Rise of the Horde - Chapter 866 - 865

Khao’khen read Sakh’arran’s message in the Arch’s research chamber with Rakh’ash’tha and Aliyah present. He read it once, then folded it, set it down, and sat with it for a moment before he spoke.

“The settlement at the confluence,” he said. “Sakh’arran found it in the Ironbeard records. A functioning orcish city of four thousand people, documented two hundred and eighty years ago in the valley where Yohan now stands.”

Aliyah had gone still with the specific quality of a person who has just had a hypothesis confirmed that they had not wanted confirmed.

“The Period Three survey found them thriving,” Khao’khen continued. “Forty years later, the Period Four survey found the settlement empty. Structures intact. No evidence of abandonment by choice, by force, by disease, or by disaster. The surveyor added one personal note: they did not stay the night.”

He looked at her. “When was this, relative to the Arch?”

“Two hundred and forty years ago,” she said, “by your reckoning, give or take a decade for the imprecision in the survey dating. The Tekarr Arch was built over a hundred years ago. The Order found documents that describe its placement at a confirmed historical breach point in the Tekarr Mountain region.” She paused. “They do not specify how historical. They say historical, which implies a breach event that had already occurred and been concluded before the Arch was constructed.”

“Fifty years before the Arch,” Rakh’ash’tha said. “A breach event fifty years before the Arch was built. Time enough for the land to recover visually, for the immediate evidence to decay, for the local accounts to become legend rather than living memory.”

“Time enough for the Threian historians to describe the territory as uninhabited,” Khao’khen said. “The first Threian southern campaign was approximately two hundred and thirty years ago. Ten years after the settlement emptied. They arrived and found nothing because the nothing had been there for a decade.”

“The Threian conquest,” Aliyah said, “was a conquest of land that had already been cleared.”

“Yes.” Khao’khen stood and moved to the chamber’s single narrow window, which looked east across the ridgeline. “The orcish people did not lose that valley to the Threian Kingdom. They lost it to the Abyss a decade before the Threian army arrived. The kingdom simply moved into empty territory and described it as conquest.”

He turned from the window.

“The breach event that emptied the valley. How large was it?”

“We don’t know.”

“They were pushed out by something they could not fight,” Rakh’ash’tha said. “Something that was present enough to make every living thing in its vicinity decide that leaving was the better choice.”

“The way a fire pushes air before it without burning anything that is not in the fire itself,” Aliyah said. “Yes. That is an approximate analogy. The Abyss’s presence, when it operates outside the breach point itself, creates a quality in the environment that biological creatures register as intolerable. It does not kill them. It makes them leave.”

“Four thousand people left,” Khao’khen said, “without conflict, without dying in place, without any of the signs of the other kinds of disaster. They left because staying had become intolerable.”

“And the surveyor felt the residual quality of that forty years later,” Rakh’ash’tha said quietly, “and chose not to sleep in what it had left behind.”

The research chamber was quiet for a moment except for its usual hum.

“Yohan is built on the ruins of the last breach’s territory,” Khao’khen said. “We fought the Threian Kingdom to take back land that the Threian Kingdom took from land that the Abyss had already cleared.” He looked at the third Keystone, visible through the chamber’s open doorway. “And now the Abyss is pressing against the Arch that was built to seal the place it came through.”

“Not for the first time,” Aliyah said. “This is a recurring situation. The Abyss does not forget breach points. It returns to them.”

“How many times has this Arch been under pressure before now?” he asked.

“Twice, in the records we got from the Church. Both times resolved by reinforcement before the Keystones reached breach threshold.” She held his eyes. “Neither of those prior pressure events showed the organized cycling pattern we are observing now. Neither of them involved coordinated approach. This is different from the previous two in a way that I cannot fully quantify but that the readings make clear.” She paused. “Whatever is behind the binding now has learned from the previous two attempts. It is not repeating an approach that failed. It is using a different one.”

Khao’khen spent another moment looking at the Keystone. Then he went back to the table and picked up his pen.

“What the archive tells us and what the Arch tells us are the same thing,” he said, beginning to write. “We are not dealing with a new problem. We are dealing with an old problem that has had hundreds of years to become more capable. That is the frame.” He wrote the first line of a message to Sakh’arran. “Everything we do from here is built on knowing that.”

She was quiet for a moment after she said this. Then she said: “The Order of the Seal was not founded to prevent the Abyss from existing. It was founded to prevent the Abyss from expanding into this world. The expansion is the threat. The Abyss behind the seal is a fact. The seal is the only thing that makes it a manageable fact.”

“And the seal is maintained by one person,” Khao’khen said.

“At this Arch. At present.” She looked at him. “The Order was built for twelve Wardens at full strength, one per Arch with practitioner support at each location. At full strength the network is sustainable indefinitely. At current strength, with seventeen total practitioners across twelve Archs, the network is maintainable only if nothing escalates beyond current parameters.”

“Current parameters have already escalated,” Khao’khen said.

“Yes. Which is why I sent the emergency messages and why I have been working without adequate sleep for four weeks.” She said it without self-pity. As a statement of the operational situation. “I need support. The kind of support the Order cannot currently provide. Which is why your presence here is not diplomatic courtesy. It is necessary.”

Khao’khen looked at the Keystone through the chamber doorway. He looked at it for a long time.

“Then let us stop discussing what has happened,” he said, “and spend the rest of the evening on what we are going to do about it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Let us do that.”