"Before the battle that changes things, there is always a season of small preparations that no one records, because no one yet knows which preparations were the important ones."
The fifth month of the six-month window was the month everything accelerated.
Caelum arrived at Ashenveil on a Tuesday.
He came up the south approach road with a pack and the same expression he had worn at the Spire's gate on the first day: open, direct, not pretending anything was other than what it was. Luceo had seen him in the Extended Resonance's sweep ten minutes before he came through the estate gate, and his wind-affinity signature was immediately recognizable.
He looked at the estate. At the courtyard where a group of students were working through a cultivation form under Corvus's instruction. At the repaired walls and the central hall's smoke rising from the evening fire preparation.
"You said you were going to come back to the Spire," he said.
"I did come back to the Spire," Luceo said. "And then I left again."
"Yes," Caelum said. He looked at the estate again. "The plant died. Three months after you left. I think it needed the suppression anchor and then it didn't have it."
"I'm sorry about the plant."
"The plant is fine," Caelum said. "I got another one." He paused. "I graduated. Top placement in the Grey-Jade combined track."
"Congratulations."
"The placement posting was provincial administration. Varenith district four." He looked at Luceo. "I said no. Which is not something you're supposed to do. I said I was pursuing independent cultivation work." He paused. "Which is apparently a thing that exists now, if you have the right documentation. Vael Ashmore provided the documentation."
Vael. Of course. She has been placing pieces.
"She sent you," Luceo said.
"She suggested," Caelum said. "The unremarkable and reliable person. You said you would remember."
"I remembered," Luceo said.
He opened the gate.
✶
Vael's message arrived two days after Caelum:
The enforcement timeline is moving faster than six months. Coval filed a supplemental urgency designation last week based on new intelligence about the non-registered gathering. The intelligence came from the Ashmore family's provincial monitoring office. My father reported voluntarily. I did not know until after the filing.
A pause in the text, visible in the spacing of the handwriting.
I have had the conversation with my father that I knew was coming. It was not productive in the way of conversations that produce changed minds. It was productive in the way of conversations that produce clarity. My position is known. His is known. I am finalizing the administrative work I mentioned before I leave the Spire. Expect me within the month.
He read the message twice.
Then he read the operative sentence again: my father reported voluntarily.
She has been balancing on the edge of two worlds for over a year. Her father moved first. Which means the balance has resolved, and she is choosing. She is coming here.
He showed Seris the message.
She read it carefully.
"The enforcement timeline," she said. "Two months, maybe less."
"Yes."
"Are we ready?"
He assessed. Forty-three students, many at Iron Realm or approaching it. Twenty-four practitioners, several at high stages. Darra's reinforced walls and the construction cultivators' ongoing defensive preparations. The Void-saturated territory, which degraded conventional Aether projection from outside its boundary. The Extended Resonance covering the estate's perimeter in real time. The blade, and everything the blade had been preparing him for.
"We are not at the ceiling of what we could be," he said. "But we are at the floor of what we need to be. Yes."
She nodded.
"Then we prepare for two months instead of six," she said, with the flat practicality that was one of the things he loved about her.
She was already walking toward the training yard to begin.
✶
Vael arrived three weeks later, on a morning that smelled of rain.
She had the folder of Voidshaping documents in her bag, which had traveled from the Spire's library to the safehouse in Ardenveil to here: the journey of texts that had begun everything. She also had, in a sealed administrative envelope, the last piece of work she had completed before leaving:
A formal legal challenge to the non-registration enforcement action, filed with the Aethic Review Board under the administrative framework's own dispute resolution protocols, citing the Ashenveil territory's pre-existing operating license and the retroactive application of the amendment as procedurally deficient.
"It will not win," she said, handing it to him.
"I know."
"It will take three months to process," she said. "During which time enforcement is suspended pending review."
She filed a challenge she knows will lose in order to create a procedural delay. Three months instead of two. She is buying us a month.
"You are," he said, "the most valuable person in this building."
"I am efficient," she said. "It appears valuable by contrast."
She walked inside.
Caelum, who had been watching from the courtyard, looked at Luceo with an expression of faint wonder.
"Who is that?" he asked.
"Someone who has been building the strategy for two years," Luceo said. "Come in and meet her."