Location:Obsidian Academy — Qin's Private Study
Date/Time:9 Frostforge, 9942 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
The ward hummed. Nothing else in the room made any sound at all.
Jayde sat with her hands loose on her knees and did the last of the arithmetic she had been doing for four days.
She had been in this room more times than she had bothered to count. Scroll towers that defied structural analysis. Three teapots on the desk, one of which had fossilized sometime around the beginning of the current century. The visitor's chair had been conscripted for paperwork years ago, and nobody had ever conscripted it back, so she sat where she always sat, on the hard one by the shelves, with her tea going cold on a stack of provincial requisitions.
She had argued supply routes across that desk. She had watched him pour with the muscle memory of a man who had done it in that chair more times than the calendar had years.
She had never once, in any of it, counted the wards.
