Location:Seven Peaks — Diplomatic Office, Command Center
Date/Time:TC1855.03.12
The requisition forms were the key.
Kael had been reading administrative documents for five months. Hundreds of pages a day, sometimes — transfer orders, supply manifests, communication logs, personnel rotations, duty rosters, equipment allocations. The bureaucratic exhaust of an empire that had been running on institutional momentum for centuries. Most people's eyes glazed after the first page. Kael's sharpened.
He'd grown up inside this machine. Not beside it, not observing it from the comfortable distance of a noble education — inside it. His mother had taught him to read institutional language before he could ride a horse. "Every dynasty is built on paper," she'd said, pulling him onto her lap in the private study, tracing her finger along a supply requisition that most people would mistake for meaningless bureaucratic noise. "Learn to read the paper, and you'll see the dynasty."
