The western border territory announced itself before they reached it. Not through any single thing. Through accumulation. The soil colour changing by degree — not dramatic, the specific greying of ground that had been running on a different mana composition long enough for the change to reach the surface level. The vegetation responding to the substrate shift the same way vegetation responded to any fundamental change in what it was growing in. Not dead. Wrong. Still functional but running a slightly different version of itself that would become more wrong over time. The off-colour sky he had read from three days east was overhead now. Broader than a settlement's contamination. Deeper. The sky over Vareth had been wrong in the way of a room with something bad in one corner. This was the room. Terra read the ground at every stop. She did not report anything use

He did not pull to zero.At seventy-eight percent he stopped.The reasoning was not tactical. It was the reasoning of someone who had been doing this for a hundred lives and understood the difference between what was necessary and what was complete. Malphas had been fully extracted because Malphas was a system that needed to be shut down. Valdris was something else. What Valdris was at twenty-two percent remaining was not a threat he could not manage. It was a king-rank general with enough mana to function and not enough to pose the problem he had posed ten minutes ago.He withdrew his hands.Valdris looked at him."You stopped." He said."Yes." Flint said."Why." Valdris said."Because I need you functional." Flint said. "Not because I couldn't finish."Valdris looked at his hands again. Reading the twenty-two percent the same way he had read the fifty-one. Complete mana awareness running its full assessment and arriving at the same conclusion Flint had stated."You could finish." He

 The first sign came on the morning of the second day. Not Valdris. The territory responding to his movement through it. The contaminated ground had a specific quality when it was undisturbed — the settled uniformity Terra had described at equilibrium, the off-colour sky sitting evenly above it. What they were walking through on the second morning was different. Not uniformly wrong. Wrong in a direction. Terra read it at the first stop. "Something large is moving through the territory." She said. Her hands were still flat on the ground. "To the northwest. The mana displacement is significant." She stood. "Like a pressure wave. Something with a substantial mana output passing through an environment that is already at saturation." "How far." Flint said. "Hard to read at this range." She said. "The contamination distorts the ambient read. But

He did not pull to zero.At seventy-eight percent he stopped.The reasoning was not tactical. It was the reasoning of someone who had been doing this for a hundred lives and understood the difference between what was necessary and what was complete. Malphas had been fully extracted because Malphas was a system that needed to be shut down. Valdris was something else. What Valdris was at twenty-two percent remaining was not a threat he could not manage. It was a king-rank general with enough mana to function and not enough to pose the problem he had posed ten minutes ago.He withdrew his hands.Valdris looked at him."You stopped." He said."Yes." Flint said."Why." Valdris said."Because I need you functional." Flint said. "Not because I couldn't finish."Valdris looked at his hands again. Reading the twenty-two percent the same way he had read the fifty-one. Complete mana awareness running its full assessment and arriving at the same conclusion Flint had stated."You could finish." He

He sat outside the camp at the edge of the cleared extraction ground and looked at the stars.The stars above the western territory were wrong in the same way everything above it was wrong. The contamination in the ground reached high enough to affect the ambient mana in the air and the air affected how the stars refracted through it. They were the same stars. They looked slightly different. He had spent enough lives looking at different versions of the same sky to find it interesting rather than troubling.He was thinking about his wife.Not the way he thought about the mission. Not operationally. He was simply thinking about her the way you thought about someone you had not seen in a very long time — without agenda, without the forward pressure of wanting to get back to them. Just the fact of them. The specific fact of a person who existed somewhere and was real.Her name was Sael.He did not use it often. He had learned across enough lives that names were the most dangerous thing to