Then, at 1:34 a.m., his laptop speaker hummed.

He refreshed. Nothing. He reloaded the PDF. The strange folio remained.

Then he turned to folio 28r.

The page was wrong. Instead of Francesco Landini’s sweet, aching Ecco la primavera , there was a piece he didn’t recognize. No title. No composer. The notation looked close to Ars Nova—but the ligatures twisted like roots. The lyrics were not Italian or Latin. They were a script he’d never seen, curling like smoke.