The real attack,finally came six days later, arrived in the one place Alex had least expected it — not the university, not the amphitheater, not any of the visible symbols of Valthoria's growing influence, but the quiet, unremarkable eastern trade road Osric's caravans used to reach the northern quarry that had saved Jeremy's forge months earlier."Ambush," Torren reported, arriving at a dead run from the gate with news that scattered every other conversation in the hall. "Osric's latest shipment, three miles out. Hired mercenaries, professional by the look of the ones we captured, not local bandits. They knew exactly which route we'd shifted the ore transport to, which means someone's been watching our patterns considerably more closely than a single stranger at a festival could have managed alone.""Casualties?" Alex asked, already moving toward the door."Two guards wounded, none killed. Osric's own quick thinking bought them enough time to signal for help before it turned into som

The turbine took six weeks to build properly, considerably longer than the crane or the amphitheater had required, and Alex found himself, watching Gideon and Corwin work through failure after failure with steady, undiscouraged patience, learning a new kind of respect for the particular difficulty of building something that had never existed in this world before at all. The first two attempts had failed almost immediately — the wheel simply too heavy for the water's force to turn, then too fragile to survive its own rotation once it finally did."Third design failed," Gideon reported, midway through the fourth week, more matter-of-fact than discouraged. "Blade angle was wrong. Water just spilled past instead of properly turning the wheel. Corwin thinks he's found the problem, though."Corwin, now considerably more confident presenting his own theories after months of proven instinct, unrolled a revised diagram with careful precision. "The blades need curvature, not flat angles. I've b

The expedition to Bramwell Hollow marked the first time Valthoria's soldiers marched beyond their own territory's borders since Red Canyon, and Alex found the preparation for it carrying a different weight than any previous crisis — not defending what already existed, but extending protection to something that wasn't, strictly speaking, theirs to protect at all. The gates that morning carried none of the grim urgency of the war's opening days; instead, a quiet, purposeful determination settled over the assembled soldiers as they checked their gear one final time.Torren led the expedition personally, a modest force of thirty soldiers alongside two of Gideon's newest engineering innovations — a pair of reinforced wagons, armored with layered steel plating salvaged and refined from the same recycled-alloy techniques Jeremy had developed during the ore crisis months earlier, crude by any measure Alex's old world would have recognized, but considerably more formidable than anything Bramwe

The university's second enrollment period brought sixty-three new students through Valthoria's gates, more than double the founding class, and Alex found himself, walking the crowded registration lines with Ilsevet, genuinely struck by how quickly this had become simply ordinary — new faces, new ambitions, a settlement that had learned to absorb growth without the anxious scrambling that had marked its earliest months. Petra had taken to greeting each new metallurgy student personally, and Corvain's booming voice could be heard across the yard, cheerfully intimidating a cluster of nervous newcomers with tales of bridge collapses he'd personally witnessed and survived.Among them was a young man who introduced himself as Emeric Voss — no relation, he clarified quickly, to the Lord Voss whose failed petition still occasionally surfaced in council gossip, simply a common enough border name. He carried himself with the careful, practiced humility of someone who'd clearly rehearsed his int

Corwin's presentation began exactly as scheduled, the boy standing before the crowd with a confidence that had grown considerably since his first nervous demonstration of the amphitheater lattice, entirely unaware of the careful, invisible net of guards and watchful eyes surrounding him throughout the assembled audience. He'd chosen to present a new design this time — a refined turbine blade shape, inspired by conversations with Gideon about efficiency, and his voice carried clearly across the amphitheater with none of the nervousness that had marked his very first public showing months earlier.Alex spotted Emeric perhaps twenty minutes into the demonstration, positioned near the amphitheater's upper tier with a clear line toward the stage, one hand resting inside a satchel that, according to Torren's earlier searches of the workshop, had gone missing along with a small quantity of the volatile alchemical compound Petra's metallurgy students used for controlled forge experiments."He