news is both good and bad, I fear," she continued, taking a seat and spending a few moments longer than necessary smoothing her hands over her skirt before carefully beginning to unwrap the scroll. "I have found the symbols - as I had thought, I have seen them before." She had simply been looking in the wrong section.
As the scroll unrolled, the lines and circles of runes came into view, nearly identical to those she had observed at the scene of the murder. "It is a very old language, its origins obscure, but I have been able to correlate some of the symbols with meanings, which is the good news." She pursed her lips slightly, looked down at the symbols on the scroll. "This is also the bad news. How much do you know about the theory of magic?"