Chapter 119: The First of Five

The territory two days east was called Ashenveil.

Not the Ashenveil where Wren had spent thirty-seven years threading a community together. A different Ashenveil — the name coincidence the kind that happened across a large enough world, the same word meaning different things to different people in different places.

This Ashenveil was a river valley settlement. Twelve thousand people. No correction worker that Orveth’s correspondence chains had identified — the isolation here complete in the sense that nobody had been doing the surface correction work, nobody had been feeling the gradient and following it, nobody had been maintaining the between-space wound against the natural compounding tendency that Vael had spent decades preventing in Drevenmoor.

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