Victory did not silence the war overnight.
It changed the sound of it.
On the high ground that had been Lysander Darien’s command cluster twelve hours earlier, Blackridge worked through the dark in the specific, grinding register of a force converting a decisive action into a permanent shift of the map. Defensive lines were reset facing the wrong direction for the people who had built them. Medical rotations moved without pause. Prisoners—ranking and otherwise—were sorted, secured, and logged under the hard light of field lamps. The air still smelled of smoke and opened earth. Beneath those smells, for the first time in three weeks, there was also the thinner scent of a conflict that had lost its ability to pretend it might still end in the aggressor’s favor.
Tristan did not sleep.
I s
