The stone was still there the next morning.Ioan’s test sat in the middle of the track like a small, stubborn accusation. Mud had splashed up one side overnight, but no boot had moved it. Ethan saw it as soon as they came over the low rise with Fenrir. Sophia noticed at the same moment and made a quiet sound under her breath.Lira was already standing near it with her arms folded.“They walked around it,” she said. “Both directions. Deliberate. Not one of them touched it.”Rhess came down from the side stretch a few minutes later. She saw where they were looking and didn’t pretend otherwise.“We saw it,” she said. “We left it. It isn’t ours to move, and it isn’t a hazard. Seemed simplest.”Ioan had followed at a distance. When he heard Rhess’s explanation he walked forward, picked the stone up with both hands, and brushed the dried mud off with his thumb. His face was carefully blank in the way of a child who had decided not to cry about something that still hurt.“It’s okay,” he said

The last week of Rhess’s trial arrived without anyone announcing it.No one needed to. Everyone on the corridor could feel the count in the way people checked the eastern horizon a little more often, in the way Lira’s fighters stopped complaining about the cold hand-overs and simply watched, in the way Ioan began saving his best stones instead of leaving them.Ethan rode the junction on the twenty-fifth morning with Sophia and Fenrir. The air was clear and sharp. The side stretch looked the same as it had for days — clean positions, disciplined intervals, no wasted motion — but something in the texture had shifted. The System carried it as a low, complicated hum: still cold, still strong, but no longer completely sealed.Rhess met them at the drainage cut. She looked tired in a way that sleep wouldn’t fix.“Five days,” she said. It wasn’t a question.“Five days,” Ethan agreed.She glanced toward the main marker stones, where Ioan was sitting with Fenrir and a small pile of carefully c

The first week with Rhess’s stretch as permanent ground felt like learning to walk with a new weight on one side.Nothing dramatic broke. That was the strange part. The side stretch held its positions, answered the shared signals when required, and filed clean reports. Ava’s crew raised the covered position in four days and Rhess’s people treated the new structure like any other piece of necessary equipment — used it, maintained it, and did not decorate it. The three stones Ioan had left stayed exactly where he put them. No one moved them. No one added to them. They simply remained, small and ignored and unbroken.Ethan rode the full line twice in those first days. The System showed him a continuous claim that now included a distinctly colder segment near the eastern edge. The cold anchors were stable. They simply refused to feel like the others. When he stood on the rise between the Stone Line and the side stretch, the difference was as clear as a change in the wind.Lira put it into