Chapter Thirty
Elias always knew before the others.
Not because he felt more.
Because he watched more.
The morning it began, the valley was unchanged. Wind steady. Guards alert. Ironholt silent beyond the ridges.
But the numbers were wrong.
He stood in the war chamber long before dawn, mapping patrol shifts against supply intake, tracking movement patterns over the last seven days.
There was no direct breach.
No missing sentries.
No unusual scent trails.
But subtle shifts had occurred.
Micro-hesitations in formation lines.
Two miscommunications during training rotations.
A guard repeating an order he had already acknowledged.
Tiny anomalies.
Insignificant alone.
Meaningful together.
Elias did not call it fear.
He called it variance.
And variance meant influence.
The Sha
