[Coldsaturn]

- "/sifts through all the stuff on the menu"
"I'm waiting for you"
Sweet Evil Trap is particularly important but you've already guessed it. Becomes even more on the nose after reading Sylus' dragon myth.

- "confusion. "someone traded me a map for what's in this gift box... maybe I'll try the dish you created just for me next time."
Aislinn didn't know how Ginevra got the protocore map in the first place, and at the end Mr. P reveals that in the past he traded the map (that he had probably stolen?) for the gift box that he then returned to Aislinn. Now, the interesting part is that if that's exactly the gift box from the deal all those years back, it means that P accepted to trade the protocore map for the money Aislinn had originally tried to give Ginevra. Money that was supposed to buy her protection. So why is P so incredibly invested in Aislinn's wellbeing, almost to a fatherly degree?

- 'because heartless rhymes with coreless.'
The first time I read that I spiraled because what are all these links between hearts and protocores like they're the very same thing?

- "the Library HAS to be involved with this, like some sort of traversal point?"
That, or the library is a similar concept but blown to enormous proportions. Protofields are single places/universes, whereas the library works above all timelines and universes. But that last protofield from the text, so tiny and so absurdly big inside is a mystery we still need to solve.