Thalveris was found on Day 42, hiding in a stone culvert beneath an irrigation channel.
The culvert was his own design. He had built it 180 years ago — a drainage structure for the agricultural irrigation system that connected his territory's western farmland to the mountain watershed. The design was precise: interlocking stone blocks cut to tolerances of half a millimeter, the joints fitted without mortar because mortar failed and stone fitted correctly lasted forever. It was, by any structural engineering standard, a masterwork — the sort of construction that civilization textbooks would reference if civilization textbooks covered drainage infrastructure.
It was also twenty-two inches tall.
