The geometry of a grave must be absolute. If the walls are porous, it is not a grave; it is merely a ruin waiting to spill its ghosts back into the world.
Nissa Tarvond stood at the geographic centre of the border dividing the Sovereign Imperium's thriving central heartland from the dead ash of the Eastern Grid. She was completely silent. The wind howling across the flat plains caught the edges of her silver mantle, whipping the heavy fabric, but the Shieldmaiden herself was as still as carved marble.
Before her, a tragedy of engineering was unfolding.
The Sovereign had ordered the East quarantined. The four million dead, the feral remnants of the Cult Splinter, the collapsing industrial infrastructure—it was all to be sealed behind a silver-steel cordon, stretching for three hundred miles.
It was a project of staggering scale, and it was failing.
