Khao’khen read Sakh’arran’s ssage in the Arch’s research chamber with Rakh’ash’tha and Aliyah present. He read it once, then folded it, set it down, and sat with it for a mont before he spoke.
"The settlent at the confluence," he said. "Sakh’arran found it in the Ironbeard records. A functioning orcish city of four thousand people, docunted two hundred and eighty years ago in the valley where Yohan now stands."
Aliyah had gone still with the specific quality of a person who has just had a hypothesis confird that they had not wanted confird.
"The Period Three survey found them thriving," Khao’khen continued. "Forty years later, the Period Four survey found the settlent empty. Structures intact. No evidence of abandonnt by choice, by force, by disease, or by disaster. The surveyor added one personal note: they did not stay the night."
He looked at her. "When was this, relative to the Arch?"
"Two hundred and forty years ago," she said, "by your reckoning, give or take a decade for the imprecision in the survey dating. The Tekarr Arch was built over a hundred years ago. The Order found docunts that describe its placent at a confird historical breach point in the Tekarr Mountain region." She paused. "They do not specify how historical. They say historical, which implies a breach event that had already occurred and been concluded before the Arch was constructed."
"Fifty years before the Arch," Rakh’ash’tha said. "A breach event fifty years before the Arch was built. Ti enough for the land to recover visually, for the imdiate evidence to decay, for the local accounts to beco legend rather than living mory."
"Ti enough for the Threian historians to describe the territory as uninhabited," Khao’khen said. "The first Threian southern campaign was approximately two hundred and thirty years ago. Ten years after the settlent emptied. They arrived and found nothing because the nothing had been there for a decade."
"The Threian conquest," Aliyah said, "was a conquest of land that had already been cleared."
"Yes." Khao’khen stood and moved to the chamber’s single narrow window, which looked east across the ridgeline. "The orcish people did not lose that valley to the Threian Kingdom. They lost it to the Abyss a decade before the Threian army arrived. The kingdom simply moved into empty territory and described it as conquest."
He turned from the window.
"The breach event that emptied the valley. How large was it?"
"We don’t know."
"They were pushed out by sothing they could not fight," Rakh’ash’tha said. "Sothing that was present enough to make every living thing in its vicinity decide that leaving was the better choice."
"The way a fire pushes air before it without burning anything that is not in the fire itself," Aliyah said. "Yes. That is an approximate analogy. The Abyss’s presence, when it operates outside the breach point itself, creates a quality in the environnt that biological creatures register as intolerable. It does not kill them. It makes them leave."
"Four thousand people left," Khao’khen said, "without conflict, without dying in place, without any of the signs of the other kinds of disaster. They left because staying had beco intolerable."
"And the surveyor felt the residual quality of that forty years later," Rakh’ash’tha said quietly, "and chose not to sleep in what it had left behind."
The research chamber was quiet for a mont except for its usual hum.
"Yohan is built on the ruins of the last breach’s territory," Khao’khen said. "We fought the Threian Kingdom to take back land that the Threian Kingdom took from land that the Abyss had already cleared." He looked at the third Keystone, visible through the chamber’s open doorway. "And now the Abyss is pressing against the Arch that was built to seal the place it ca through."
"Not for the first ti," Aliyah said. "This is a recurring situation. The Abyss does not forget breach points. It returns to them."
"How many tis has this Arch been under pressure before now?" he asked.
"Twice, in the records we got from the Church. Both tis resolved by reinforcent before the Keystones reached breach threshold." She held his eyes. "Neither of those prior pressure events showed the organized cycling pattern we are observing now. Neither of them involved coordinated approach. This is different from the previous two in a way that I cannot fully quantify but that the readings make clear." She paused. "Whatever is behind the binding now has learned from the previous two attempts. It is not repeating an approach that failed. It is using a different one."
Khao’khen spent another mont looking at the Keystone. Then he went back to the table and picked up his pen.
"What the archive tells us and what the Arch tells us are the sa thing," he said, beginning to write. "We are not dealing with a new problem. We are dealing with an old problem that has had hundreds of years to beco more capable. That is the fra." He wrote the first line of a ssage to Sakh’arran. "Everything we do from here is built on knowing that."
She was quiet for a mont after she said this. Then she said: "The Order of the Seal was not founded to prevent the Abyss from existing. It was founded to prevent the Abyss from expanding into this world. The expansion is the threat. The Abyss behind the seal is a fact. The seal is the only thing that makes it a manageable fact."
"And the seal is maintained by one person," Khao’khen said.
"At this Arch. At present." She looked at him. "The Order was built for twelve Wardens at full strength, one per Arch with practitioner support at each location. At full strength the network is sustainable indefinitely. At current strength, with seventeen total practitioners across twelve Archs, the network is maintainable only if nothing escalates beyond current paraters."
"Current paraters have already escalated," Khao’khen said.
"Yes. Which is why I sent the ergency ssages and why I have been working without adequate sleep for four weeks." She said it without self-pity. As a statent of the operational situation. "I need support. The kind of support the Order cannot currently provide. Which is why your presence here is not diplomatic courtesy. It is necessary."
Khao’khen looked at the Keystone through the chamber doorway. He looked at it for a long ti.
"Then let us stop discussing what has happened," he said, "and spend the rest of the evening on what we are going to do about it."
"Yes," she said. "Let us do that."
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