Location:Seven Peaks — Throughout Settlement, Spirit Garden
Date/Time:TC1854.02.15
Raven walked the mountain at dawn because she needed to remember what she was defending.
Not the strategic assets. Not the formation network or the cultivation tower or the population statistics that Marcus updated on the command center's display every morning with the precision of someone who believed numbers were a form of prayer. Those mattered. But they weren't why she'd built this.
She started at the gate. The same gate where the Sanctum Elders had stood two weeks ago, where Heavenly Law had split the sky and unmade two thousand years of stolen existence in less than a minute. The grass had grown back. Ascara didn't hold grudges — the planet processed and moved on with the particular efficiency of something that had been doing this for four billion years.
