On that day, in the year of 2020, Nicholas Flamel died, smiling at his wife who died with him. It had surprised him, how long their frail bodies had lasted after the Elixir of Life ran out, but now, finally, it was at an end. A long saga of adventure and riches, finally over, finally complete.
The book wasn't technically in the Restricted Section of the library, then again, Aiden Hale shouldn't technically have been in the library at all. Aiden shouldn't have been anywhere but in his dorm room, but Aiden didn't much like rules. Aiden seemed to think they just got in the way. Which is explains how he found himself in the library, after barely escaping Filch and that ratty little cat, striding along the dark, solemn columns of books.
He navigated quietly along the towering walls of books, each seeming on the verge of collapsing inwards, on the verge of crushing him under the weight of hundreds, if not thousands, of books. His wand, pine with Phoenix feather core and unusually long, was casting a narrow beam of light for him to see by, the only light in the pitch-black library. Aiden nervously shifted the beams direction towards any sound, any scratch, any creak that could be Filch, but its gaze only caught the hundreds of bindings of the hundreds of books that were crammed together on the old oak shelves.
Left here, right there, a turn around that table and… The Restricted Section lay directly in front of him, protected only by a bit of rope, not even barred, not even locked.
On that day, just as Nicholas Flamel died, the book he had hidden so well, guarded with so many spells, was released.
Aiden's hand was just on the verge of unhooking that ill-protecting rope, when a book fell right in front of him from one of the shelves. It bounced once, landing just past the rope that once guarded it. It had sprung open during the fall, revealing a page roughly in the center, "Gold Pebbles", a picture of gold rocks was painted beneath it, and sticking out of the binding, as though shoved in between the pages by a long forgotten hand, was a note.