The city was called Venmoor.
Not the eastern region's Venmere where Aldas had stood down — this territory's city, a population of forty thousand, the specific character of a place that had been a regional center for long enough to have developed the institutional weight of an entity that had been important for a long time and knew it.
The Church equivalent here was older than the kingdom's Church.
Pre-System in its founding, post-System in its corruption, and — as Dael's pattern documentation had identified from Senn's eighty-three years of observation — possessed of the deepest institutional connection to the pre-System suppression of any settlement in the territory.
Not just building on the wound.
Actively maintaining it.
Not consciously — the institution had long since stopped knowing what it was maintaining and simply maintained it because maintenance was what the institution did and had done for longer than anyone currently alive could remember why.
