Date: TC1853.07.20 (Night)
Location: Seven Peaks – Perimeter Patrol
The moon hung low over Seven Peaks, casting silver light across the defensive walls that breathed with quiet sentience. Zara Nightwhisper moved along the eastern perimeter with the silence of a woman who'd spent eight years learning to kill without sound.
Old habits. The kind that never truly died, no matter how many months she spent learning to build instead of destroy.
Her patrol route covered the least monitored section of the boundary—where the living architecture merged with natural forest, and the formation network thinned to conserve energy. Command had assigned her this rotation specifically because her infiltration training made her ideal for spotting vulnerabilities. The same skills that had let her ghost through secured compounds for the Shadow Hand now served defensive purposes.
She still wasn't sure how she felt about that.
