Chapter 119: The Outcome Becoming Clear
The Thornwall Pass, The Vethara Approach, The Caldris Basin — Twenty-Two Days
The fourth god died on the third day.
The remaining three died across nineteen days after that, each death producing the specific quality of the world’s mana system losing another administrator, the cascade effects accumulating in the continental weather patterns and the agricultural calendars and the institutional frameworks that had been organized around the divine hierarchy’s four-century presence, the world in the gap between the administered system’s full collapse and the covenant’s restoration conducting itself with the specific quality of a thing that had been organized around something that was no longer there to organize it.
John understood this in the incremental form that the staff’s resonance communicated it, the warmth reading the mana’s movement across the continental extent the way that a hand read temperature change across a surface, not precisely and not completely but consistently and in the form that mattered, which was the form of the direction rather than the magnitude.
The direction was toward the collapse.
The restoration was forty days north, in a city he had already been in, in a person who did not yet know they were waiting.
Between the collapse and the restoration lay twenty-two days of the specific quality of a battle that would end only one way, and the twenty-two days contained within them the full price of the ending.
The fourth god’s name was Drel.
One of the dependent four, administrator of the western territories’ secondary mana routing, present in the world in the form that the dependent gods were present, which was less directly than the primary three and more continuously than the human institutions understood, the continuous presence expressing itself through the mana’s behavior in the western territories rather than through the direct atmospheric manipulation or the large-scale redistribution that the primary three had employed.
Drel’s particular capacity was the suppression’s maintenance in the geological strata, the deep rock where the original covenant’s mana was most concentrated and most resistant to the routing’s redirection, the places where the Forgotten Places had been possible because the suppression had not been able to reach the depth at which the covenant’s residue persisted.
John understood this from Yeva’s first knowledge-sharing, which had included the dependent four’s specific capacities alongside the primary three’s, and he had been planning the western territories’ engagement around the geological strata’s quality since the seventh Forgotten Place and the complete covenant picture and the understanding of the suppression’s architecture that the complete picture had provided.
He stood at the Thornwall Pass’s northern approach on the third day’s dawn with the staff at full resonance and the ki perception reading the pass’s geological record through the stone under his feet and the quality of the mana at depth, the depth that Drel had been administering the suppression within for the four centuries that the other gods had been administering it at the surface and in the atmosphere.
The pass’s stone held the covenant’s residue at forty meters’ depth.
Forty meters was close enough that the staff’s resonance could reach it.
Drel arrived in the form that the geological presence took when it was directed rather than ambient, the stone under John’s feet conducting the specific quality of the divine presence’s attention through its structure in the way that stone conducted pressure, gradually and without announcement, the pressure building across the first ten minutes of the engagement in the specific quality of something very old expressing itself through a medium that was almost as old.
Oryn was in the stone beside him.
Not physically beside him, which was not the form the earth manipulation took when it was at this depth and this scale. Present in the stone’s quality, the centuries-old earth manipulation reading the geological record at depth alongside the ki perception’s reading, the two instruments operating in the same medium and producing the shared picture that the two together produced.
Oryn had been in the Forgotten Places’ territory for the full nine months, and the Forgotten Places’ territory was the territory where the covenant’s mana was most concentrated at depth, and the nine months of sustained proximity to that concentration had done to Oryn’s earth manipulation what the proximity had done to Helena’s Uncos and what the formation’s sustained shared movement had done to the ki perception’s channel between John and the people beside him.
It had deepened the instrument in the specific way that the covenant’s mana deepened things it was in contact with for sufficient duration.
Oryn’s earth manipulation at depth, in the covenant’s mana, against the god who had been administering the suppression in the geological strata for four centuries, lasted four hours.
The pass’s northern approach held a new formation at the engagement’s conclusion, the stone reorganized in the specific quality that four hours of Oryn’s maximum intensity at depth produced in geological structure, the reorganization not the damage of force but the expression of the earth manipulation operating at the level where the geological record was written rather than the level where it was read.
Drel’s dissolution expressed itself through the western territories’ deep stone, the suppression in the geological strata releasing the covenant’s mana at depth across the subsequent days, the release producing in the root networks of the western territories the specific quality of the covenant’s residue returning to the accessible level rather than the inaccessible one.
Helena’s vines, extended into the Thornwall Pass’s thin surface soil, read the release as it arrived from below.
She said nothing.
Her expression said it instead, the specific quality of the Uncos receiving the mana from the depth that the suppression had been holding at the inaccessible level for four centuries, the quality of someone whose instrument had been reading the diminished surface for the full length of the journey and had now encountered the undiminished depth.
John looked at her across the pass’s stone and received what the looking produced.
"The fifth," she said, after a moment.
"Yes," he said.
The fifth and sixth gods died in the Vethara approach across eight days, two of the dependent four whose specific capacities were the atmospheric organization of the coastal territories and the tidal mana’s administration in the areas where the sea and the land met, the meeting being the area where the covenant’s original condition was most legible in the natural world because the tidal rhythm was the rhythm that the covenant’s mana had moved in before the usurpation, the rhythm that Helena’s Uncos had been reading since the coastal caves and the third trial.
The engagements at the Vethara approach were the most costly of the twenty-two days.
Not in duration, which was the fourth god’s four hours against the combined nine hours of the fifth and sixth, the ninth hour containing within it the specific quality of the final thirty minutes of the sixth engagement, the thirty minutes after the staff’s resonance had depleted to the level that required Helena’s restoration for the third time in the twenty-two days.
In the accumulated cost.
John’s left shoulder had not returned to full function from the Aldenmoor Heights.
This was the specific form of the accumulated injuries after nine months of the war’s engagements, the shoulder being the first and most persistent, the partial function having settled into the honest form of what the partial function was, which was the form of three-quarters capacity rather than the form of the recovered injury, the recovery having produced the plateau that the physician at the forward camp had identified as the stable form rather than the continuing improvement form.
The Vethara approach’s fifth engagement had produced the right knee’s specific condition, the condition arriving in the seventh hour of a nine-hour engagement as the consequence of the tidal manipulation’s effect on the coastal stone’s stability, the stone expressing the tidal force’s redirection under the fifth god’s administration in the specific quality of surface that was not the surface it had been when the engagement began, the right knee’s meeting with the reorganized surface having produced the condition that moved through the body’s inventory in the ki perception’s quality of the honest assessment rather than the dramatic announcement.
The condition was functional.
It was the specific form of functional that contained within it the understanding that the continued demands of the sustained engagement were producing costs that resolved on the weekly scale rather than the daily scale.
Helena had looked at the knee with the Uncos extended into the tissue’s current state, in the quality of the genuine seeing rather than the assessment organized around what she wanted to find.
"It will hold," she had said.
"Yes," he had said.
"Through what remains," she had said. Not the question. The honest inventory conducted alongside him rather than at him, the two of them attending to the same information with the same instrument’s quality.
"Yes," he had said.
She had not said anything further, which was the form of the honest attending that understood that the further saying was not the form the moment required.
The sixth god died at the Vethara approach’s eastern cliff face, three hours past midnight on the eighth day, in the specific quality of the night engagement that the accumulated twenty-two days had been building toward.
The tidal mana was at its highest expression at the third hour past midnight, the ancient rhythm that predated the usurpation conducting itself in the coastal geology with the quality that the original condition produced at the tidal peak, and the sixth god’s specific capacity was the administration of exactly this rhythm, the god’s four-century presence in the tidal mana producing the condition that made the night engagement both more dangerous and more precisely directed than the daylight form would have been.
Brother Solen had nineteen monks at the Vethara approach.
Not the seventeen of the declaration’s valley, which had been the full complement of the communities that had maintained the original practice in the form that John had found them in nine months prior. Nineteen, the prior seventeen supplemented by the two additional practitioners that Solen had identified through the runner network’s connection to the communities across the continental extent, two practitioners whose relationship to the original practice had been the preserved form rather than the institutional split’s interpretation, both of them having been practicing in the isolation of their respective communities without knowledge of each other or of Solen until the runner network’s reach had made the knowledge available.
The nineteen monks in the original practice’s full form at the tidal peak’s third hour past midnight, in the coastal cave system where the third trial had been the trial of genuine reliance and the covenant’s experiential memory had arrived in the form of the world as it had been, produced the specific quality of the non-physical dimension occupied by the covenant’s original condition at the moment and the place where the tidal mana’s natural expression was at its most concentrated.
The sixth god’s dissolution expressed itself through the tidal rhythm returning to the original pattern, not immediately, which would have been the dramatic form, but across the subsequent hours as the administration of the tidal mana ceased and the original rhythm reasserted itself in the specific way that the original condition reasserted itself in the places where the suppression had ceased, which was gradually and without announcement and in the form of the thing returning to what it had always been underneath the administered routing.
By dawn, the tidal caves were conducting themselves in the quality that the third trial had given John the experiential memory of.
He stood at the cave entrance at dawn and felt it through the staff’s resonance and the ki perception and the full covenant picture and all of it, the tidal rhythm in the stone and the water and the living things of the cave system expressing the covenant’s original condition in the specific quality of the thing itself rather than the residual form or the preserved form.
This was what the world had been.
He held it for the duration the holding required.
Then he went to find Helena and tell her what remained.
She was at the cave system’s interior pool, the pool where the third trial’s water had held the specific quality that the covenant’s experiential memory had produced, the pool now conducting itself in the quality of the tidal mana returned to the original rhythm, the living things of the pool’s ecology expressing the responsive flow in the specific way that healthy ecosystems expressed it when the mana was moving through them in the original condition rather than the administered routing.
Her vines were in the water.
The expression on her face was the expression that the second loss and the sharpness and the grief and the anger and the internal orientation had produced in the nine months since the wrong moment’s configuration, the expression not the performed version of any of these but the honest form of someone who had been carrying the full weight in the honest form for sufficient duration that the carrying had become the primary quality of their presence rather than the content of any individual moment.
She looked at him.
He said: "One remaining."
She received this in the full quality of the complete reception.
"The seventh," she said.
"Yes."
"Maren," she said.
"Yes."
Maren was the last of the dependent four, the god whose specific capacity Yeva had named as the most significant of the dependent four’s capacities and the most dangerous in the context of the covenant’s restoration, not because Maren’s administrative power exceeded the others’ but because Maren’s specific capacity was the administration of the mana’s movement in the human body itself, the deep physiological routing that the suppression had installed in the human instrument across four centuries of the diminished condition, the routing that had made the Uncos possible in the form the training produced because the Uncos was the human instrument’s learned relationship to the mana that the suppression had been routing, the mediated relationship rather than the original direct one.
The Uncos in the suppressed condition.
Maren’s dissolution would change that.
He had not yet told Helena what Maren’s dissolution would mean for the Uncos.
He told her now, in the flat quality of the accurate information delivered in the form the information required, the information being that the Uncos in the form that the training had built it and that the journey had developed it was the form of the human instrument’s relationship to the suppressed mana routing, and that Maren’s dissolution would remove the suppressed routing from the human instrument’s physiology, and that the removal would mean the Uncos in its trained form would no longer be the primary instrument available to the human instrument’s relationship to the mana.
The original direct relationship would be available instead.
Helena looked at him across the interior pool’s water in the tidal rhythm’s returning quality and held what he had told her in the full weight of the complete reception, the implications arriving in the order that their significance produced rather than the order that comfort suggested.
"The Uncos becomes unnecessary," she said.
"It becomes the prior form," he said. "The mediated relationship rather than the original one. The way the practice that Solen’s communities preserved became the prior form when the seventh location produced the complete covenant picture. Still valuable. Not the only form available."
"After Maren," she said.
"After Maren."
She looked at the pool’s water and the vines in it and the tidal rhythm conducting itself in the original condition’s quality, the vines reading it with the Uncos in the sharpness’s form, the form that nine months of the journey and the war and the losses and the honest carrying had built.
"The last engagement," she said.
"Yes."
"How long," she said. Not the duration of the engagement, which was not the form the question was asking toward. The time to the engagement.
"Four days," he said. "The Caldris Basin. Where the mana’s movement in the human instrument is most concentrated in the accessible form, the basin being the geographical feature that the physiological routing uses as its primary node in the continental extent."
She received this.
"Then we have four days," she said.
It was the same sentence she had said in the forward camp’s primary room after the third god’s death, forty days reduced to four by the twenty-two days’ account, the sentence carrying in its repetition the specific quality of the reliable form, the form that the continuing took when the continuing was what was available and what was required.
She retracted the vines from the pool in the carrying configuration and stood in the quality of the sharpness and the grief and the honest carrying and the complete covenant picture and all of it, and she looked at him with the genuine seeing that the eighteen months of the journey and the war had built between them.
"Tell me about the Caldris Basin," she said.
He told her.
The four days between the tidal caves and the Caldris Basin contained within them the specific quality of time that arrived between the penultimate thing and the final thing, the quality not of anticipation, which would have been the performed version, but of the honest attending to the days themselves as the days required, the operational planning and the engagement’s preparation and the monks’ practice and the assembly’s final configuration all occurring in the form they required without the elaboration of the significance that the significance could have produced.
Daven said, on the second day, in the flat quality of the accurate statement: "The earth manipulation will not be sufficient for the Caldris Basin’s engagement."
John looked at him.
"The basin’s geology is the sedimentary form," Daven said. "Not the consolidated stone that the deep manipulation requires. The mana’s physiological node uses the sedimentary layer’s specific quality, the loose organization of the sediment providing the distribution that the consolidated stone would not. The earth manipulation in the sedimentary form is the surface manipulation, not the depth manipulation." He looked at the basin’s direction with the quality of someone who had been reading geological records through the earth manipulation for long enough that the reading was the primary form of his relationship to the landscape. "I can work the surface. I cannot reach the node."
"I know," John said.
Daven received this.
"You planned for it," Daven said.
"Yes."
"The monks," Daven said.
"The monks," John said. "And the staff’s resonance at the complete form. And Helena’s Uncos while it is still the instrument." He paused in the interval of the full thought. "And whatever Oryn can produce in the sedimentary form, which is not the depth manipulation but is not nothing."
Daven was quiet for the interval of the honest assessment.
"It is the most dangerous engagement of the twenty-two days," he said.
"Yes," John said.
"Because Maren’s specific capacity is the human instrument," Daven said.
"Yes."
"The engagement will be conducted in the medium that Maren has been administering for four centuries," Daven said. "In the human bodies of the people conducting the engagement."
"Yes," John said. He held Daven’s gaze with the honest attention. "Which is why it is the last one rather than an earlier one. The preparation required the prior engagements. Not for the operational learning alone. For what the prior engagements produced in the instruments that the Caldris Basin requires."
Daven looked at him for the long interval of the genuine assessment.
"The staff," he said.
"And Helena’s Uncos," John said. "And Brother Solen’s nineteen monks in the original practice’s full form. And the ki perception at the range that the twenty-two days have developed it to." He paused. "All of it in the medium that Maren has been administering. The covenant’s original condition expressed through the instruments that the suppression’s administration has been operating in."
Daven was quiet.
"The covenant claims the medium," he said. Not the question. The accurate naming of the strategy’s form.
"Yes," John said.
The Caldris Basin received them on the twenty-second day in the quality of a geographical feature that had been the primary node of the mana’s physiological routing for four centuries, the basin’s sedimentary geology and the specific shape of the continental terrain that directed the mana’s movement through the living things of the central territories all expressing themselves in the ambient quality of the air and the soil and the water and the specific quality of human bodies in the basin’s geography.
John felt it through the ki perception at the basin’s edge, the human instrument reading the mana’s movement in the medium of itself rather than in the medium of the external world, the specific quality of the suppressed routing conducting itself in his own physiology in the form it had been conducting itself in for the six centuries of his existence, the form that had been the form of the suppressed condition for the four centuries of the usurpation and that had been, before the four centuries, the form of the original condition.
His body remembered the original condition.
Not in the memory’s cognitive form, which was the form that six centuries of experience produced. In the form of the ki perception’s deepest reading, the reading at the level where the instrument and the thing it read were the same thing, the level that the Forgotten Places and the twenty-two days and the complete covenant picture had been developing toward since the monastery.
He stood at the basin’s edge and held the full account of what he was about to bring the covenant’s original condition into.
He carried the injuries.
The left shoulder at three-quarters capacity, stable at the plateau. The right knee in the specific functional condition that the Vethara approach had produced, the condition that held through the weekly scale of the recovery rather than the daily. The staff’s resonance at the full form, the warmth total and interior, the complete quality that the sixth trial had produced and that the twenty-two days had been consuming and restoring across the full engagement sequence.
The accumulated weight of six months of Ragnarok.
He carried it in the inadequate framework and the honest form and the world-healed answer primary in the place it needed to be primary, and he looked at the basin and understood that the twenty-two days had been the preparation for this, not only the operational preparation of the learned engagements but the other preparation, the preparation of the person the conducting required, the person whose instrument was operating in the medium that the last engagement would be conducted in.
Helena was beside him.
He looked at her with the genuine seeing and received what the genuine seeing produced, which was the full quality of the person who had been the anchor and who had found the internal orientation in the anchor’s absence and who was conducting the Uncos in the sharpness’s form for the final engagement in the medium of her own physiology, the Uncos reading the mana’s movement in her own body and through it reading the basin’s physiological node in the form that no external instrument could read it.
Her vines were extended.
Not into soil. Into the air, which was not the form the vines ordinarily took and which was the form that the basin’s specific quality produced in the Uncos at maximum depth, the vines reading the mana’s movement in the ambient medium of the basin’s physiological routing’s expression in the air and the soil and the water and the bodies of the people standing in it.
She looked at him.
She said: "It knows we’re here."
"Yes," he said.
"Maren," she said.
"Yes."
"It’s been waiting," she said. Not the fear. The precise observation of the person whose instrument was reading the medium and finding in the reading the specific quality of something that had been administering the mana’s movement in the human instrument for four centuries and that had been reading the approach of the people whose instruments were the direct expression of the covenant’s original condition in the human instrument for the twenty-two days of the prior engagements.
"Yes," he said.
"Then we don’t wait," she said.
He looked at her for the interval of the genuine seeing.
"No," he said.
He turned to the basin and walked into it, and Helena walked beside him, and the formation of two moved into the Caldris Basin’s quality in the specific way that the genuine purpose and the honest form and the world-healed answer primary in its position moved through the space of the final engagement, which was not the dramatic movement of the theological texts but the ordinary walking of two people moving toward the thing the journey had been building toward, in the form that the journey had prepared them to move in it.
Brother Solen and the nineteen monks followed.
Oryn and Daven took the basin’s flanking positions.
The assembly moved in the specific quality of the assembly that had been built across the nine months of the declaration and the seven Forgotten Places and the twenty-two days of the Ragnarok, each component present for reasons that were their own and that converged in the Caldris Basin’s quality without requiring the reasons to be the same.
The basin received them.
Maren was in the medium.
The engagement began.
What the final engagement produced in the twenty-two days’ account was not the dramatic conclusion that the theological texts had prepared the people who read them to expect.
It was the specific quality of the covenant’s original condition expressed through the instruments that the suppression had been operating in, the staff’s full resonance and Helena’s Uncos and Brother Solen’s nineteen monks in the original practice’s full form all conducting the covenant’s expression through the human instruments in the medium that Maren had been administering for four centuries, the covenant claiming the medium in the form that the covenant’s original condition claimed things, which was through the responsive flow rather than the directed force, the mana moving through the living things in the mutual responsiveness that made each more fully what it was.
Maren had been in the medium for four centuries.
The medium had been the covenant’s for longer than that.
The engagement lasted three hours and seventeen minutes.
The three hours and seventeen minutes contained within them the specific price of the final engagement in the specific form that the final engagement’s costs arrived, which was the cost of the covenant’s original condition expressed through the human instruments at maximum intensity in the medium that the suppression’s administration had been shaping for four centuries, the cost of the reshaping in reverse, the original condition reclaiming the medium from the administration that had been directing it away from the original condition for the full length of the suppression.
John’s right knee had ceased to be functional at the second hour.
He had continued from the ground, the left leg carrying the weight and the ki perception reading the medium and the staff’s full resonance conducting the expression without the standing’s form, the ground being where the sedimentary geology’s surface was closest and the mana’s movement through the basin’s node most directly accessible to the staff’s resonance at the horizontal rather than the vertical.
Helena had not looked at the knee.
She had been reading the medium through the vines extended into the air and the soil simultaneously, the Uncos at maximum intensity in the medium of her own physiology, conducting the sharpness’s form for the three hours and seventeen minutes with the specific quality of someone whose instrument had been developed through the conditions that the development required and who was applying the developed instrument in the conditions the application was for.
At the two-hour mark, two of Solen’s nineteen monks had withdrawn.
At the two-and-a-half-hour mark, three more.
Solen had continued with fourteen, the same number as the third god’s engagement in the high meadow’s form, fourteen being the number that the full practice required rather than the number that the formation ideally contained, the fourteen conducting the original practice in the non-physical dimension of the Caldris Basin’s medium with the specific quality of people who had been practicing toward this for the four centuries of the split’s transmission and the nine months of the assembly’s development.
At the three-hour mark, Maren was in both constraints.
The physical dimension occupied by the staff’s full resonance and Helena’s Uncos in the sharpness’s form.
The non-physical dimension occupied by Solen’s fourteen monks in the original practice’s full form.
The medium itself occupied by the covenant’s original condition expressed through the instruments that had been developing toward this for the full length of the journey.
The seventeen minutes after the three-hour mark contained within them the specific quality of the outcome becoming clear.
Not the dramatic quality. The honest quality, the quality of a thing finding its conclusion in the form that conclusions found when they had been building through the full account of the prior things and had arrived at the moment where the direction was no longer uncertain but was the direction it had been building toward.
Maren’s dissolution expressed itself through the human instrument.
Through the bodies of the people in the Caldris Basin, through the specific quality of the mana’s movement in their physiology changing from the suppressed routing’s form to the original condition’s form, the change not immediate in all the ways that the restoration would ultimately produce across the decades of the propagation’s work, but present in the form of the direction’s change, the mana in the human instrument beginning its return to the original condition in the specific way that things returned to their original conditions when the thing that had been directing them away ceased to direct them.
John felt it through the ki perception in his own body.
He had been carrying six centuries in the suppressed condition.
The suppressed condition had been the only form his body had known for four centuries of the usurpation’s duration, the original condition present only in the Forgotten Places and the high meadow and the specific moments of the covenant’s active expression through the staff’s resonance.
He felt the change beginning.
Not the complete change, which was the work of the decades ahead and the staff’s rightful holder and the propagation’s full arc. The beginning of the change, the direction established, the routing’s administration removed, the mana in his physiology in the first moment of the original condition’s return.
It felt like what the third trial had given him the memory of.
Like the world as it had been.
He held it in the inadequate framework and the honest form and all of it, and he sat on the Caldris Basin’s sedimentary ground with the right knee’s condition and the left shoulder’s three-quarters capacity and the full account of the twenty-two days’ accumulated weight, and he held what the twenty-two days had produced.
Six gods dead.
The seventh’s dissolution complete.
The mana’s routing administration absent from the world for the first time in four hundred years, the cascade effects accumulating across the continental extent in the form that the absence produced, the gap between the administered system’s full collapse and the restoration’s completion larger than the planning had assessed and present in the form of the honest consequence of the honest work.
One remaining.
Not a god.
The person without Uncos in a city he had already been in, who did not yet know they were waiting, who was the rightful holder of the staff that had been full resonance since the seventh Forgotten Place and that was in his hands and not where it belonged.
He was injured in the specific ways that the twenty-two days had produced.
He would be able to walk tomorrow.
He looked at Helena beside him, the vines retracting from the air and the soil in the carrying configuration, her expression in the quality of the complete engagement’s aftermath, the sharpness and the grief and the honest carrying and the three hours and seventeen minutes present in the quality of the person rather than as the explicit content of the expression.
She looked back at him.
She said: "The city."
"Yes," he said.
"How many days," she said.
He calculated from the ground’s position with the right knee’s current condition and the route’s northern section and the twenty-two days’ distance from the prior calculations.
"Eighteen," he said. "At the pace the knee allows."
She received this.
"Then we begin tomorrow," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She extended her hand.
He took it and stood, the left leg carrying the weight and the staff in the right hand and the left shoulder at three-quarters capacity and the right knee at the functional form that held through the weekly scale of the recovery, and he stood in the Caldris Basin’s quality in the aftermath of the final engagement with the gods gone from the world for the first time in four centuries and the gap present in the honest form and the city eighteen days north and the rightful holder waiting without knowing.
Brother Solen stood at the basin’s edge with the fourteen monks in the aftermath’s quality and looked at John across the ground between them with the expression of someone who had been conducting the original practice toward this for the full length of his life and the four centuries of the transmission before his life and who was in the first moment of the thing the practice had been conducted toward.
He said nothing.
His expression said it instead, in the honest form rather than the performed one, which was quieter and more specific and more present than the performed version could have been.
John looked back at him with the genuine seeing.
The basin held them all in the aftermath’s specific quality, the mana moving through the living things in the original condition’s beginning form, the responsive flow returning by the first increments of the decades-long process that the rightful holder and the propagation would complete, the world in the first moment of the direction’s change.
The sun moved toward the Caldris Basin’s western edge in the ordinary quality of the afternoon conducting itself toward evening, indifferent to the weight of what had occurred in it and specific in the angle of the light.
