Chapter 369 - 368: The Pull
Location:Seven Peaks — Various
Date/Time:TC1854.03.12-15
The bead wouldn’t let her rest.
It had been stirring since Thornwall — since the first dream of a town she’d never visited, since the broken courage frequency had registered in her soul space like a note struck on a string she didn’t know she carried. But since Tianlei’s arrival, the stirring had become something else. A pull. Directional. Persistent. South, always south, with the particular insistence of a compass needle that didn’t care whether the person holding it wanted to go north.
Raven sat in her office at the third morning hour, reviewing agricultural projections for the satellite settlements, and the Kirin bead pulsed in her soul space with a frequency that made the numbers on the formation slate blur. Not pain — demand. The bead wanted something. Wanted her to go somewhere. Wanted her to find someone.
Not one person. Many.
She could feel them — distant, diffuse, thousands of kilometers to the south. Broken courage. The specific resonance the Kirin bead had been tuned to since it first shuddered in response to a dream of clicking sounds and a town called Thornwall. But these weren’t shadowspawn victims. These were different. Soldiers. People who’d been trained to fight and then discarded when their bodies couldn’t sustain what had been done to them. People whose courage had been ground down not by monsters but by the institutions they’d served.
Federation soldiers. Dumped in the south. Left to die.
The bead didn’t explain this in words. It communicated in resonance — the same way Serenyx communicated in impressions, the same way Sylvara communicated through Elian. Life energy recognizing broken life energy across a distance that should have been impossible and insisting, with the particular stubbornness of a cosmic artifact that had been waiting for this moment, that something be done about it.
Raven set down the formation slate. Pressed her palms against the desk. Felt the pull — south, south, always south — and understood that this wasn’t going away. The bead had found its frequency. It would pull until she followed or until the people it was resonating with died.
She needed to go south.
***