"Every operation of consequence begins the same way: three people in a room who should not be in the same room, agreeing to do a thing that should not be done."
They met every Thursday for six weeks, and by the end of six weeks the map of Ashkar's Hollow had been redrawn four times.
Vael brought the administrative intelligence: the patrol rotations, the facility's official supply schedules, the garrison misdirection protocol she had spent three weeks carefully corrupting from within her family's provincial access. She was precise about it in the specific way of someone who has done careful, damaging work and refuses to be careless now. The misdirection would trigger on a specific date, pulling the Ashmore provincial garrison's emergency response — which by territorial agreement included the Aethic Guard rotation at the Hold — toward a fabricated incident twelve miles southwest. The window it created was estimated at ninety minutes.
"Ninety minutes," Seris said, the third time Vael reported this figure.
"Ninety minutes," Vael confirmed. "Give or take the response time of the on-site commander, who may or may not follow protocol efficiently. I've built in a fifteen-minute buffer in the conservative direction."
"So seventy-five, reliable," Seris said.
"Seventy-five, reliable. Ninety, probable."
Seris looked at Luceo.
Seventy-five minutes to enter, locate the practitioners, break the brand integrations, extract everyone who can move, and exit. Through a facility whose internal layout we have only partial intelligence on. With three people, one of whom is carrying a Void cultivation that will flag every monitoring instrument in the building the moment it is used at significant capacity.
"Walk me through the internal layout again," he said.
This was Seris's domain: the intelligence from the deceased scouts and the surviving maintenance worker, cross-referenced with the facility's official architectural filings, which Vael had pulled from the provincial records and which were, she had noted with the dry precision of someone raised in administrative culture, probably not fully accurate, as facilities of this nature tended to expand without updating their filings.
The Pale Hold's confirmed layout: a central processing hub connected to four holding blocks arranged radially, each block housing approximately fifteen to eighteen practitioners. The Aether extraction infrastructure ran beneath the holding blocks through a subterranean channel network, feeding into a central collection reservoir in the hub's basement. The facility had one main entrance, two service entrances, and a heavily reinforced emergency exit on the north face that could only be opened from the inside.
"The north exit is the out," Luceo said. It had been on the map since the third week. "The problem is the hub. We have to pass through it to reach the holding blocks, and the hub is where the Cultivator-General's office is."
"Oressa Vann," Vael said. "Iron Realm Seventh Stage. Her personal fighting style, according to the garrison records, emphasizes large-scale Aether projection. Area effects. She is not a precision fighter."
"Meaning she is dangerous in open spaces and less dangerous in corridors," Seris said.
"Meaning she is very dangerous in open spaces," Vael corrected. "The hub's atrium is sixty feet across. If we encounter her there, the area projection techniques will be significant."
"I can negate area-effect techniques," Luceo said.
Both of them looked at him.
I can negate them up to a certain scale. What that ceiling is against a Seventh Stage cultivator specifically, I do not know. I have been honest about what I know. I have been less specific about the edges.
"I can negate them," he said again, steadily. "Work from that assumption."
✶
Two weeks before the operation, he did something that surprised him: he told Caelum.
Not the full plan. Not the names or the facility or the specifics. He told Caelum that he would be absent from the Spire for a period of two to three days, that the absence needed to be covered, and that if anyone asked, Caelum had last seen him at the library on a Tuesday evening.
Caelum looked at him for a moment.
"The unremarkable and reliable person," he said.
"Yes."
"Are you going to come back?"
Honest answer required here. Not performance.
"I intend to," Luceo said.
Caelum nodded with the gravity of someone who has received a meaningful answer that was not a comfortable one.
"The plant will still be alive when you get back," he said.
"I know it will," Luceo said.
✶
One week before: the three of them met for what they had implicitly agreed was the final planning session, the meeting that transformed the plan from something being prepared into something being executed.
Seris spread the map on the table. It was, by now, a document of significant density: four colors of ink, two sets of annotations, margin notes in three hands, a revision history that told the story of six weeks of increasingly specific knowledge arriving against a backdrop of increasingly real stakes.
She touched the fourth holding block.
"My mother is here," she said. She had said it before. She said it now differently: not as intelligence, but as orientation. A fixed point. The thing the map was for.
Luceo looked at the map and at Seris and at Vael, who was studying the patrol rotation with the focused composure of someone who has decided that the only useful response to fear is precision.
This is the thing you have been building toward. From the Ashenreach forest, from the wrong sky, from the cold ground and the blade and the girl with silver hair who told you what the world was. This is it. This is the answer to the question of why you are here.
He looked at the blade, leaning against the wall.
The crack along its flat had deepened in color over six months, the crimson a shade richer, the pulse slightly faster, as if the object had its own sense of imminence.
Ready, he told it silently — which was an absurd thing to communicate to an inanimate object, except that the blade answered in its way: a single deep pulse of warmth through the bond, the particular resonance that had been building since the Ashenreach.
"One week," he said aloud.
They folded the map.
They did not say the things that should be said before dangerous things, because saying them would have required them to be the kinds of people who believe in the possibility of loss, and none of them had survived this far by believing in that possibility more than necessary.
Outside, Ardenveil settled into its nighttime quiet.
The Pale Hold was fifty-three miles north.
One week.