Over four careful morning hours on Day 43, Master Joric Thane carried out the four-stage escape protocol across both sixty-four-pace Reach parcels.
There was no shouting, no running, and no disorder. The clearing drills that Joric and Paxa Sel had rehearsed with the refugees during the forced rest periods of Days 31 and 32 had transformed forty-two anxious travelers into an efficient, disciplined company.
The broken road prism (Site 13) and the counterpart quarry bench (Site 14) sat two hundred paces apart on the valley floor. Because of that, Joric had established a new consolidated camp zone on a high, broad limestone shelf to the east. The terrace sat forty paces above the valley floor and fifty paces beyond the surveyed perimeters. Well outside the sixteen-pace legal safety margins needed by the laws of Kezra’s class.
Kezra Venn stood on a dressed limestone benchmark between the two sites, her recovered survey notebook open in her left palm, her iron-shod ash rod resting against her boot. On Page 013 and Page 014, the live outer edge diagrams were lit up by fine, reddish indicator lines that registered the presence of living mass larger than a field mouse within the surveyed boundaries.
