The avatar's resonance blast had injured forty-seven people.
Not seriously — no deaths, no permanent damage. But the four minutes of divine resonance had overwhelmed anyone with standard Flame sensitivity who'd been within two kilometers of the manifestation. Headaches. Nosebleeds. Temporary sensory overload in three students whose Flame cores were still developing.
Rem worked for eighteen hours straight.
The academy infirmary was full. The Char District medical facilities reported overflow. The hospitals in Solheight's central district handled the worst cases — two elderly awakened civilians who'd been walking near the temple when the avatar appeared, their cores destabilized by proximity to divine resonance.
Cael visited the infirmary that evening. Rem was finishing his last patient — a first-year student who'd been in the training yard when the avatar manifested and had collapsed from resonance overload.
"She'll be fine," Rem said, stripping off medical gloves. His round face was drawn, the usual humor replaced by the flat efficiency that appeared when Rem stopped being a friend and became a healer. "All forty-seven will be fine. The resonance damage is temporary — it's like sunburn on the soul core. Painful, disorienting, but it heals."
"You've been working for eighteen hours."
"The patients didn't schedule their injuries around my sleep cycle." Rem dropped into a chair. "The divine resonance is different from Ruin energy. It doesn't deconstruct or decay. It overwhelms. The core's regulatory systems get flooded with input they're not designed to handle. It's like plugging a lamp into a power plant."
"Can you protect against it?"
"Nyx's barriers filter Flame-frequency energy. If the barriers can be calibrated to filter divine resonance specifically, they'd reduce the exposure. But divine resonance isn't standard Flame energy — it's orders of magnitude more concentrated. Standard barrier techniques might not hold."
"Nyx is already working on it."
"I know. She came to me for the resonance signature data from the injured patients. She's building a barrier prototype calibrated to divine frequencies."
"How long?"
"She said 'when it's done.' Which is Nyx for 'don't rush me.'"
Cael sat beside Rem. The infirmary was quiet now — the patients sleeping, the staff cycling through shift changes. The lighting was dim, the Flame-crystal fixtures turned low. Outside the windows, the campus was still. The avatar's manifestation had rattled everyone. Classes had been cancelled. Students huddled in dorms, processing the reality that a God had appeared over their school.
"Are you okay?" Cael asked.
Rem looked at him. The tired eyes — brown, crinkled at the corners, perpetually friendly — held something more complicated than fatigue.
"Forty-seven people hurt because a God had a bad dream," Rem said. "Two civilians in critical condition because they were walking near a temple and the universe decided that was the wrong place to be. And the God didn't even mean to do it. It wasn't an attack. It wasn't a punishment. It was an overflow. The divine equivalent of rolling over in your sleep and knocking the lamp off the nightstand."
"Except the lamp is people."
"Except the lamp is people." Rem rubbed his eyes. "I used to think the worst thing about healing was the side effects. The curse. Making people laugh or cry or feel attracted to the wrong person while I fixed their broken bones. Then the curse was broken and healing was perfect and I thought: great, now I can help without hurting."
"But?"
"But there's always more hurt than I can reach. Forty-seven today. How many next time? If the Gods keep waking, if the dormancy field keeps failing — how many people get knocked off the nightstand?"
"That's why we're building the network. Why we're restoring the dormancy arrays."
"I know. I know the strategy. I know the architecture. I know the blueprint. I just — sometimes I need a minute to be a healer instead of a strategist. Sometimes I need to sit here and be angry that people got hurt and there's no one to blame because the thing that hurt them was a sleeping God's involuntary dream."
Cael didn't say anything. Rem didn't need words. He needed presence. The structural support of someone sitting beside him in a dim infirmary after eighteen hours of work, being a person instead of a plan.
They sat for ten minutes. Then Rem stood, stretched, and his face rearranged into something closer to his normal expression.
"The two critical patients will need follow-up care for a week. I'll coordinate with the hospital. Nyx's barrier prototype — when it's ready, we need to deploy it around the academy and the surrounding residential areas. If the avatar manifests again, the civilian population needs protection."
"Agreed."
"Also, I'm starving. Is the cafeteria still open?"
"It's two in the morning."
"So that's a no."
"Enna keeps emergency rations in the forge workshop. Third cabinet."
"Enna preprogrammed emergency food supplies?"
"Enna preprograms everything. It's how she shows care."
Rem walked toward the door. Paused. Turned back.
"Cael. The dormancy array you repaired — the one channel in the Radiant Temple. You said the God's sleep deepened when you fixed it."
"It did."
"So repairing the arrays makes the Gods sleep better. More repairs, deeper sleep, fewer manifestations, fewer people hurt."
"That's the theory."
"Then I need you to repair them faster." Rem's voice was the voice he used when he was dead serious — flat, direct, none of the rambling or deflection. "I can heal forty-seven people. I can't heal four thousand. Or forty thousand. Every day the arrays degrade further is another day the Gods dream louder and more people get caught in the overflow."
"I know."
"Then build faster."
He left. The infirmary door closed. The patients slept.
Cael sat in the dim room and let Rem's words settle. Build faster. The same demand the situation had been making since the beginning — since the first glyph repair, since the first ashling signal, since the first time the clock started counting.
Build faster. Build bigger. Build more.
The math was always the same: more junctions, more ashlings, more repairs, more time, more everything. And the supply was always less than the demand.
His core was at fifty-five percent. He needed rest. Recovery. The substrate cylinders in the workshop could bring him to sixty, maybe sixty-two. Enough to work. Not enough to repair twelve thousand dormancy channels across a continent.
He needed more ashlings.
---
The fifth signal returned.
Enna detected it three days after the avatar's manifestation — the signal that had gone dark two weeks ago, reappearing at the network's southern edge. Not stronger. Different. The resonance pattern had changed.
"The fusion's configuration shifted," Enna reported. "Before the dark period, the signal was consistent with an early-stage ashling awakening. Now it's consistent with an ashling under suppression. The core is active but being externally dampened."
"Containment?"
"Possibly. The dampening pattern is artificial — not natural fluctuation. Someone is applying an external force to suppress the fusion's output."
"But the suppression isn't complete. The signal is still detectable."
"Barely. At the network's extreme range. If we didn't know what to look for, we'd miss it."
"The ashling is alive."
"The ashling is alive and their core is fighting the suppression. The signal bleeds through because the fusion won't stay down. Whatever they're doing to contain it isn't fully effective."
Someone, somewhere in the south, had captured the fifth ashling. Contained them. Was suppressing their fusion with external force. But the fusion was fighting back — leaking signal through the suppression, broadcasting its existence to anyone who could hear.
The fifth ashling was alive. And they needed help.
"I can't go south," Cael said. "The junction network needs active management. The dormancy array repairs need to start. The investigation, the political situation, the avatar aftermath — I can't leave."
"I can go," Mirael said.
Everyone looked at her.
"I can follow the network. I did it before — four weeks, alone, from Threnmark to Zenith. The southern route is longer but the resonance lines connect. My precognition will provide early warning if I'm walking into a trap."
"Alone?"
"Not alone." She looked at Kess. "You."
Kess's brown eyes widened. "Me?"
"Your decay ability is the most directly useful in a rescue operation. If the ashling is in a containment facility, you can decay the containment infrastructure. You can age locks. Corrode barriers. Disintegrate restraints."
"I've been training for six weeks."
"You've been training with the best ashling practitioner on the continent. Your control has improved by orders of magnitude. And you're angry — which, in an extraction scenario, is fuel."
Kess looked at Cael. The brown eyes asked the question without words: *Am I ready?*
Cael considered it. Six weeks of training. Targeted decay at seventy percent accuracy. Emotional control improving but not complete. Seventeen years old.
"You're ready enough," Cael said. "Mirael's precognition covers your gaps. Your combat decay covers hers. You complement each other."
"I've never done anything like this."
"I hadn't done anything like what I did at the Crucible. But the person on the other end of that signal doesn't have the luxury of waiting until you feel ready."
Kess's jaw set. The anger found its direction — not at Cael, not at the system, but at the people who'd captured someone like him and were holding them down.
"When do we leave?"
"Tomorrow," Mirael said. "The signal's position suggests a location in the Korrath region. Three to four days of travel."
"Drake can arrange transport to the Korrath rail junction," Sera said. "After that, you're on foot."
"On foot through territory where the advisory board's suspension doesn't reach," Isolde added. "The Korrath region is administered by the Southern Priesthood Authority. They operate independently of the Continental Council. The investigation doesn't apply to them."
"Then we're entering hostile territory."
"You're entering territory where no one knows you, no one expects you, and no one will see you coming." Isolde pulled up a map on her tablet. "My Web doesn't have operatives in Korrath. You'll be without intelligence support."
"We'll have Mirael's precognition."
"Which is unreliable."
"Unreliable is better than nothing. And nothing is what the fifth ashling has right now."
The room went quiet. The kind of quiet that meant everyone understood the risk and nobody had a better idea.
"Extraction protocol," Sera said. "If you find the ashling and can free them safely, do it. If the situation is beyond your capacity, document what you find and return. Do not engage forces you can't beat."
"Define 'can't beat.'"
"Anything above A-rank. You're two ashlings with developing abilities. You're not a strike team."
"Yet," Kess said. The word carried the weight of someone who'd spent his life being told what he couldn't do and was getting very tired of the list.
Cael looked at the two of them — Mirael, twenty-three, former Flame analyst, four weeks of running and six weeks of training; Kess, seventeen, orphan, six weeks of fusion control. Sending them south on a rescue mission that might be a trap, a dead end, or the beginning of something they couldn't predict.
But the signal was there. The fifth ashling was alive. And nobody else could reach them.
"Go," Cael said. "Bring them home."
Mirael nodded. Kess's jaw was set. They left the common room together — two ashlings, heading south, because they both knew what it was like to be alone with this and they weren't going to let it happen to someone else.
The clock ran. The signals pulsed. And somewhere in the south, a fusion core fought against its containment, bleeding signal through the suppression, reaching into the dark, hoping someone was listening.
Someone was.
