Agent Pale-Seven returned to Ashenveil on the fourteenth of Scorchend — three weeks after the Border Incident, two weeks after full mobilization, and exactly on schedule according to the extraction timeline that Vrenn Myrvalis had established when the agent had deployed south nine months ago.
Pale-Seven was a code designation. The agent's real name would never appear in a Ministry document, because the agent was still alive and the Ministry's information security protocols were built on the principle that living agents had names that could be tortured out of captured operatives. The Ministry didn't protect identities out of courtesy — it protected them because every name that remained secret was a name that couldn't be screamed under interrogation.
