Chapter 404 - 403: The Prince’s Question
Location:Seven Peaks — Diplomatic Office, Command Center
Date/Time:TC1854.11.01
Colonel Harwick’s response arrived through the personal courier network on the third day of Frost Season, which was either good timing or terrible timing, depending on how much you wanted the answer.
Kael read it in his office. Tianlei was on the floor behind him, conducting an architectural survey of a wooden block tower with the rigorous methodology of a 10-month-old engineer — stack three blocks, evaluate structural integrity by hitting the top block, observe gravitational consequences, begin again. The percussion of blocks against the floor provided a rhythmic backdrop that Kael had learned to process as ambient rather than distracting, the way he’d once processed the ambient noise of the Imperial Court.
The courier’s case was military — sealed, formation-encoded, carrying the particular weight of correspondence that someone had handled with care. Harwick was old guard. Formal. The kind of officer who believed that sealed cases and proper handling were not affectations but discipline, and that discipline was the thread that held civilization together when everything else frayed.
The message was three lines.
Your Highness — Regarding your inquiry about Lord Serian Xuán. Lord Serian was reassigned from the Greymere posting approximately four months ago. The reassignment details are classified at a level above my access authorization. His current status is listed as active duty. I regret I cannot provide further information. — Colonel Harwick
Kael read it twice. Not because the words were unclear — because the spaces between them were.
Reassigned. From a routine posting. Without notifying his family. Without the standard inter-unit communication that accompanies all Guard transfers. Without telling Kael, who maintained correspondence with Serian through a personal channel that existed specifically so they could communicate outside the Guard’s formal architecture.
Details classified. Classified at a level above a Colonel’s access. Harwick commanded the Greymere district. His access authorization covered everything short of Imperial Special Operations and SIS designations. Whoever classified Serian’s reassignment had done so at a level that excluded the man’s own commanding officer.
Active duty. The default status for any Guard member not explicitly listed as deceased, discharged, or detained. It meant nothing. It was the bureaucratic equivalent of "we haven’t changed his file," which could indicate he was on a covert operation, or that he’d been transferred to a black unit, or that nobody had updated the records because nobody had thought to check, or that the person responsible for his file had been told not to change it.
Kael set the message down. Behind him, Tianlei completed a tower of four blocks — a personal record — and celebrated by adding a fifth, which exceeded the structural capacity and resulted in a collapse that the boy greeted with delight rather than disappointment, because destruction was a more interesting outcome than stability when you were 10 months old.