The red script hovered over Cael Ardent’s breast like a brand of dried blood, motionless now that the gold foil had crumbled into ash.
INCIDENT 014: EQUINE ROT CONTAINMENT — ZERO CIVILIAN SURVIVORS — CITATION EXCISED BY PROVOST MARSHAL.
The words did not flicker. They sat upon the air with the cold, unyielding weight of an official military tombstone, casting a rust-colored glow over the soldier’s sweating collarbone.
Cael did not move. His hands lay open on his woolen knees, the fingers trembling with fine, rhythmic tremors like the legs of an exhausted draft horse. His breath came in dry, ragged hitches, his chest refusing to expand fully as though the air in the River Lantern’s parlor had turned into stone.
“Fourteen,” he whispered, staring through the glowing letters at the floorboards. “Incident fourteen. I was seventeen years old. They gave me a corporal’s stripe two weeks later for diligence in containment.”
Jon Hale remained standing just beyond the hoop-iron boundary, watching the knight’s face crumble.
For eight days across multiple lives, Cael Ardent had appeared to Jon as an elemental force—a commander who lived three steps ahead of reality, calculating casualties with the cold efficiency of an abacus, trading lives for tactical terrain without a flicker of doubt. Even when he had pressed his blade to Jon’s throat in the cellar or demanded the surrender of the town’s grain stores, his voice had carried the unshakeable certainty of an imperial instrument that knew its own purpose.
