Across the late morning of Day 144, the paymaster’s tables set beneath the southern gate arch became the busiest crossroads in Stonewake Citadel.
Veteran Jared Vane had taken his twelve pieces of silver and walked out into the pale sunlight. Then, the invisible dam of institutional pressure broke across all four company barracks. What had seemed an unthinkable breach of military discipline in formation became an orderly, practical reckoning around the payout tables.
Soldiers filed up in small, quiet groups of four and five. They carried their rolled bedrolls, their wooden kit boxes, and their personal work knives. Their reasons for stepping out of line were varied, mundane, and entirely human, showing how little ideological zeal existed among the rank-and-file once the threat of punishment was removed.
A dozen men from the foothills regiments had local partners, common-law wives, or young children living in the small hamlets along the Alderfast exit road. They refused to wake up ten marches away on a strange crossroads. Meanwhile, their families remained behind in a hostile mountain basin. Another score of older wagon drivers, masons, and baggage drovers deeply distrusted large-scale mapmaking after hearing rumors of what Ulvan Dret’s forest exchange had done to the timber slopes in Hushwood. They had seen snapped tree roots, crushed logging sleds, and dead charcoal clearings. They wanted no part of five hundred paces of foundation flying across the sky.
