"I have decided," Kayla said, watching a hound dissolve into a school of luminous fish, "that one frightens me the most."
"Then you have not watched Alfred," Fraisea said.
Because Alfred had still not moved, and the battle had begun to bend around that fact. The small black wolf sat on his hill with the patience of a held breath while mountains wrestled in the sky, and it was becoming clear that every Sovereign in the fight was doing a job, and Alfred's job had not started yet.
It started when the calamity did the thing Fraisea had been dreading aloud for an hour.
"It is not trying to win the fight," she said suddenly, the numbers snapping into shape. "It never was. Look at its mass flow. Everything the Sovereigns destroy, it is not regrowing, it is relocating. It is pouring itself downward. Into the ground. Under the rim." Her voice went flat and fast. "It is going to come up inside the border. Behind every wall on this front at once."
