Two months after the ceremony, the network dissolution had begun spreading on its own momentum.
Not through force. Not through legal proceeding, though Rowan kept careful documentation of every contact for whatever institutional record the regional council might eventually require. Through simple, patient contact instead, Rowan reaching out to the forty-three packs one by one, working through the list with the same methodical care he brought to everything.
Some Alphas responded immediately. They could feel the governance bonds dissolving beneath them, disoriented and frightened by a sudden absence where certainty used to sit, and they needed someone, anyone, to tell them what was happening to the architecture of their own minds. Some took longer, suspicious of contact from Ironpeak, wary
