Two days after the fall of House Vance, the Lower Plaza of Sector 7 witnessed a sight that had never occurred in the one-hundred-and-forty-two-year history of the Vanguard Federation.
A massive wooden podium, draped in the blue-and-gold banners of the Federal Republic and flanked by sixty heavily armed Vanguard Border Marshals in dress uniforms, had been erected before the steps of the Artisan Guildhall.
Assembled in the plaza below were over six thousand citizens. Blacksmiths in clean leather aprons, weavers holding their children on their shoulders, wounded scouts leaning on timber crutches, and hundreds of commoner families who had walked all the way from the outer tenement wards of Slum Ward 9.
Seated upon the podium was High Judge Thaddeus Sterling, Senior Marshal Corvinus Brand, and Teacher Valerie Koslov.
And standing at the center of the stage, flanked by Grimm and Pip, was Arthur Vance.
Arthur wore a brand-new, regulation dark-blue Vanguard Scout tunic, tailored from durable double-weave wool and trimmed with silver braid. Pinned over his left breast. It caught the autumn morning sunlight with brilliant clarity, was the newly minted Silver Vanguard Star. An insignia of high working merit awarded only to tamers who had stopped a Disaster-class threat.
