The modification of the circle took six days.
Not because it was technically difficult — Casvar knew exactly what was required, had known it for four hundred years, and worked with the efficiency of someone executing a plan that had been fully formed in their mind for longer than most people had been alive. Six days because the physical work was slow and precise and Kael insisted on understanding each step before it was completed.
This slowed things considerably.
Casvar did not object. He explained each step in the careful, exact language he used for things that mattered, and Kael asked questions, and by the end of the six days he had two hundred and eight words and an understanding of the circle's mechanism that Casvar said was more complete than the previous Kaer had ever achieved.
He said: "The previous one didn't ask."
Casvar said: "He did not. He read the situation correctly — understood what the circle was, understood what it could do — and then proceeded to do it with less precision than the situation required."
Kael said: "He was in a hurry."
Casvar said: "He was accumulating for twelve years and could feel the pressure of it. Yes. He was in a hurry."
Kael said: "I would have been in a hurry too."
Casvar looked at him.
He said: "If I had been accumulating for twelve years with no one to teach me how to hold it, no Seren to explain what was happening, no Dren to name what was being withheld — I would have been in a hurry too. The hurry was not a failure of character. It was a failure of information."
Casvar was quiet.
He said: "The stone record says the circle worked as intended once. Before the Resonance framework. Before the current divine structure. A Kaer stood in it and performed the return and the accumulated energy went back to the living world's borderlands and the borderlands—" He paused, searching for the word Casvar had read from the stone record. "They recovered. From something that had depleted them."
Casvar said: "Yes."
He said: "What had depleted them."
Casvar said: "The same thing that is always depleting them. The weight of death without return. When souls depart and shed their energy into the Ashenveil and the Ashenveil accumulates it and does not return it — the living world's borderlands thin. The places where the living and the dead are naturally proximate become less proximate. The border weakens."
He said: "And when the border weakens."
Casvar said: "The dying becomes harder. The passage becomes more difficult. The energy shed at death is larger, and more chaotic, and more difficult to accumulate cleanly. It is a compounding problem."
He said: "Which is why the Resonance framework is getting less efficient over time."
Casvar said: "Yes. The upper strata Soul-Lords compete harder each generation for the same amount of available Resonance because the return has not been performed in—" He stopped. He looked at the modified circle. "A very long time."
Kael sat with that.
He said: "The return isn't a one-time correction. It needs to be repeated."
Casvar said: "At intervals. Yes. The stone record suggests every three or four generations of the divine structure. The previous occurrence was before the current framework. The next was — delayed."
He said: "By four hundred years."
Casvar said: "By four hundred years."
He looked at the modified circle. At the new orientations — not outward and directed, but inward and receiving, the geometry shifted to pull rather than push. He thought about the teacher from the border town, and the builder, and the other four hundred and sixty souls whose unfinished directions he had received and whose Resonance he was holding with the patient, systematic attention of a man who had learned, very slowly, that what he was holding was not material.
He thought: they will go back. Not the specific people — the energy they shed. Back to the places they came from. Back to the borderlands that are thinning.
He thought: the Nineteenth did this too. Four hundred years of holding and returning. And they erased him for it — not because the return was wrong, but because the Resonance framework depends on accumulation staying accumulated. The return threatens every Soul-Lord's power base.
He said: "When the other gods find out what the modified circle is for—"
Casvar said: "They will object."
He said: "Strongly."
Casvar said: "Yes."
He said: "We need to be ready for that."
Casvar said: "I have been ready for that for four hundred years."
He said it the same way he said everything. Assessment. Fact placed between them for use.
Kael looked at him and thought that this was probably the truest thing Casvar had ever said to him, and that it had taken ninety days and two hundred and eight words to arrive at a moment where it could be said plainly.
He said: "Good."