The Iron Conclave's Anomaly Division occupied a floor and a half of the Conclave's eastern administrative building, which was not as impressive as it sounds because the eastern building was the smallest of the four.
The Division's function was exactly what the name suggested: the tracking, classification, and investigation of events that did not fit standard patterns. Most of what they handled was mundane. Riftzone behavior outside normal parameters. Rank assessments that produced inconsistent results due to equipment issues or unusual individual biology. Aether signatures that registered as strange until someone went and looked at them and found an entirely reasonable explanation.
The two agents assigned to the Aridun border region cluster were named Voss and Lin. They had been partners for three years and had a working relationship that operated primarily through Voss talking and Lin being right.
They received the combined anomaly report on a Thursday morning. Two incidents, same general area, within a few months of each other. A monitoring sensitive's crystal cracking during routine sweep. A merchant's consumer scanner failing in an identical manner.
Lin read the report first, as she always did, while Voss got water.
'Equipment failure,' Voss said when he came back, reading over her shoulder.
'Both in the same village,' Lin said.
'Within a few months isn't simultaneous.'
'The sensitive's report says the failure mode was identical. Complete signal absence rather than interference or degradation.'
Voss sat down. 'That's a different failure mode than equipment malfunction.'
'Yes,' Lin said.
They looked at the report for a moment.
'Could be a local Aether disruption,' Voss offered. 'Old Riftzone activity, something geological.'
'The sensitive's been running sweeps in that sector for eleven years. No prior anomalies.'
'Started recently, then.'
'Recently,' Lin said, 'as in, within the past year and a half or so.' She pulled up the satellite data. 'The nearest Riftzone to that village is the sealed Tier X at coordinates forty-seven. It's been stable for two centuries.'
Voss went quiet.
Tier X was not a phrase that generated comfortable silences.
'The seal integrity reports are current,' Lin said. 'Nothing from the monitoring array suggests any change in the seal. And a Tier X breach would not manifest as a scanner failure. It would manifest as a regional catastrophe.'
'So it's something else.'
'It's something else.'
Lin opened a deeper archive search, cross-referencing the specific failure mode, complete signal absence during rank assessment, against historical records. The search returned twelve results across four hundred years of Conclave documentation.
She read through them.
Then she read through them again.
Eleven of the twelve were equipment failures. The twelfth was different. It was from eight hundred and forty-seven years ago, from a region that no longer existed under its original name, and it was classified.
Not standard classified. The document carried a classification level that Lin had seen on three prior occasions in her career, all three times relating to things that had turned out to be significant enough that she had spent the subsequent months wishing she had not looked too closely.
'Voss,' she said.
'I see it.'
She stared at the classification stamp.
'We should request a direct investigation clearance,' she said finally.
'We should request it carefully,' Voss said.
Lin was already drafting the request. She wrote it with the precision of someone who understood that certain words, put in the wrong order, attracted the wrong kind of attention. She asked for clearance to conduct a standard follow-up investigation into equipment anomalies in the Aridun border region. She did not mention the eight-hundred-year-old classified file.
She submitted it and sat back and thought about a small village called Maxentius that no one had ever cared about.
Something about that felt, suddenly, like it was about to change.
She hoped she was wrong. Experience suggested she was not.
The request cleared review in four days. Standard processing time. Nothing to indicate that anyone in the review chain had looked at it twice.
They began packing for the field.