Morning put a pale coin on the crown of Oak Rise. Dew clung to the new-laid timbers; the stone base—Ansel's pride—felt like a jaw set right. Below, horn cairns dotted Founders' Way out toward the Flats like thoughtful mushrooms, each with a shelf, a coil of rope, and a clay jar tucked under a stone lip.
— Morning Brief — Novaterra• Oakwatch: stone base complete; timber cap framing (day 2)• Horn Cairns: line to Oak Rise (8/8) stocked (spare mouthpieces/rope/caltrops)• Pathfinders: mustered (12) — Bryn (lead), Hale (second), Ras (perch-sense)• After-Sight (Aiden): Ready (12h cooldown)• Training: "Weathered" cohort (200) → Militia drills begin• Morale: Steady-bright 🙂
Aiden stood with Elara at the footing while Ansel tapped a plumb line and declared the corner soupsafe. Mara tested this by balancing a bowl on the sill and tasting; the bowl didn't slide. Approval: a grunt, rare and minted. 🍲
"Top frame by dusk," Ansel promised, already measuring with his eyes. "Horn shelf inside, mirror perch up top, water butt on the lee."
"Gourd under the eave," Hale added, holding up a hollowed fruit with a carved mouth. "Carries two short clean when wind misbehaves." He hung it with a ceremony that made the gourd stand straighter.
Bryn arrived with the Pathfinders—twelve lean figures who looked like they'd learned to walk by listening to dirt: Hale, Ras, two Riversong cousins with rope in their hands like they were born with it, a tanner whose feet never sounded hurried, a carpenter who knew what wood did in the rain, five others who had learned the geometry of edges by surviving. Bryn's scar through her brow glowed faintly in the morning.
"You'll live where air remembers us and where it forgets we exist," Aiden told them. "Wadis, cut-banks, brush tunnels. You'll hang horn gourds where sound carries, cache mouthpieces and rope where hands will need them later. Your oath is eyes first, knives last. When you disappear, I will not come get you with heroics. I will send rope and patience."
Bryn's mouth tilted—the nearest she came to a smile. "Eyes first," she echoed. "Knives last."
Ras's palms twitched at his sides. "I can smell where fear wants to perch," he said, half apology, half pride. "I'll point, and then we'll burn what hangs there."
"Do," Elara said simply. "And if you see drums hidden in ditches again, don't be clever. Be loud."
Jory raised a hand politely. "The cairns are tuned," he reported with gravitas. "Each jar has a spare mouthpiece. Tap the cairn; it hums the same note all the way to Oakwatch." He tapped with his knuckle and the cairn gave back a small confident mmm. He looked very pleased. 🫡
Aiden opened the pane only he could see; it cut the air cool behind his eyes.
*— Ability: After-Sight (Tactician's Sight)• Ready.• Once per engagement, reveal hidden ambush within 800m when ordering a pursuit or advance.• Cooldown: 12h.
He shut it before he started seeing ghosts where he wanted numbers. "We drill," he said. "Militia in the oval with Elara. Pathfinders on the cut-bank circuit with Bryn. At last light, we run a horn relay from Oakwatch to gate in under ninety seconds." He looked at the Fort's direction without looking. "Eyes. Not trophies."
Elara's mouth tipped—approval. "Good arithmetic."
The Weathered cohort lined the oval, boards and spears in hand, fatigue still stitched into their shoulders and pride tugging at the seams. They wore boots fitted by Mara's string and patience. A few had Jory's chalked calls on their cuffs. Lia's cousin—Flag-Keeper, shy and bright—held the sun-dot child standard like a sacred joke.
Elara climbed a crate. "You will not be heroes," she said, voice even. "You will be line. When your neighbor starts to forget which way forward is, you become his memory. When someone tries to make a story out of their own legs, you keep them for tomorrow." She lifted her spear. "Center—sit. Anchor Step."
The first line planted and the ground felt them—Elara's new boon settling like a low gravity right where knees met earth. Boards kissed. Bosses leaned. The wall discovered it could be heavier without being slower.
— Unit Buff — Under Elara• Anchor Step: Knockback resist +1; stake plant +10% speed while she commands (active)• Aura: Keeper of Edges — "Don't Chase" discipline +1 within 50m.
"Right," Elara called, "hinge. Left, serpentine." Jory blew five rising for the right; the line obeyed; cavalry screens practiced crossing dust patterns without making art for art's sake. Rinna oversaw Thorn's dry-fire crew on the edge—no shot, just rhythm, just reload honesty. Tam recited under his breath: "No greedy shot, no double aim, breathe when the world forgets."
Calder and the clinic hands ran their own class under the sun-dot: Quick Stitch, Steady Hands, gentle lies that kept panic down to a simmer. They taught fingers to find bleeding you can't see. A boy fainted, woke, and asked to learn it again. Calder patted his shoulder. "Good. If the ground tilts, you'll stand."
Mara walked the outer ring with her Ladle of Law and didn't need to point it often; when she did, people obeyed. 🍲🙂
Bryn took the Pathfinders west and then south, into the ribs of the land—the dry runs that wore green like a poor memory. She didn't talk with her mouth much; she talked with hands, with chin tilts, with pauses that made people listen to things they had mistaken for silence.
"Cut-bank," she said, touching the raw, tea-colored scar where last spring had bitten. "When raiders hide here, they put brush over the lip and string a drum in the ditch. You will smell sap before sound. Hale—mark the gourd perch."
Hale hung a gourd where wind would carry two short down the run and up to the cairn. He adjusted the angle until the gourd stopped sulking. "There."
"Perch-sense," Bryn said, nodding Ras forward. Ras crouched, closed his eyes, and pointed. "If I were a bead," he muttered, "I'd hang from that bent willow limb. If I were a drum, I'd crawl under that tumble of roots and lie like I meant to be dirt."
"Then we will burn one and bury the other," Bryn answered. "Eyes first."
They set the first horn gourd east of the ruined willow. They tucked spare mouthpieces in a stone's hollow. They sprinkled a handful of caltrops under the place a man's knee would naturally go if he belly-crawled there. Gentle nastiness. Ropes laid like quiet sentences.
— Pathfinder Net• Gourd relay #1 hung (cut-bank: West Run)• Cache stocked: rope, mouthpiece, caltrops• Ambush risk −15% in marked radius.
At the turn where the cut-bank kissed the wadi and pretended to be innocent, Bryn made them all lie flat with their ears on the ground. "Listen," she said.
Hale heard wind. The Riversong cousins heard a lark that didn't mean it. Ras heard… a direction.
"Brush," he whispered. "Not ours."
Bryn held up two fingers. "Leave it," she said. "Mark it. We tell the wall the ground has teeth. We do not pull them until our boots are on stone."
Ras nodded, learning what eyes could mean when you weren't trying to be the point of a knife.
By late afternoon the tower's timber cap was a skeleton against the sky. The mirror perch was framed; the horn shelf inside wanted only a board to stop being idea. Ansel patted the post like it had done a hard job. "She'll see," he said.
"Tonight," Aiden told him. "We'll ask her to talk, too."
Elara assembled the relay team: Jory at Oakwatch's mouth, a second on the mid-cairn, a third at the gate. Lia's cousin—Flag-Keeper—was allowed to clutch a small sun-dot and glow. Bryn's Pathfinders lined the cut-bank road like commas where the sentence needed breath.
"Drill," Elara said. "Call and answer. Horns are homework, not heroics."
The sun slid its gold down the tower and left it silver. The air grew clean and cool in that way that makes skin consider gooseflesh and keep it to itself. Aiden looked past Oakwatch into the low light and—because he had promised to be the kind of man who uses gifts he did not ask for—called the pane up.
— Ability: After-Sight — Activate?• Trigger: Advance/pursuit order (or planned patrol risk).• Range: 800m.• Cooldown after use: 12h.
He thumbed the thought. The world didn't change colors so much as admit a few. A thin lattice drew itself over the Flats—a map of habit and malice that lives in ground. In the cut across the wadi, a glimmer clung: not a man, exactly, but the geometry of men. A mat half-hidden. A drum under brush. A ditch waiting for a foot that believed in flatness.
Aiden breathed out. "There," he said softly to Elara, and gave her the coordinates in his neat, annoying numbers. "Cut-bank beyond the second cairn, sixty paces shy of the willow mouth. Brush and a drum. Quiet. Waiting for a pursuit that isn't coming."
Elara's eyes moved once—acknowledgment, not surprise. "Bryn."
Bryn's hand signal was a ghost: two fingers, left, then down. Hale slid. The Riversong cousins slid. Ras smiled a small, angry smile at a trap that didn't get to be a secret anymore.
"Do we pull it?" Aiden asked.
"Not tonight," Elara said. "We let it watch us not be idiots. In the morning, with rope and dots and no chase."
He swallowed a laugh that didn't belong. "Good arithmetic."
The relay ran like a song you'd drilled until it lived in your teeth.
Jory lifted the horn in Oakwatch's framed mouth and blew one long. The sound went down the wooden spine and out across the cairns. The first cairn's gourd answered; the second carried; the gate horn caught and sent it back—a clean loop. Jory tried a four broken; the gourds gave it back with a slight sadness, and he smiled as if they were children learning to pronounce an R. He closed with two short—polite retreat—and the air made it polite.
Aiden checked the water clock: 82 seconds from tower to gate and back again. He raised his hand and didn't quite clap. "Again," he said softly, greedy for excellence.
They shaved it to 78. Jory's lips went pink and proud. 🫡
— Horn Net — Test Relay• Round-trip (Oakwatch → Gate → Oakwatch): 78s (target < 90s)• Drift correction learned on cairn #3• Jars inventoried; spare mouthpieces sealed (dust-ward)
Mara stood under the tower with a pot like a small moon. "Soup after," she reminded the air, which had been thinking of applause. "Always after." 🍲
Calder collected volunteers for a Night Soup rota along the cairn road—tin cups, a kettle on a safe brazier, a promise that after and during were kin now, not strangers.
Rinna, who hated sentimentality unless it was properly earned, set a small nail in the horn shelf and hung a strip of the cracked mask there—curriculum, not trophy. Under it, Aiden chalked: THIS IS WHAT BREAKS. DO NOT CHASE IT. Tam touched the chalked letters and didn't wipe his hand on his tunic. 😶
Dusk bent down to look at their work. Oakwatch's skeleton took the last light and held it like a lantern. The cairns hummed when Jory tapped them, each to the same note. The Pathfinders ghosted back in, feet quiet and faces bright with a pride that had nothing to do with applause.
"Brush in the wadi," Bryn reported in six words, "drum under it, watched us."
"Let it choke on watching," Elara said and didn't smile.
Aiden's eyes kept going back to the place the After-Sight had painted for him. The ability had cooled in his head now; the pane grayed—cooldown set like a law.
— After-Sight• Used (this cycle)• Cooldown: 12h (Ready at dawn)
He could almost hear a drum trying to pretend it was a root.
Lia's cousin stood at the tower's base and practiced lifting the child-sun standard, very serious. Jory watched her and pretended he wasn't measuring breath for a small body that would grow into standards too heavy for arms that didn't believe.
Venn leaned on the ledger like a tired friend and called the roll of cairn stock out loud so the night could know it. "Rope coils: eight. Mouthpieces: eight. Spare caltrops tins: eight. Notes that say don't be clever: eight." His voice softened. "Good."
Elara bumped Aiden's shoulder with her gauntlet. "We're ready for a night that thinks we're not."
"Let it be bored," Aiden said. "Bored nights are my kink."
She almost laughed and then turned that energy into patrol assignments, as she always did. 😌
Night brought nothing except an owl who disapproved of gourds, and one goblin who snagged his knee on a caltrop beneath a brush-mat and learned a prayer he would not repeat. The drum under the roots didn't dare breathe.
— Evening Summary — Novaterra• Oakwatch frame up; horn shelf set; mirror perch ready (glazing T+2)• Horn Cairns relay tested: 78s round-trip (meets target)• Pathfinders: cut-bank circuit marked; gourd #1 hung; ambush flagged (no pull)• After-Sight: used for patrol planning; cooldown till dawn• Training: "Weathered" → Militia (Anchor Step drills)• Morale: Steady-bright → Quiet-proud 🙂
Aiden climbed to Oakwatch's mouth and sat with his feet long over the dark, the tower still smelling of sap and stone dust and a little pride. The cairns out along the road made a line you could believe in. The Fort beyond the Rise sulked where it couldn't quite be seen.
He thought of the global list and of Mid-Bronze, of the Fort that would spawn its yearly trickle, of After-Sight and what it had shown him, of the names on the board and the empty stools in kitchens.
Elara found him there and leaned a hip against the post. "You'll want to use it every time," she said, not naming the ability to keep it from thinking it had a personality. "You won't always be allowed."
"I know." He didn't and did. "Eyes first. Knives last."
"We built the eyes," she said. "Tomorrow, we teach the knives to wait."
He nodded and looked at the cairns until they weren't stones anymore but syllables in a language he was beginning to speak. He tested a sentence in the air, as if it needed to be heard to become true.
"Novaterra, we're a town with eyes now. We hear before we hurry. We put dots where sentences end, not where cliffs begin. No heroics. Just work." 🙂
The wind went down the horn gourd and made a tiny, pleased sound, as if the air had learned to hum in key.
Somewhere under a brush-mat, a drum waited all night for a chase that didn't come, and the waiting tasted like failure.