Jack did not tell anyone about the crystal.
This was not a decision he arrived at through careful deliberation. It arrived the way certain conclusions did — complete, already assembled, presenting itself to conscious thought as a fact rather than a choice. He surfaced from the dungeon in the small hours of the morning, sent Julius back to the colony with the quiet authority of a man who had just experienced something too large to discuss and needed the space to let it compress into something manageable, and went to the study.
The quill was writing. He sat at the desk and watched it for a while without reading what it produced. The fire had gone to coals. The window held a rectangle of deep blue pre-dawn sky.
He thought about the source of the world's mana.
