He sent the message to Arveth through the Guild's routing system that evening.
Not a question. He told her what Neral had told him—the fifth possibility from the Helios document, the hypothesis about the entities building upward once enough nodes were active, the suggestion that the fourth chain might not need a carrier to construct it. He told her what three nodes active felt like through the sovereign seed. He told her that the third entity had begun conducting within forty minutes.
Then he asked: what had she verified?
He sent it and went to sleep.
Arveth's response arrived before dawn.
It was longer than her usual communications. Three pages, handwritten in the careful deliberate script she used when she was documenting something for the record rather than writing to be read quickly. She had been composing this for weeks.
