"As far as I know, yes. They'd have lost too much to execute him — his research is irreplaceable and they know it. Political confinement is more likely. Permanent removal from the Council."
He nodded once. "The report I file will say: equipment degradation consistent with transit stress, relay stations in the assessment region non-functional due to standard equipment failure, continued monitoring recommended, no evidence of deliberate interference detected." He met my eyes. "What I observe outside the scope of the brief is outside the scope of the brief."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't," he said. "I'm making a calculation, not a sacrifice. The Tower's colonial program has a forty-seven percent long-term failure rate on Vassal-World integrations. You people are mana-dead and you're already developing sensitives faster than any colonization projection anticipated. The cost-benefit analysis for a full colonial operation here is already poor and deteriorating." He stood. "Vasir was right. It was never a good idea."
He left the next morning without further conversation.
I filed his visit under: *assets in unexpected places.*
**Earth: Day 59, Hour 22**
The Maw Doctrine file was restricted for reasons that became apparent approximately three pages in.
Sera had accessed it through the task force's intelligence archive — the Tower maintained a research library in the Earth-side operation's encrypted records, and Mardus's visit had apparently recalibrated her access clearance in ways neither of them had discussed explicitly.
The file was 340 pages. I read it in four hours.
The taxonomy was the first thing: *Class IV Dimensional Parasite — Feeding Stage.* Class I through III were smaller organisms, simpler feeding structures, documented and studied. Class IV was the big one. The one that made the restricted taxonomy feel suddenly necessary.
A Class IV Dimensional Parasite did not invade. It did not colonize. It did not send armies or build infrastructure or negotiate treaties.
It *rooted.*
The organism's primary body existed at a dimensional depth that conventional mana perception couldn't reach — somewhere between physical planes, in the substrate that dimensional travelers passed through and mages drew energy from. From this primary body, it extended feeding structures through the dimensional membrane into physical planes. The feeding structures were indistinguishable, to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at, from dimensional portals.
Gates.
The creatures that came through the gates were not an army. They were the ecosystem that the organism maintained around its feeding apertures — the same way deep-sea fish cluster around hydrothermal vents, the creatures clustered around the gates because the gates were the warmest, most energy-rich points in their environment. They were incidental. The gates were not for them.
The gates were for the organism.
What it fed on: dimensional substrate. The energy of the membrane itself — the dimensional equivalent of soil nutrients. A planet with a native mana ecology was like a garden. Rich substrate, accumulated over millennia. When the organism found one, it rooted, extended its feeding apertures, and began drawing.
The rooting took time. Months in dimensional terms. The feeding structures needed to stabilize before the draw could begin in earnest. The creatures that clustered around the early apertures — the Hounds, the Drakes, the things that had been tearing Earth apart for fifty-nine days — were essentially the organism's early-stage ecosystem. Once the root structure was established and the draw began, the creatures became irrelevant. The organism would sustain itself on the substrate directly.
A planet that was being fed on by a Class IV Organism lost its dimensional substrate slowly, over decades. The mana ecology collapsed. The ley lines went silent. The world became, eventually, like a garden stripped of soil — still there, physically intact, but unable to support the kind of life that had made it worth inhabiting.
The Tower's Maw Doctrine file estimated that Earth, based on its baseline mana density and geological structure, had approximately seventy years before the substrate was drawn below the threshold required to sustain a mana ecology.
At current saturation growth rates: the mana ecology that Earth's sensitives were developing would peak sometime in the next five to ten years, provide a generation of extraordinary human potential, and then begin a slow, irreversible decline.
The invasion was not the problem. The invasion was the distraction.
The organism — which the restricted files referred to by the name that had appeared in Vasir's Council chamber performance, the name the Tower had been using for decades in reference to the entity they thought was a person, a leader, a *Demon King* — was called, in the Maw Doctrine taxonomy.