Above the green clover patch at the far end of the wheelwright’s yard, the morning air was clear of clay dust. He smelled only of bruised grass, late dandelion nectar, and autumn sunlight warming the stone boundary wall. Town Examiner Corvin stepped out from behind the ash-plank barricade with his bronze glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. His open audit folio was held against his chest and his brass pocket watch ticking in his upturned palm.
His ink-stained fingers trembled slightly—not from fear, but from the gut-deep shock of watching two hundred years of academy orthodoxy evaporate in the sunlight. Behind him, Pella Rook and Foreman Eren Tal stood motionless beside the shattered ruins of the oak workbench, neither speaking a word as the second hand on Corvin’s pocket watch swept past one minute and forty-five seconds toward the two-minute contract limit.
Across the yard, the crushed baked-clay shards lay cold and dead in the gravel, incapable of conducting a microampere of current or anchoring a spatial map point. Yet around the fuzzy thorax of the pale moth spirit, the personal Traveler Return Mark began its scheduled pre-transit gaining speed, shifting from a slow one-second pulse to a rapid, musical shimmer that hummed like a struck tuning fork.
