On the fourth day, Lira came to his desk and set a single sheet of paper in front of him. “Read the third paragraph,” she said. The paper was from Fenwick in Ashenmill. He had gone home two weeks ago to visit his family between training sessions and had been practicing the observation skills from the first two weeks of the program. He had been noting the quality of emotional signatures in the people around him — a practice Lira had designed for expanding empathic range through daily application. He had noted something unusual. Three people in Ashenmill have been expressing an emotion I cannot fully categorize, Fenwick had written. It is not their own emotion. It has the borrowed quality that Lira described when discussing the groundwater broadcasts. But it is not fear. It is a specific kind of certainty — a conviction that something is inevitably coming and that resistance is foolish. I have found this same quality in two people in Millford, when I passed through. And in one

The ruins looked different in autumn. The white trees at the city’s edge had turned grey rather than shedding leaves — the sixhundred-year pause in their growth had produced a different senescence pattern from ordinary seasonal change, a slow greying that moved from the outer branches inward over weeks rather than a single autumnal turn. The ground between the buildings had a sparse low growth that had not been there in summer — thin pale grass that had found its way in along the line of the old roadstones, small and determined. “Something is growing,” Lira said. “The origin point’s distribution reached here,” Kael said. “The bedrock under Old Aldenmere is the geographic center. The distributed network runs through it.” He crouched and pressed his palm to one of the pale grass blades. “The world is attempting to resume its own processes in places that were blocked by the Void architecture and the seed network.” He stood. “Which means the connective tissue is present here at maximu

The honey jar arrived first. Then the letter, in the same hand that had slipped the first one onto Kael’s desk in the night, except this time the hand had a slightly different quality to it — the pressure of the pen changed, the spacing between words more careful. Not the hand of someone who was older. The hand of someone who had been paying different attention when they wrote. Kael opened it at his desk. I felt the second rune go cold from my meadow, Aldric had written. I felt the outward distribution three months later. The bees were agitated for the better part of an hour during the dissolution, which I understand is a reasonable response to a continent-scale geological event. I have been thinking since the beach about what the Antecedent said regarding the mark carrying forward what was held. I have been thinking about the fragment of myself that was inside the god for twenty-three years. There is something I did not tell you on the day we met because I had not yet found the

Mira asked the question at the second governing council meeting, nine months after the first. She asked it at the end of the agenda, after the monitoring network’s quarterly report and the Varrath hub’s first operational update and a funding discussion for the Ren Collection’s main facility. She asked it after the formal business was complete, in the specific timing of someone who had held a question for long enough that she had decided the right moment was the moment she chose. “The vessel mark,” she said. She looked at Kael. “When it passes, who carries it next?” The room was quiet. “The bloodline,” Kael said. “The mark passes through the specific bloodline Eldrath established a thousand years ago.” He paused. “There is no choice in the passing.” “Is there a choice in the preparation?” Mira said. He thought about it. “Tell me what you are actually asking,” he said. “The vessel line has passed through four people without any of them knowing in advance what they were carrying,

The year after the conviction signal dissolution was the year everything became ongoing. This was not dramatic. This was the opposite of dramatic. It was the year in which the work that had been crisis-driven became work that was simply work — regular, important, specific, attended to with the same care and somewhat less urgency. The monitoring network published its first annual report. Twenty-nine trained observers across twenty-two locations. Forty-seven documented riftsensitive sites, sixteen with active methodology notes, eleven with connection lines mapped. Three instances of minor conviction signal residue identified in the report’s year, all addressed at the local level using the manual’s third-section protocol before reaching the scale that required central response. The network was working. The Ren Collection opened its doors in the ninth month of the year in a three-story building in the city’s university district, designed by a young architect named Davar who had spen