Tomas returned to the dry chapel alone at the third hour of the morning. He carried his iron-gall ledger and a single animal fat candle.
He sat upon the altar step, the one hundred and forty brass tags laid out before him on the clean linen. He reached out with his right hand, picking up the brass tag of Corporal Kenneth Mallow.
His calloused fingers closed around the cold metal. Then, a strange, deep ring hummed through the bones of his palm.
It wasn’t the physical strain of Load Share, nor the stone-built clarity of Read the Record. It was a new, expansive awareness. An awakening within the master ledger of his mind that linked physical cargo to human bloodlines.
The ability Succession Trace unlocked behind his eyes like an opening atlas.
He touched the brass tag. Then, he saw not only the stamped letters of Kenneth Mallow’s name. But a radiant, glowing thread of legal and genealogical continuity that branched outward from the metal like the roots of an ancient willow.
The thread traced through nineteen years of town registers: Kenneth to his wife Martha. Martha’s death in the parish poor-house eight years later. The survival of their two daughters, Clara and Elen, now married to ditchers in the neighboring parish of Reed Marsh. Their three living grandchildren who still paid the double tithe on their ditching spades.
