Mandate
1543 Words
The Scholar knew that would be a risk worth noting.
I decide to note, privately, that the Scholar was not wrong.
"I'll be at the Council presentation," I say. "Not with you. Separately."
"Understood."
"Before we go in, you tell me everything. Real numbers, not the managed version. Everything in the file."
"Yes."
"And if there's a conflict between what I need to do and what your official mandate covers,"
"I'll manage my mandate," he says.
I look at him for a moment. He looks back. This is the part where someone usually blinks or qualifies or offers a more comfortable version of what they just said, and he does none of those things. He just waits, with the patience of someone who has learned that waiting is more honest than filling.
"Fine," I say.
His communication device pulses. He reads it and something happens in his face.... fast, controlled, but it was there. Genuine alarm for approximately one second before the control comes back.
"What," I say.
"Category Four breach. Thirty kilometers north. Closest Sanctioned squad is six hours minimum." He meets my eyes. "There are three villages in that radius."
Category Four needs twelve Sanctioned. We have two people and one of us is officially nothing.
"You know the road," I say, already standing.
"Yes."
"Can you keep pace."
He stands. He's taller than the kitchen makes room for, which I hadn't fully registered sitting. "Can you."
Interesting question. "Yes," I say, "and I need you to know before we go that I'm going to do things out there that you don't have a framework for and I need you to not try to manage them. Not out of arrogance. Because stopping to explain in the middle will cost us time we don't have."
"Understood," he says, immediately, like he already thought about this.
"And afterward—"
"Everything. Yes."
We go.
The road north is empty. He rides and I run alongside and he adjusts his pace to mine without comment, which tells me his read of what I am physically is accurate. The breach site is in a valley between two ridges, I can smell it from a kilometer out, the specific dissonance of an open node, Resonance wound instead of contained.
The pack is already out and moving through the outer village structures. Category Four up close is not like Category Two, these are older, denser, the core frequency more entrenched and harder to destabilize. He takes the ground engagement immediately, three simultaneous, and his combat output is genuinely extraordinary by any standard I'm using. Precise, controlled, efficient in the way that means he has been doing this for a very long time and has removed everything from the process that isn't necessary.
I go for the node.
The breach is a wound in the architecture, not metaphorical, literal. A gap in the original structure where the Veilwright's demolition has removed a load-bearing element, and the Abyss is pushing through the gap. I put my hands against the surrounding frequency and find the shape of what's missing, the Scholar taught me this in the third year, the Hunter drilled it in the fifth, the Architect showed me once what it looks like when you do it correctly, which looked like nothing from the outside, and I rebuild it. Not restore. I don't have the original to restore from. I build what belongs there from first principles, from the base frequency, from the grammar of it.
Four minutes. The breach closes.
I turn around. The remaining Maws come apart one by one as Caelen and I work through them from opposite ends of the village, and I am aware, the entire time, of that grounding effect. My signal is clearer out here with him in proximity than it's ever been in the field alone. The original language comes faster. The work costs less.
I'm going to think carefully about that.
When the last one's down, he's standing in the center of the village looking at the closed breach with the expression of a man whose theory has just been proven and who isn't sure whether to be relieved or terrified.
"You sealed the node," he says.
"Yes."
"You rebuilt the original architecture."
"Yes."
"In four minutes."
"Yes."
He's quiet for a moment. The village is starting to come back to life around us, shutters opening, cautious faces at windows, someone crying somewhere in the relief way rather than the grief way.
"Riven." He turns to look at me. "My file. The pattern. The eighteen months." He pauses. "Do you understand what this means for the timeline."
"The demolition has been running for years," I say. "The Veilwright's faction knows exactly what they're taking apart and in what order. They've been doing it slowly so it looks like natural decay." I look at my hands. "To seal it properly, not one node at a time but the whole architecture — I need Sable's amplifier. And Sable's amplifier needs to be built completely first. Which takes time we don't have at the current rate."
He nods slowly. "How much time."
"Ask the person who's been tracking the rate."
"Eighteen months," he says. "Maybe twenty."
"Then we have eighteen months to build the mechanism, expose the Veilwright, get Sable the materials they need, and prevent whatever the Celestial Court does when it realizes what we're doing." I pause. "And find out what happened to my mentors."
He's quiet for a moment. "The Dying Court," he says, carefully.
I look at him.
"I found a reference eight months ago," he says. "In the classified archive. A Celestial Court record from two centuries back, describing the exile. The deposed divine body. Three entities assigned to mortal forms as punishment for..." He stops. "The record described it as insubordination. Refusing to modify the original architecture on the new Court's instructions."
"They refused to corrupt it," I say.
"Yes." He looks at me steadily. "The record said: scattered, diminished, contained. There was an addendum. Handwritten, much later." He pauses. "It said: subject entities have established contact with a mortal practitioner of unknown classification. Recommend immediate intervention. Recommend accelerated demolition of remaining nodes to foreclose any possibility of restoration."
The demolition started because my mentors found me.
Or, the other way around. The demolition accelerated when the Veilwright's faction understood that the Dying Court had found a way to pass the original language on. That there would be someone, eventually, who could use it.
They've been trying to tear the architecture down before I could learn enough to rebuild it.
Three years of accelerated demolition. Eighteen months left.
"We need to get to the capital," I say.
"Yes."
"I need three days first."
"Why?"
"Because I have to find out whether my grandmother is alive." I start walking. "And because Sable needs two days to pack the amplifier components. And because I have three sealed letters and I've only read two of them and the third one is the one the Scholar said to save for when I understand what the tools are for." I glance back at him. "I understand what the tools are for."
He falls into step beside me. The grounding effect is consistent at this proximity — steady, quiet, there. I am very carefully not addressing it.
"Riven," he says. "Your grandmother. The Dying Court record I found." He pauses. "The entity the record flagged as highest priority for containment, the one who established contact with you first, who the Court considered the most dangerous—"
"The Scholar," I say.
"The record used a name," he says. "Not Scholar. A divine title." He watches my face. "Mireva."
I stop walking.
My grandmother. Mireva Solenne. The Scholar.
The same person.
My grandmother, who was exiled into a mortal form, who lived in this world for two centuries diminished and contained, who found a way to get assigned as mentor to the one practitioner who could use the original language, who spent fifteen years teaching me while living as a woman in a village, who died nine years ago in my father's house.
Who left letters in the cellar. Who visited Sable eight weeks ago.
"She's dead," I say. "Nine years ago."
"The mortal form died," Caelen says, carefully. "The record I found, the addendum, the recent one, was written four months ago." He holds my eyes. "It says: Mireva entity has achieved partial restoration of divine standing through proximity to the primary practitioner. Recommend immediate action."
Four months ago. Before the silence.
The silence isn't because she's gone.
The silence is because the Veilwright's faction did something to her when they realized she was coming back.
"We need to go," I say. My voice is completely even. "Now."
He nods. We walk faster.
The stars above the valley are the same stars that were above the Ashwild every night for fifteen years, and somewhere in the system beneath them, in the architecture my mentors built and the Veilwright is tearing down, there is a record of everything that has been done. Every suppression. Every containment. Every mortal form forced on a divine entity that refused to corrupt what it made.
Eighteen months.
I am going to need every one of them.
- Writer
