There was nothing unusual about opening her PO Box and finding inside it a pile of ephemera and letters written to and from people years ago. It was just that normally they were packaged.

She wrinkled her nose in consternation at the yellowed envelope and its ancient stamps among her junk mail and bills and a few small packages from admirers, and shifted Petitcru into her other arm so that she could carry it to the post office windows for a better look.

Strange. No return address. Only her own address - without a name - scribbled directly on top of the older, faded one. Once she sorted out which eBay seller had delivered her a letter in this fashion she was going to leave some very pointed feedback about destroying old ephemera for the sake of convenience, but at least it didn’t look to be anything especially valuable. It had been sent and re-sent, apparently, over the years, bearing faded and layered cancels over the equally-faded stamps. But it had, oddly, an intact wax seal, which had not broken.

She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and her initial impulse was simply to throw the thing away. This reeked of Destiny City Bullshit, and she had enough of that going on, especially without letting it permeate the boundary between Elaine and Joy, which was already growing perilously thin.

But the allure was too powerful. Elaine had always been a woman compelled by other people’s letters, and so, after a moment’s consideration, she placed Petitcru down on the package counter - ignoring the baleful glare of a post office worker who was too busy to yell at her about it right that second - and snapped the seal, which was plain and unmarked.

She had anticipated the long, looping cursive of seventy or so years back, but what met her instead were the regular, square figures of a much more bygone era. They looked - it was a dismaying realization - like one of the hands the Garde manuscripts were written in. She pored over it, looking for words she could recognize, and saw very little - not nearly enough to discern its contents. The ink was a striking, shimmering red, so dark that it was nearly black, and it looked as pristine as if the page had just been neatly blotted hours before, despite the crumbling page on which it was written - which was not vellum, or calf, or any other surface she’d expect to see those letters on.

She hesitated over it, feeling sick, and then she folded it and tucked it ungently into the tote bag on her arm. This was a problem for future Elaine, or possibly for Joy - or possibly even for Gouvernail - and until she figured out whose problem it was, it would not be hers. She gathered Petitcru back into her arms, finished gathering her packages and tossing out her junk mail, and did her best, as she stepped back out into the cold, not to think about what she’d just seen.