There had been no message marking the end of his initial review period. The five-day schedule had simply run out, replaced by nothing in particular.

  The requests kept coming anyway. Orestis took that as confirmation.

  He actually preferred this to a formal contract. An ongoing, undefined engagement had no clean exit, no fixed authority to revoke it, no single person responsible for ending it, and—his personal favourite—it required justification to interrupt.

  Bureaucratic inertia: the only force in the universe more reliable than gravity.

  Recall was still possible, but it would take effort. And effort, at this stage, translated into noise—the last thing Kallistrate or the Temple wanted.

  Which meant that, for now, he had exactly what he needed: time.

  ***

  The document arrived without ceremony.

  It was waiting when he returned that evening, slotted among three routine requests and a Consortium circular that had nothing to do with him. No seal marked it as urgent. No cover note accompanied it.

  Orestis set his satchel down and read the header twice.

  Preliminary Training Capacity Review.

  Below it, a block of text detailed scope and purpose in the careful, bloodless language of institutions that preferred to be seen preparing rather than acting. Mandatory service was never mentioned. Neither was war. Instead, the document spoke of expanded readiness, increased throughput, and projected recovery efficiency under accelerated conditioning.

  Ah. So that’s what we’re calling it now.

  Only then did the routing make sense.

  This should have stayed within Kallistrate’s own channels. That it hadn’t meant they wanted the numbers checked—quietly, by someone without a stake in how they turned out. Not because they were unsure, but because the method was meant to scale.

  Kallistrate had no shortage of experts who knew how to train bodies and repair damage. What they lacked were people who studied what happened years later, or who compared one system to others that had failed elsewhere. That was what the Consortium was for.

  They wanted the training examined for long-term viability. Whether it resembled anything that had broken before. And if it did, they wanted alternatives that were—at the very least—manageable.

  They already suspect it’s flawed. They just need someone to say it in language that doesn’t sound like an accusation.

  He sat, unfolded the pages, and read on.

  The Crown’s involvement was evident in the structure: resource tables, timelines, projected outputs—all arranged with the confidence of people accustomed to thinking in terms of scale. The Temple’s presence was subtler. It appeared only in footnotes and parenthetical phrases: clerical intervention cycles, post-healing functional readiness, aura output stabilization following treatment.

  No doctrine. No theology. Only process.

  Orestis read the document through once, then again more slowly. Partway through, the shape of it began to feel familiar.

  He remembered how Kallistrate had gone to war with Logrion. He remembered the confidence in the proclamations. The calm certainty that victory was inevitable.

  And they had won.

  One of the reasons cited afterward was the number of aura-capable soldiers deployed by Kallistrate—far more than Logrion had expected, and far earlier than anyone thought possible.

  Orestis remembered less about the strategic discussions than he did about the aftermath. The quiet when he returned home. The castle assault. The bodies that had thrown themselves at him without hesitation.

  They hadn’t been brave. They’d been broken. Just not in ways anyone could see yet.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  He looked back at the document. The timelines were shorter than they should have been. The recovery assumptions too clean. The margins too thin.

  So this was how they had done it.

  They had run soldiers through repeated cycles of intense training, then used divine healing to repair the damage. The program was ambitious, but not incoherent. Physical conditioning under sustained load. Repeated exposure to aura activation thresholds. Recovery handled through scheduled clerical healing, treated as predictable rather than uncertain.

  The numbers were neat. Comfortingly so.

  They assumed that healing removed the cost.

  It didn’t.

  Sacred healing restored tissue, closed tears, reset alignment, returned blood to proper flow. What it did not do was increase tolerance or strengthen what had already failed.

  Each cycle left the soldier whole, but no more capable of enduring the next strain than before. The damage was gone. The limit remained. Push hard enough, often enough, and the distance between the two vanished.

  That was the mistake.

  This method could produce aura-capable soldiers. It would compress years of development into months. The cost was that the resulting force would carry its failures forward, unseen, until they accumulated faster than healing could correct.

  Whether the Temple understood the risk was unclear. That they had proceeded anyway was not.

  Orestis closed the document and leaned back, eyes unfocused.

  Demerius would not object to this. The god had never objected to cruelty, or greed, or the quiet waste of people. Those weren’t failures of structure. They were costs, and costs could be absorbed.

  What Demerius punished—when he punished at all—were systems that could no longer support themselves. Continuity mattered. Intent did not.

  The Temple believed it was reinforcing the system by accelerating it. They were wrong in a very specific way: they were building something that would function only so long as nothing went wrong, then insisting—through healing and doctrine—that nothing ever truly did.

  The same logic that decided my parents were an acceptable cost. Different scale. Same arithmetic.

  Orestis folded the document carefully.

  He had been trying to understand how institutions like the Temple failed. This document answered the question without meaning to.

  If the Temple wished to proceed on the assumption that limits could be erased, he would not argue. Arguing implied belief that they might listen.

  Instead, he would stop treating their certainty as reliable.

  ***

  Orestis left his room shortly after.

  The library stood where it always had, set back from the main street. Its stonework was plain, marked only by a small Consortium symbol above the entrance. It didn’t advertise importance. It simply endured.

  Inside, the air was warmer than the street and noticeably dry—the kind of warmth that came from age and use rather than comfort.

  He approached the intake desk. The librarian looked up and waited.

  “I’m looking for incident records,” Orestis said. “Long-term strain. Cases that were declared resolved.”

  “Infrastructure or personnel?”

  “Infrastructure. Preferably ones that didn’t fail all at once.”

  That earned him a brief glance. Then she reached beneath the desk and slid a thin token across the surface.

  “Third floor. Stacks C through F. Post-remediation reports. Return the token when you’re finished.”

  He took the stairs.

  The third floor smelled of treated leather and old paper. The shelves were tightly spaced, labels small and precise. Nothing here was meant to be impressive. Everything was meant to be found again.

  He chose a table near the wall and began pulling volumes. Ward degradation under sustained load. Structural fatigue in transit arrays. Progressive misalignment in stabilization frameworks. None ended in catastrophe. They all ended in correction.

  He read quickly, skimming failure summaries, slowing only at remediation notes. Reinforcement added. Load redistributed. Margins widened. Oversight adjusted.

  Always adjusted.

  What caught his attention was not what they fixed, but what they didn’t revise. The language was consistent: failures attributed to variance, material limits, unforeseen interactions. The system itself was rarely questioned. It hadn’t failed, they claimed. It had simply been stressed beyond expectation.

  Expectation. A convenient place to hide assumptions.

  He opened another volume. A relay collapse that had occurred only after years of continuous operation. No single overload. No identifiable trigger. Just a gradual narrowing of tolerance until correction was no longer sufficient.

  Orestis closed the book and leaned back.

  Orthessa didn’t pretend systems lasted forever. It accepted that they wore down. What mattered was recognizing when reinforcement stopped helping and redesign became necessary.

  That distinction was everywhere here, if one knew how to look.

  The librarian passed by once, paused, and set down two additional volumes without comment.

  “Related,” she said.

  I appreciate a librarian who understands what you’re looking for before you do.

  He continued reading. By the time he returned the token, he had not found anything new.

  That was the point.

  Back in his room, he retrieved the training document and laid it beside his notes. The language he needed was already there—in Orthessa’s records, in its quiet habit of naming limits without assigning blame.

  He adjusted the terminology. ‘Stability’ became ‘function.’ ‘Recovery’ became ‘operational readiness.’ ‘Margins’ became ‘load tolerance.’

  None of it was inaccurate.

  Then he added a footnote citing infrastructure precedent: long-term operation under repeated correction, and strain that accumulated despite successful repair.

  The language was measured. Nothing inflammatory. Nothing speculative. It served only to provide context.

  Context that anyone paying attention would find impossible to ignore.

  When he finished, the document appeared unchanged to anyone not specifically looking for the difference. He submitted it and received no reply.

  By morning, another request had arrived, referencing the revised section without comment.

  Orestis read it once, then set it aside. That would suffice for now.

  already failed elsewhere and applies the same terminology to the Temple’s work. These are the words the Consortium uses when something cannot be fixed.

  Patreon, along with extra lore and author notes.