He’s not piloting this, I said quietly. He built it to run on its own.
Silence stretched between us.
That understanding should have felt like progress, a solved equation. Instead it felt like stepping off a ledge.
Marigold’s fingers tightened against the desk. That’s why Vienna felt too easy, she said. We weren’t fighting him. We were dismantling something he set loose.
I pulled up every corrupted wellspring on the map and traced the flow of power. Corruption moved along the silver lines without hesitation, redistributing whenever resistance appeared.
Designed resilience.
We need to show them, she said.
Yes.
I began consolidating projections and models, my hands moving automatically through the ritual of organization. But my mind kept circling the same conclusion. Every strategy we had built depended on a throat to cut.
And that assumption might be wrong.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my temple—not pain just pressure. Overuse. Fear.
Marigold’s hand found my wrist, brief and steadying.
We figured it out, she said. Understanding comes first.
She was right. She usually was about these things—the emotional logic that my analytical mind skipped past.
Thank you, I said quietly.
Her shoulder brushed mine as we left for the Raynoff Tower war room. The contact was small, intentional. It steadied something in me I hadn’t realized was slipping.
Inside, Lord Raynoff sat at the head of the table, the other three interim council members flanking him. International representatives connected through video calls—Tokyo, London, Cairo, São Paulo.
And the four of us stood together to present what we’d learned.
Three days ago, we cleansed Vienna’s corrupted wellspring. Corruption began returning within hours. Today it has reached full contamination again.
Murmurs rippled around the table.
I projected the dimensional maps into three-dimensional space above us. The resurgence originated from Prague, Munich, and Salzburg simultaneously. No evidence of centralized direction. No signature indicating the master’s presence.
Then eliminate those nodes, the Tokyo representative said.
We traced them, Elio replied, illusion layers unfolding outward. Prague draws from five additional nodes across Poland and Germany. Munich connects to seven more. Salzburg anchors the Alpine network—at least twenty wellsprings.
The architecture is redundant, I said. Remove one node and the load redistributes across the remaining structure. It was designed to survive targeted disruption.
Lord Raynoff leaned forward. You’re suggesting the corruption no longer requires active oversight.
Yes. I met his gaze. He engineered it to sustain itself.
Silence.
Then we cleanse the entire network simultaneously, someone suggested.
Marigold shook her head. Based on current strain metrics, we could safely cleanse perhaps fifteen wellsprings before portal exhaustion and necromantic backlash become catastrophic. There are fifty-eight.
I brought up resource projections. Even with full coalition support, we would require six months of sustained operations to purge the network. We have eight days until solstice.
