Sir Cael Ardent opened his mouth to repeat the War Ministry catechism on acceptable loop attrition—the clean, iron-bound formula that the High Chancellery preceptors had taught him in the capital vault: All suffering incurred prior to anchor activation is legally and physically nullified upon restoration of the baseline morning.
The words never reached his lips.
His gaze caught on the tiny, scalloped white ridge of Nell’s milk-tooth sitting on the bleached linen square beside the black pyramid of blasting powder.
At eight years old, a child’s lower incisor still bears the three faint, rounded developmental mamelons along its biting edge that adult teeth wear flat—three tiny pearls of enamel no wider than the head of a brass pin, meant for biting into baked apples and warm bread crusts.
Because the tooth was an anchored Keeper relic (#9) resting inside the five-foot ring of Honest Measure, the imperial memory filter inside Cael’s gold collar could not blur its edges into abstract tactical script, nor could it classify the tooth of a living child sleeping twenty feet overhead as expended peripheral clutter.
Instead, as Cael stared down at the microscopic crescent of dried brown blood on the root of the tiny tooth, the protective wall inside his skull cracked along an older fault-line that predated the Siege of Harth by eleven years.
