Rumors never moved quickly.
They seeped.
By the time the convoy reached the next town, the story had already changed shape. It was no longer about a delayed route or a provisional mandate quietly withdrawn. It was about a road that refused to stay closed.
Merchants spoke first.
They always did.
They spoke of pressure lifting for no reason, of a narrow pass suddenly feeling wider, of authority hesitating where it never had before. They spoke cautiously, framing it as coincidence, but coincidence repeated too often became narrative.
By the second town, the story gained a figure.
A traveler.
A passerby.
Someone unremarkable.
"He didn't argue," one merchant said over watered wine. "He just stood there."
"And then?" another asked.
"And then it worked."
That was the unsettling part. Not force. Not spectacle.
Effect.
From there, the rumor crossed borders the way smoke crossed valleys—thin, diluted, but persistent.
In a coastal city under Covenant supervision, a clerk flagged a report as anomalous. In a border fortress, a patrol captain dismissed a similar account as merchant exaggeration, then ordered void anchor diagnostics anyway. In an inland capital, an archivist quietly cross-referenced older records tagged environmental noncompliance.
Patterns emerged.
Non-magical interference.
Administrative hesitation.
Spatial permissiveness without cause.
The Covenant did not panic.
It never panicked.
Instead, it categorized.
Category: Influence Event
Subtype: Non-Elemental
Threat Level: Indeterminate
The word indeterminate appeared more often than anyone liked.
Vale felt none of this directly. He moved along minor roads, stayed in places too small to warrant oversight. Yet the air around him felt… conversational.
Not watchful.
Inquisitive.
In one village, an old man asked him, "Do roads choose who walks them now?"
Vale smiled politely and said nothing.
In another, a child ran past him and laughed for no reason at all, as if something invisible had shifted just enough to be amusing.
By the time Vale crossed into the outer territories of a neighboring domain, the rumor had changed again.
It was no longer about a man.
It was about wind.
Not storms. Not gales.
Decision.
"They say the wind doesn't push anymore," a border guard muttered to his companion. "It just… allows."
His companion snorted. "Wind doesn't allow anything."
"Then why are the passes opening when they shouldn't?"
Silence followed that question.
Far away, in a Covenant listening chamber built beneath layered sigils and void dampeners, analysts adjusted models and found them lacking.
Wind activity without elemental trigger.
Human presence without magical signature.
Outcome favoring motion.
One analyst paused longer than the others.
"Sir," she said carefully, "these rumors are crossing borders faster than enforcement can correct them."
The overseer nodded. "That's how you know they matter."
"What's the response?"
The overseer's expression remained neutral. "Observation. For now."
But he added a note to the directive.
If the rumor stabilizes, it becomes belief.
If belief spreads, it becomes resistance.
Vale crossed another border at dusk. No checkpoint stopped him. No barrier asserted itself.
The land simply… accepted him.
Behind him, rumors continued their slow, patient journey—growing quieter, more distorted, and far more dangerous with every retelling.
Because once people began to believe that the world could be negotiated with—
They would start questioning who had been speaking for it all along.