# BEFOREWinter came again to Weston Creek.The second winter of the school. Different from the first — the first winter had been the winter of building the extension and Doran's body memory and the correspondence with Osha beginning and the school finding its internal rhythm in the cold. This winter had a different quality. Something more settled. The specific quality of a second year knowing what it was in a way the first year had still been discovering.The school had thirty-one students now.Four more had arrived in the autumn — two from the boundary territory communities Vessa had been corresponding with, who carried the carrying quality in the specific form that Vessa had identified and documented and that now had its own section in the curriculum. One from a village in the eastern province where the new assessor training module had been implemented and a grandmother had recognized in her grandson something she called the old listening that her own grandmother had described and

## THE VOID THRONEHe walked alone.Lin Suyin had offered to come. He had said no, and she had understood immediately, the way she understood most things — not because he was refusing her, because the ascension was the one thing that had to happen alone. Not from isolation. From completion. The candidate sitting in the throne was the culmination of a path that had been specifically his, and the culmination required the specific aloneness of something finishing what it had started.She had held his gaze when he said no.She had said: come back different.He had said: yes.She had said: the good kind of different.He had said: yes.He had walked.---The road to the ruins was the same road it had always been. The old forest. The hills where the path narrowed. The specific deepening quality of spiritual energy as the ruins approached. He had walked this road before — first time as a competitor with a map case, second time with Zhao Peng coming back from the ruins changed, third time with

## THE RESTORATIONSpring came fully to Weston Creek in the third week of the season.Not the tentative early spring of the first flowers and the ground still cold underneath. The full spring — warmth in the afternoon, the wildflower field dense with color, the farming community doing what farming communities did in full spring, which was work with the specific engaged purposefulness of people whose livelihood was directly connected to what the season was doing and who had been waiting for the season to be doing it.The school had thirty-three students.Two more had arrived in the weeks since Wei Liang's return from the ruins. One from the northern territories, sent by a community that had been in correspondence with the network for three months and had finally felt ready to send their first student. One who had walked from a boundary territory community Vessa had been corresponding with since winter, carrying a letter from the community's eldest teacher that described the carrying qu