On the sixth evening after the descent from the northern ridge, Chief Examiner Vaska Ren carried a padded oak instrument case from the abandoned practice court into the hospice yard and set it on the pine table beneath the roof edges. He used his uninjured right hand. He lifted the lid to reveal the seal court’s test pressure lens—a palm-thick disk of layered mountain quartz suspended inside a tuned ring of marsh-copper needles—and wrote two words in chalk on his slate: Seventh Dawn.
Hall Mistress Soran stood opposite him where the lantern light fell clearly across his hands and slate, while Ilyra, Commander Keth Or, and two independent mountain teachers who had ridden in from neighboring valleys—Master Bren of the West Scree School and Instructor Yul of Pine Ford—gathered around the table.
“Under the original Hollow Summit and northern chamber schedules,” Ilyra read aloud from Vaska’s second slate line for the benefit of the yard, “seven dawns was the longest interval the test rig could remain dormant after an interrupted descent before drawing surrounding valley breath back into its conducting seams to re-anchor Heaven’s Measure. If any backup socket, buried floor wire, or unsevered rim thread survived our pullback on the Twelfth Night, it will try to gather pressure at tomorrow’s sunrise.”
