What made last night different from all other nights?

On all other nights, Kartom’s quill began to write—and then it stopped. It was improper to glare at a recording, or to fume at the empty space in a report that both preceded and followed a contextless question. Wasted effort was effort that could have been spent on understanding; performance was time that could be spent pursuing truth.

Still, even relative to the typical Ease-shift reports filed by the Doctor—by Rafa, whose pointed rejection of her title in both speech and paperwork was something Kartom was constantly forgetting—the matter was... vexing.

The words the Tower wizard had written erased themselves from the paper, and he began anew, this time not deviating from the traditional phrasing. The recording which rests in the tower, and which is the attested, canonical recording of Kibosh, suggests the answer is that events proceeded as typical for an Ease night.

“I understand,” he said with as little disdain as he could, “that the recordings fail to capture a certain amount of ancillary information.”

“Well that’s funny,” snorted the healer—the doctor, perhaps, but never Doctor—across the desk from him. “Standard’s pretty clear, right? Record, analyze, report. Obviously you can’t be saying you know better than the Tower and your Pillar.”

“The form, which represents the standard of duty assigned to me by, yes, the institution of Shem which is known as the Tower, contains a space for such ancillaries.”

“Don’t growl and glower at me, boy.”

“Whatever decisions drove you to mischaracterize my tone,” the mage snapped, “it would be best if you reconsidered them. Speak in tones of contempt as you will, I will not permit the twisting of word or deed—not even from you.”

“Well, look who’s snitty.” Rafa smirked, leaning back in her chair. “Fine. You weren’t growling, and no, I don’t have anything else for you to put in the form.”

The quill scratched against the paper for a moment. When it stopped, Kartom sniffed derisively and plucked it out of the air as it drifted back to him. Not looking away from her, he tapped the nib with a finger and channeled the smallest amount of magic he could manage into the enchantment before scrawling a barely-recognizable—though certainly unique—signature across the bottom of the page.

He transferred his glower to the form, as though his distaste could be expressed in a manner compatible with the carefully-written questions and as-carefully written answers he’d provided. Sighing, letting his face ease into a begrudged neutrality, he placed it on the sending slate and channeled the requisite amount of mana.

Without any fanfare, without any transition between existence and nonexistence, the paper vanished.

And now, Kartom thought to himself with a measure of anticipation to leaven the resentment, the truth behind the facts… once we have a measure of privacy.

Gradually, over the course of a silent minute, a charge built in the air as a panoply of small magics activated. A pair of orbs began to glow softly, a ring began to hum, the faces of a block began to rearrange themselves, and the weighted exercise staff which the mage was quite well advised to make more use of began to sag into its holders as if under pressure. There were a very large number of odds and ends within his office which could take a continuous intake of mana, and in batches of seven at a time, they began to wake to function—or at least to life.

None of it was misdirection, not exactly. He made quite extensive, routine use of the technique—it was, arguably, the foundation of his personal style, and had been since before he was considered experienced enough to possess such a thing. It would be unusual of him not to re-establish his external channel-points as soon as convenient; the only thing he found more aggravating about Ease than the requirement to set it aside was the fact that those at whose orders he had begun doing so were correct in their insistence.

It was not, however, a coincidence that the resulting chaotic mix of energies would take either an emphatic, obvious effort or the System assistance wielded by Archmages—or, say, the needle-threading of a mage moderately skilled at the fundamentals of mana theory and manipulation.

In a century or so, perhaps Shuli would become the fourth of those who could thread that needle. Until that happy day, there were precisely six individuals upon the continent of Alqar who could observe Kartom and his surroundings without his being aware of it.

“The report,” he said pointedly, “is filed. Unless you intend to waste both of our time further, this circumlocution can end.”

“Forest’s confused.” Rafa’s usually acerbic voice was contemplative, wistful. “Like it forgot to be mad, a little. Was able to make it to Vois in just a few minutes after I used the orb to spirit-step to the border, no trouble other than a few new Awakened dumb enough to get in the way on my way back.”

The shock of that simple statement nearly caused him to lose his artifact-anchors. It had been decades since the last time Rafa had been able to walk the Forest in spirit, and that had been a trap intended to kill her. Nothing that lived there had threatened her again, but Rafa would not, could not kill outside of direct self defense, and the Forest was perfectly capable of capitalizing on such a thing.

Bound by oaths as she was, a single bramble spirit, awakened into sentience was enough to bar her passage—a tactic that could never have worked with the likes of Esse, the village’s Delve Pillar and a woman who thirsted for violence.

The Forest-folk brought their sick to the Edge and bartered for the aid she gave freely, or they brought their magic and tried to kill her in keeping with the Rules Unwritten. But Rafa had always been barred from entry by the simplest of means: a person standing in her way, making no threats but permitting no passage.

“Did you bring—I apologize,” Kartom stammered. “Will you allow me to view—”

“I couldn’t cure the kid. Jueya, I couldn’t cure Jueya.” She said it like he hadn’t interrupted. “They let me go to her, since the Forest wasn’t opposing me and what were they gonna do, stop me anyway? And I couldn’t cure her, the wasting-root rot got into the marrow, it’s been in the marrow since before anyone noticed it and it’s too good at mimicking her. Fuck me, they had the nerve to say what I did was more than she deserved—like a fucking kid doesn’t deserve a chance to live, like I hadn’t been trying to get to her all these forsaken years.”

Kartom narrowed his eyes, attentive to what Rafa hadn’t said. “What did they give you to take back, that you find so over-generous?”

“They gave me a vaccine for rith-fever.” Her voice was low, barely controlled. “Rith-fever, Kartom. Ten Springs made it for me, with every drop of her own fucking mana and most of Vois’s reservoir. More than a century of us giving a better life to kids on both sides, and she’s drawn so deep I don’t think she’ll come back.”

“Source of all grant her grace,” he whispered, and a bare movement of her eyelids was the only acknowledgement that he’d spoken. “After all of these years. What a parting gift.” One that Kartom knew she’d earned, even if she’d never admit it, especially not to herself—to Rafa, healing the sick was simply what a doctor did, and the rest was irrelevant details.

“I told Esse I could do it,” she said sadly, “not that I’d try, not that in three hours all I could do was push it back so she could have an immune system again. I told her that her baby sister would live a normal life, that was the deal, not that she’d be stuck in a five-year-old’s body until her telomeres ran short and she died of old age. Wasting-root, Thousands fucking burn me, if I could reach through time I’d strangle myself for bringing it back into this world, I don’t care how many people I saved from the Melting Death.”

“You woke her?”

“No,” Rafa admitted, and a tension flowed back into her body as she glared at him. “It’s not my call to make, and they said Vois is sticking around a bit. Growing, even, like they’re reinforcing their holdings underground, like they’re worried about something. So she’ll be there for a bit. I’ll tell Esse, Thousands only know how she’ll take it, and then it’s her choice if she wants to wake the kid or not, or if it’s a broken bargain and she goes back to the Forest. Maybe that old teacher of hers is gonna—”

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

“—fight.”

Shuli’s pencil wrote its way across the page, pausing for long stretches between questions as its owner waited to hear more. After a few moments, the wizard’s apprentice sighed again and turned to the other woman.

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“Ma’am,” she groused, “must you omit every detail that this calls for?” Shuli waved her hand at the rune-engraved wooden slate floating beside her, and at the single piece of paper resting on that slate. “Or is this sojourn too much a pleasure?”

“I told you, kid,” her laconic companion hissed. “Singing Steel met me at Forest’s Edge and agreed to fight. I’m still here. What do you want?”

“Ma’am. Esse. Pillar. Delvemistress.” Shuli stopped in her tracks, hands on her hips. “I do not possess the necessary context to divine the meaning in anything I have written on your behalf.”

“So? Send that fucking thing.” Esse indicated the form with her head, lips thinning in impatience. “They know what it means, or they can fucking wonder. Putting what happened on the record is what my duty is.”

“I see.” Shuli’s eyes narrowed, and the form disappeared with a brilliant flash of light far stronger than the weak morning sunlight—she scowled, but this time it was at herself, and at the imprecision of her spellwork which let off that incandescent inefficiency. “And now, Delve Pillar Kibosh, would you do me the courtesy of explaining?”

“Singing Steel was my first teacher.” They started walking again, this time with more purpose, tracing a circle a mile out from the village’s walls. “Put my first knives in my hands on my eighth day, wrought my first spearhead, shaft of my bound ax is heartwood of its birth-tree. It cut the path open for me to leave, told me to come find it when I was ready.”

“I read,” Shuli said carefully, “that the Ascendant Spirit of the Land whose epithet is Singing Steel was in a Goddess Grove in the north, in torpor. Far from where Kibosh sits on the southern border—near the ocean, even if the Grove is not far west of the Wardline.”

The other woman snorted derisively. “They forced it down. Chained it, left it pinned under the Wretch’s weight.”

They walked in silence for a while, trampling a path through grass recently cropped—by sopra, rather than shoats, since the beasts of burden were let out to roam on Ease. “Bait, then? For you, as you… left on poor terms.”

“Likely. And if they had to let it up, I figure something’s coming from the north.”

"Across the ocean, and unknown to Kandaq and Tagata alike. Is this…" Shuli trailed off. Kandaq was due north across the ocean, and friendly enough that they would have given word; Tagata sprawled across the ocean’s islands, and suffered none to disrupt trade. What could be coming, she worried, that the Forest is afraid, and of which no news has been sent?

Thinking hard, she ignored the burn in her legs, though not easily. She knew that the battle-mad Immortal she was accompanying was choosing their pace deliberately, and she refused to be baited into complaints so long as she was physically capable of keeping up.

It was quite like Esse, whose obsessive domain was the management of Kibosh’s stable of dedicated killers, to use a debrief as an opportunity to force someone to exercise.

It was quite like Esse to so matter-of-factly discuss having fought and killed her mentor the night before, and to leave for the young woman—which Shuli knew herself to be, young and inexperienced, an apprentice, even if it was to a genius—the challenge of understanding the implications.

And there would be implications, ones she would miss and whose failure to understand she refused to consider shameful. But at a minimum, the decades-long commitment to holding down a Spirit like Singing Steel would not have changed lightly, nor would the Forest ordinarily allow such a fight without a guarantee of victory or some measure of compensation.

Of the three Immortals which held Ease-night shifts, Esse was least often tested, if only because the Forest had no reason to feed the growth that she so single-mindedly chased. For that fight to have happened and her to have come out victorious and a Spirit centuries old to die by her hand, without a commensurate exchange?

And if something had changed hands, if this were bought, Shuli thought to herself, careful not to let it show, she’d have said so. Probably. And probably means I’m going to need to go up the chain.

And besides, if something were coming from over the ocean, and it had the Forest itself shifting its behavior in response…

“Ma’am, is this change—”

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

“—good?”

“Mmm.” There was a snapping sound as a stick broke, somehow contemplative and moody. “Mrh.”

“Farmer.” Magus Zrodne sighed, squatting down awkwardly to pick a beetle off of a stem, eyes easily picking out its shape despite its diminutive size and the early hour. He dropped the beetle in the technically-civilian’s hand, keeping the scowl entirely off of his face. “I have already submitted the forms, as even the most inquisitive Clerk does not expect you to provide any particular accounting.”

“Spitbug,” the farmer grunted.

“Acidic, I believe, but not a pest species, if one is careful not to crush them out of error—one of the several beneficial creatures recorded to have first been introduced in your vicinity.”

Farmer shrugged at that, stroking the beetle’s carapace before placing it carefully on a leaf of the wheat field they and Zrodne were standing in. “Ayeh, s’ppose.”

“Farmer, you are well aware of my responsibility, my duty. Please do not take me to be one who trifles with such a thing.”

“Bit o’quisition, ayeh?”

“Of all people in Kibosh,” the battlemage retorted, biting his words off angrily, “I would be least likely to be an inquisitor unto you, Elder. Aside from our shared history, I am not foolish enough to think such a thing might make a difference.”

“Mmm.”

There was another crunching sound as a flower snapped off of its stem at Farmer’s frown, unraveling to show a spiraling green thread inside. It waggled briefly in the air before trying to ball up, and then shriveled up as though it were burning in a heatless flame.

The silence stretched in, if not contentment, then a willingness on both sides to take as much time as was needed.

“Three folks,” Farmer grunted eventually, straightening with an expression of distraction. “Frost falling.”

“Three new—what possessed you to agree to such a thing? We absolutely—this, bringing on three new people at Frost’s end is impossible. We’ve only Ellana for integration; it’s only two seasons and people will notice. Are we to call in support from Hayir that we would be unlikely to—”

“Eh, nah.” From a height that seemed to unfurl far beyond their physical body, a pair of hemp-covered shoulders shrugged, as though that was all there was to say. “Tiffany here,” they clarified after a long, tense silence. “Other two, Yilrah.”

“You are endorsing a woman whose name means manifestation of God as a Forest-born citizen of Kibosh.” The man formally responsible for Kibosh’s area of the Forest managed—if barely—to keep the disbelief out of his voice. If Farmer says that a woman named Tiffany will be immigrating from the Forest, Zrodne told himself determinedly, there is no purpose in questioning. One simply files the necessary paperwork. Instead of objecting in a tone of shock, he adopted a tone of idle inquiry, as though asking after the health of a beloved pet. “How came two others to decide upon traveling to Yilrah, a half-Deshanna township on the border of the Spine? Why a place so far east, as their destination?”

“Forest’s wakin’.” There was a sound like creaking timber, and Zrodne was pulled as though on a string in the other’s wake. “Open trails, took a wander, saw a new few things, fixed a thing or two. Them three, they ain’t sure, not ‘bout it, not ‘bout how t’feel.”

“As the Ward holds,” the Magus breathed in stunned surprise. For the Forest to grant Farmer the right to walk openly and unhindered, for them to take a wander for hours and see things they’d not seen before? For Farmer to no doubt collect for themself any number of cuttings, samples, and observations, and in return to merely solve some few problems and quietly resettle three people?

It was a bargain so vastly skewed in Shem’s favor that it was beyond mere comment; it approached matters of diplomacy and policy. For an Immortal to be involved called for the Heir, mortal representative of the Queen that he was, to make… at least an unofficial visit, whatever else might come to pass.

“It will be a subtle matter to bring appropriate attention to Crown and Writ, and to avoid any excess of notice. But law and custom alike grant me that much leeway, if no further.”

“Ayeh.”

“This is because of that Nadash girl, isn’t it.” He scowled at the other’s back for a moment, then brought his eyes back to the ground—it wouldn’t do, it very much wouldn’t do, to step on the rows of plants. Rude, if nothing else. “I grant that one may find it proper to have putatively open, controlled trails on an Ease when the Forest-folk want to trade. This is what the Rule Unwritten is for, I have been extensively so informed by that bloodthirsty fellow Pillar of mine. In return for Ease’s Howl being a matter between you Immortals and the Forest, you and the Forest do whatever business you will, so long as you grant no grounds to object or complain and we mortals retain our measure of oversight.

“But the Forest awakening? Is this to be the last battle, where the Forest itself will move and the Goddess Remaining sally? Or is this the end, where she leaves with the Self within her shard? The dungeon here is too alive to be left untended for any length of time, and no Low Road has been forged. I very much hope you are confident in your choices, Farmer; should matters go amiss, the Forest and Sudh alike might drown a city and its demesne in blood.”

Farmer bent, silently, as if ignoring the Magus’s words. They picked a miniscule roundworm off of a sheaf of wheat, frowning at it, and crushed it between two fingers with a soft grunt.

Not a ripple of magic, Magus Zrodne thought to himself. Not a whisper of a Skill. And yet, he could feel the deaths ripple out in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.

Grunting again in satisfaction and collecting a nod from the Magus, Farmer walked out of the field they’d been inspecting, glancing at the Forest in the distance as they slowed.

And with every footfall, a field’s worth of flowers turned to follow the Reaper of the Fields—keeping their face to their sun.