Across the oak drafting board in Sister Merrow’s washroom under two whale-oil lamps, the work of the ring around the hollow crown began not with grand proclamations, but with Imran Bell, Senior Engineer Korr Var. Pella Rook inspecting Korr Var’s large linen-backed underground under-road drain map of Lathmere, now marked with blue pins on the western arc and yellow pins on the eastern arc alongside Eighteen-year-old Kel Dorr and thirteen-year-old Tavi. When Imran, Korr Var, and Pella plot the four shaft observations onto the ward map, they discover a nonstop ring of disturbed beetle colonies encircling the Hollow Crown’s deep foundation.
The technical core of the ring around the hollow crown needed distinguishing the two fully different survival behaviors of the same beetle species on opposite sides of the hill: upward brood escape on the west versus emergency doorway caulking on the east. Throughout this phase of the systematic cellar-to-cellar mapping of the lantern beetle colony, the crew held fast to reading living shifted weight as a heat map of the hidden trunk. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
“Look at the circle the pins make around the base of College Hill,” Pella said softly, tracing her brass measuring tongs along the four-hundred-yard radius centered squarely on the sub-vaults of the Hollow Crown. “On the western half of the ring, every colony is carrying its white egg-sacs up toward the street grates. On the eastern half…
