Fellis Dain reached down to the clean wool blanket at Kezra’s side. He lifted the heavy, dark pigskin volume with both hands, and laid it gently across her lap.
The book felt heavy. Not with magical deep ring, but with the dense, physical weight of four hundred pages of heavy rag paper, oak boards, and dark oak-ink. The brass clasp clicked softly as Kezra’s thumb pressed the release. She folded back the cover, turning past the forty-four-character title block with its stark twenty-one-day lock, until she reached the live site registry on page twelve.
The two Horizon addresses burned in faint, pulsing amber script against the ruled margins:
Site 43: Empty Choir Stepped Bench Plateau (1,024 x 1,024 x 512 paces) — EXCHANGED Site 44: Stonewake Citadel Mountain Bench (1,024 x 1,024 x 512 paces) — EXCHANGED
Beneath the entries, the active ledger line recorded the state of her earned power: LIVE SITES: 02 / 08.
“Explain to me again why retiring them doesn’t trigger the cooldown,” Fellis asked quietly. He leaned his hip against the cart wheel as Paxa Sel came over with a cup of cold water.
“Retirement is a surrender of permission, Fellis,” Kezra explained, her fingers resting lightly beside the amber letters. “When you activate an exchange, you’re moving half a billion cubic paces of living bedrock against the heavy rush of the earth. The recoil hits your nervous system because the class channels the ground shaking through your blood. But when you retire a site…
