Alistair stood at the edge of the crater and looked down into the darkness.
The ground was wrong here, as it is practically unrecognizable after being reshaped by Due's resolution.
The rock face was different from anything it had been before, jagged and split in ways that shouldn't be possible.
However, it was useful for what he needed to do.
Alistair began to train his Edgeform sequences, moving his body through the familiar motions of the Thorne Clan's martial arts.
The miscalibration from Domain Mode was still present in every scan he attempted to run.
It was a slight and permanent error, causing the Equalizer to return readings that were always fractionally off.
Alistair had been adjusting for it since that morning, and the adjustment was finally becoming instinct.
His body was starting to compensate for the data errors before his mind finished calculating the actual difference.
He worked through the sequences for two hours without stopping once.
The miscalibration was forcing something he hadn't expected, which was a heavy reliance on Aspect skill rather than his raw Characteristic power.
His footwork was cleaner than it had been before he ever used Domain Mode.
His timing was sharper too.
The permanent cost of his power was reshaping his fighting style into something more precise, whether he had decided that or not.
Elara watched him from a distance.
She sat on a rock twenty feet back and said nothing for the first hour of his training.
Eventually, she spoke up about his footwork.
Alistair ignored it and continued his strike.
She said it again, adding more detail this time.
"Your right foot drops half an inch before the pivot. You're compensating with your left shoulder, and it's creating a delay."
Hearing this, Alistair paused and thought about his movement.
'She is right… I am leaning too much into the shoulder to make up for the scan lag.'
Alistair adjusted his stance and tried the sequence again.
Elara watched him apply the correction for ten minutes, then she went back to what she was doing without making a fuss.
Due sat against a rock nearby and recovered as best as he could.
Smaller obligations cleared one by one from his vision.
His hands moved in settling gestures at a much slower pace than they did before the trap.
The reduced capacity was already becoming the new normal for him.
He watched Alistair train, and Elara watched as well, though she went back to being silent.
At some point, Alistair finally stopped.
He drove his Rune Sword point-first into the cracked rock at the crater's edge.
He stood there breathing heavily while Due looked up from his threads.
"The correction is holding," said Due.
Alistair pulled the sword free from the stone.
"She was right about the shoulder."
"She usually is," replied Due in a tired voice.
Following that, Due went back to his work with the threads.
Day two arrived with a grey sky.
The Sovereign Record dispatch arrived in the late morning.
Due caught the dissolving edges of the paper and read it as fast as he could.
He went to the Glory section first, noting that there were now eight faction collapses, which was up from five.
The eastern territories were continuing to unravel, and the destabilization was still spreading across Solnar.
Then he saw the name Sun Harvest, which was named directly for the first time in an official report.
The battle was described in the clinical language of continental military analysis, which Alistair found mostly annoying.
Due's trap was characterized as an anomalous obligation event.
This was just the Sovereign Record's way of saying they had no category for what had actually happened at the Oasis of Grain.
Due folded the paper and handed it to Alistair without making a comment.
Alistair read the words carefully.
'This isn't what I imagined when I was back in the Black Mountains. That version was simpler. This one has Due's permanent loss in it, and Elara, and a crater, and eight factions that aren't there anymore because I knocked on a door.'
He handed the paper to Elara.
She read it and set it down on her lap.
Nobody mentioned the First Warden line that was printed near the bottom.
All three of them read it, and all three of them left it alone.
Saying something would have made it more real than any of them were ready for.
Alistair was honestly unsettled by the title, but he kept his face neutral.
Due asked no questions, and Elara offered no commentary.
They sat with the news for a few minutes.
Eventually, the dispatch dissolved completely, leaving nothing to look at but the dirt.
The afternoon passed quietly for the group.
Due worked through his threads while Elara organized the camp supplies.
Alistair ran his scan in wide passive circles from the crater's edge.
He tracked settlements, roads, and the ordinary background noise of the Oasis of Grain.
He thought about Caldren reading his own name in the same dispatch as a man he had tried to capture and failed to contain.
He couldn't decide if that was useful or just heavy for his current situation.
Regardless, he stopped trying to decide and just sat there, letting the scan run.
Day three began long before the sun was up.
Alistair's scan woke him before the light did.
Therasia's army was at the outer edge of his range.
A thousand soldiers were marching in dark armor through the dark before dawn.
The formation was tighter and more deliberate than the one Due's trap had scattered three days ago.
It was clearly not the same force.
Five reasons had stacked since then, including Arphus, Elara, the explosion, and the Sovereign Record entry.
Caldren's political exposure in the same dispatch had also played a part.
This had nothing to do with anger or revenge anymore.
This was Therasia's machinery responding to something it had classified as a structural threat.
It came with supply lines and rotation schedules.
It was the organization of a force built to stay until the job was done.
Alistair stood and looked at Due.
Due was already awake and was already managing his threads.
His hands moved with the urgency they always carried when something significant was near.
His expression was calm.
It was not the calm of peace, but the calm of a man who had done the math and found it unfavorable.
Seeing this, Alistair knew they were in trouble.
Elara was already up too.
She hadn't needed a scan to tell her what was happening.
She had grown up around military operations long enough to feel what a thousand soldiers moving before dawn did to the air.
She looked at Alistair and didn't ask what was coming because she already knew.
They separated deliberately to prepare.
There was one moment between them before they moved.
It wasn't sentimental or drawn out.
They were just two people who were bound to death, looking at each other with a full understanding of what was about to happen.
Due straightened his back and adjusted his collar.
Alistair looked at him one last time.
"Try not to use Domain Mode immediately," said Due.
"I wasn't planning to," replied Alistair.
"You weren't planning to the first time either," Due spoke while sighing.
Due left before Alistair could reply to that.
His cloak was back on, retrieved at some point without a word about it.
Alistair noticed the cloak and kept it to himself.
Elara was further back than Alistair had told her to be.
He caught her position on the scan and decided not to send her further away.
He knew she wouldn't listen anyway.
The formation of the army moved as the grey dawn finally broke.
Alistair's scan found the commanders one by one.
Their Characteristic signatures were resolving through the mass of soldiers.
Four were identified and distributed through the ranks as he expected.
However, the fifth reading was suppressed.
It was suppressed enough that he came close to missing it entirely.
But, he caught it.
The grey dawn light caught the dark armor of a thousand soldiers moving toward him.
Somewhere in the middle of them, the fifth commander carried a reading that was trying very hard not to be found.
Alistair marked the location and the weight of the suppression.
His eyes widened as he realized the signature was familiar.
Alistair drew his Rune Sword.
The metal hummed as he walked toward the dawn to meet them.