By mid-afternoon on Day 139, the thin winter sun had crept across the south-facing castle walls of Stonewake Citadel. He cast long, sharp-edged blue shadows over the broken stone of the eastern curtain wall.
Kezra Venn knelt in a drift of white lime dust and crushed mortar where the castle’s eastern backup stable wing had stood three weeks earlier. The building had been a substantial two-story structure of squared timber and coursed limestone cut stone, erected by Marshal Krail’s tunnel diggers during the second year of the occupation to house seventy cavalry remounts and store winter oats. Kezra had inspected the preliminary Horizon boundary on Day 100. Then, her sighting rule sight-line had revealed that the stable’s northeast corner projected three paces across the strict north-lined up 1,024-pace prism.
To his credit as an orderly commander, Krail had not argued about the shape. He had assigned thirty soldiers, three stone-cutters, and two heavy stone sleds to demolish the projecting wing down to the courtyard cobbles. The salvaged rafters, timber posts, and slate roofing shingles were stacked inside the inner bailey in tidy, numbered rows. From the saddle of a passing patrol horse, the eastern boundary looked entirely cleared. A wide, gravelled carriage strip raked flat and bordered with white drainage pebbles.
