The first day passed in work.
That was not unusual. Work had been my primary currency for three years — the thing I spent most freely and relied on most completely, the structure that held everything else in place when everything else was uncertain. I understood work the way some people understand prayer: not as an escape from reality but as a way of moving through it with direction and purpose when direction and purpose were otherwise hard to locate.
The eastern border consolidation continued. The moderate Coalition faction — through Aldric's careful preliminary communications, the first ripples of which reached us by early afternoon of the first day — had apparently received the intelligence package with the kind of silence that indicated serious internal conversation rather than dismi
