Thirty miles away in the country capital of Iron Crucible City, the central scrying mirror of the Board of Heavenly Patents began to flicker.
The mirror was a twenty-foot disk of polished black glass suspended above a pool of liquid silver. It watched forty thousand registered souls across the province. Every compliant fighter appeared as a tiny pinprick of green or gold light.
At exactly midnight, a jagged black square opened in the center of the glass.
The pinpricks corresponding to the Seventh Smelting Ward didn’t fade to red as if dead.
They simply ceased to register. The black glass surface returned a dead, matte glow, as though a physical hole had been punched straight through the mountain landscape.
“Null reading,” the chief royal scroll-keeper whispered, his fingers trembling across his counting frame. “Host not found at sector map points 44-North. The entire valley has dropped out of the registry.”
*
Back at the northern pass of the Azure Cloud Sect, the mountain gravel crunched under heavy boots.
