Thirty years is enough time for fear to lose its edge.
It does not vanish. It calcifies. It becomes policy, then precedent, then inconvenience. By the third decade after the disappearance of the first cohort, the empire had convinced itself that restraint was not wisdom, but stagnation.
They were no longer alone.
To the south, the Althrene Compact began excavations near their own corrupted zones, issuing triumphant communiqués wrapped in ceremony and scholarship. To the east, the Sharn Principalities sent observers into regions once marked forbidden, returning with relics and rumors. Even minor states, hungry for legitimacy, began funding expeditions framed as cultural recovery rather than sacrilege.
Virellia watched.
Virellia calculated.
And eventually, Virellia moved.
This time, there would be no deniability.
The Second Sanction Expedition was declared publicly under imperial decree, signed not only by the Inner Council but ratified in open assembly. The language was careful, polished, and deliberate. It spoke of heritage, of responsibility, of reclaiming knowledge lost to chaos. It avoided the word Catalyst entirely.
Ceremonies were held in the capital's eastern forum, beneath banners older than the Detestation itself. Priests intoned blessings that had not been spoken aloud in generations. Scholars gave speeches heavy with caution and heavier with ambition. The people watched, uneasy but proud, reassured by ritual.
Ritual was the point.
The empire wanted witnesses.
The expedition party numbered four.
Again, selection took years.
The first was Maerith Solenne, appointed as expedition lead. A veteran diplomat turned administrator, she had negotiated ceasefires between rival provinces without once raising her voice. Her strength lay in synthesis. She could hold conflicting truths without flinching.
The second was Taviel Ryn, a combat arcanist trained under post-Detestation doctrine. Unlike her predecessors, Taviel specialized in suppression rather than projection. Her magic was designed to cancel, dampen, stabilize. She had spent her career preventing catastrophes, not causing them.
The third was Heliane Cross, a natural philosopher whose work on corrupted ecosystems had redefined imperial understanding of magical decay. She believed corruption was not an intrusion, but an adaptation. That belief unsettled many. It also earned her the post.
The fourth, and only man among them, was Corven Ilas, a signal engineer. His task was simple in description and impossible in practice. Maintain communication. Ensure continuity. Prove that this time, the empire would not lose sight of its own people.
They were briefed openly.
They were blessed openly.
And they were warned, openly, that failure would not be buried.
Unlike the first cohort, no anchors were hidden within them. The ethics councils had vetoed the practice decades earlier, citing irreparable harm and unacceptable risk. Instead, they were outfitted with layered safeguards. Signal relays, resonance beacons, fallback routes, emergency extraction protocols.
On parchment, it was flawless.
They departed to applause.
For the first month, everything went according to expectation.
Reports arrived on schedule, transmitted through relays stationed along the approach routes. The tone was professional, even optimistic. Terrain instability noted but manageable. Magical variance within predicted tolerances. No hostile manifestations observed.
Foreign observers took interest.
The empire allowed it.
Transparency, after all, was the posture of confidence.
By the fifth week, interruptions began.
Messages arrived delayed, fragmented, sometimes repeated out of sequence. Corven adjusted frequencies, recalibrated transmitters, rerouted through secondary relays. Each fix worked briefly, then failed in a new way.
The reports themselves changed.
Maerith's language grew precise to the point of rigidity, as if clarity alone could anchor reality. Taviel documented suppression fields holding longer than projected, then shorter. Heliane began including speculative addendums that contradicted her own earlier conclusions.
Still, contact remained.
The empire reassured itself.
Two weeks later, the interruptions worsened.
Entire days passed without signal, followed by bursts of data compressed into incoherence. Visual feeds showed landscapes that refused to remain still. The mountain appeared closer in every transmission, even when coordinates insisted otherwise.
Corven's final clear report focused entirely on signal behavior.
"It is not interference," he wrote. "The medium itself is responding. As if communication is being weighed."
That line was flagged, reviewed, and archived.
For two months, contact persisted in this degraded state.
Sometimes voices came through without imagery. Sometimes imagery without sound. Once, a message arrived bearing the timestamp of three days in the future, then corrected itself.
Foreign nations began asking questions.
The empire began deflecting.
Behind closed doors, pressure mounted. The expedition had exceeded its initial mandate. The mountain's response patterns were inconsistent with all existing models. Taviel's suppression metrics suggested external influence adapting in real time.
Maerith requested authorization to proceed deeper.
The council debated.
And while they debated, contact ceased.
Not abruptly.
Quietly.
One day, there was no morning transmission. By evening, none arrived. Corven's relays registered nothing beyond ambient noise, flat and unremarkable.
Extraction protocols were triggered.
No response.
Emergency beacons activated automatically after seventy two hours.
None registered.
Search teams were prepared, then stalled. Military intervention was proposed, then deferred. The empire hesitated, trapped between precedent and pride.
In public, statements were released affirming ongoing communication issues and reaffirming confidence in the expedition's resilience.
In private, archivists began sealing records.
Foreign pressure intensified. Rumors spread faster than fact. Some claimed the expedition had defected. Others whispered ascension, containment, betrayal.
The mountain remained unchanged.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
The Second Sanction Expedition was officially declared lost after one full year without contact. The language of the decree was mournful but measured. Sacrifice was honored. Lessons were promised. Safeguards were reviewed.
No further attempts were authorized.
The empire withdrew its observers.
Other nations quietly did the same.
The region around the mountain was reclassified, not as forbidden, but as unresolved. A distinction that satisfied no one and comforted even fewer.
In the decades that followed, scholars would debate the similarities between the first disappearance and the second. They would argue about timing, about technology, about intent. They would note the absence of bodies, the lack of catastrophic fallout, the silence that followed.
What none of them could fully explain was this.
The first cohort vanished without witnesses.
The second vanished in full view of the world.
And after that, the mountain no longer needed to prove anything.