The world aggregate cost crossed ten on a Thursday.
Oren felt it before the daily reading confirmed it — the Cost Sense registering the shift the way it had registered every significant threshold, the quality of the ambient sensation changing character rather than simply declining in quantity.
He was at the kitchen table when Oren's message arrived.
Ten. The shift is happening.
He sat with it for a moment.
Then went outside.
The Ashrow in the morning. The Domain running through the streets. The between-space present in the ordinary quality of people moving through their day — the market opening, the children arguing about Classes at the well, the correction worker from the lower guild district walking her morning route past the nodes she had been maintaining for eight months.
He stood on the Ashrow's main street and felt ten.
Different from eleven.
Brill had described it correctly.
The between-space's motion primary.
