The declaration took six hours.
They wrote it on the largest table in the base, which had been rebuilt twice in eight months and would probably need to be rebuilt again before the year was out. Due had sourced a clean stack of Record-grade paper through a runner Tavin had vouched for, and the paper sat in the middle of the table with a respect none of them admitted out loud.
Alistair wrote the first draft.
He did it alone, in the morning, while the others moved through the rest of the day. He wrote with the frame of a man who had been thinking about what Sun Harvest meant since the cave with Glory and was now, finally, being asked to write it down where it would remain.
The first draft took two hours. He looked at it once. Did not love it. Set it on the table and went outside for ten minutes.
When he came back, the three of them were reading it.
