The first true snow of the season began as a delicate, deceptive dust, a fine white powder that settled into the deep ruts of the North Road and softened the jagged edges of the rubble still piled near the gate. By nightfall, however, the air had turned into a biting, crystalline vacuum that sucked the heat from the lungs and turned the breath into freezing fog. Inside the Alchemist Guild tower, the cold was a physical presence, seeping through the stone walls despite the roaring furnaces below. Staff Sergeant Blake, however, was oblivious to the temperature. He was hunched over a new workbench, his hands moving with the obsessive, micro-mechanical precision of a man who had finally bridged the gap between two centuries.
Before him lay the fruit of his labor and the Widow Elms' smuggling: a series of polished, convex lenses and a long, tapering cylinder of blackened copper. This was the first prototype of the Oakhaven Long-Range Optical System—what the Shadow Command simply called the S-6 Glass Eye. It was a crude refracting telescope by modern standards, but in a world that relied on the naked eye and the intuition of scouts, it was a weapon of mass intelligence. Blake had spent the better part of a week grinding the lenses using Lykos's specialized abrasives, refining the focal length through a painstaking process of trial and error that had left his eyes bloodshot and his fingers raw.
"The clarity is holding, Sir," Blake reported as Deacon entered the workshop, his boots crunching on the frozen grit of the floor. Blake didn't look up from the eyepiece. He adjusted a fine brass screw—milled from the guts of one of the Widow's pocket watches—to shift the internal lens carriage. "I've managed to minimize the chromatic aberration by using a double-lens objective. It's heavy, and the field of view is narrow, but I can see the individual stones on the signal tower three miles out. If we mount these on the semaphore vanes, we don't just send signals; we can read the enemy's movements before they even clear the treeline."
Deacon leaned over the instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. The world beyond the tower jumped into sharp, startling focus. He could see the skeletal branches of the Blackwood Forest, the snow clinging to the bark like white moss. He could see a thin plume of smoke from a distant woodcutter's hut. It was a tactical revelation. The tyranny of distance, the primary obstacle of medieval command and control, was beginning to erode. .
"We need four more, Blake," Deacon stated, his mind already calculating the deployment. "One for the command tower, one for Rodriguez at the North Gate, and two for the scout posts at the perimeter. We integrate them with the semaphore system. This is our early warning network. If the Goblins regroup, or if the Imperial tax collectors send a vanguard, I want to know while they're still a half-day's march away. How is the iron milling for the mounts?"
"Miller's team is struggling with the tolerances, Sir," Blake admitted, finally standing and rubbing his aching lower back. "The iron we're getting from the southern trade is inconsistent. It has too much slag. It's fine for horseshoes and hinges, but for precision gearing, it's a nightmare. I'm having to hand-file every teeth on the adjustment wheels. We need a better way to refine the ore if we're going to scale this up. We need a blast furnace, not a blacksmith's hearth."
"One step at a time, Sergeant," Deacon said, though he shared the frustration. The mismatch between their 20th-century knowledge and the 12th-century material reality was a constant, grinding friction. "Focus on the optics and the synchronization of the chronometers. Major Kiley reports that the 'Blue Fever' cover story is starting to wear thin with the townspeople. They want to see the 'cured' acolytes. We need the semaphore system fully operational by the end of the week so we can coordinate the 'miraculous recovery' with Father Marius's public blessing."
The telescope was more than a tool; it was a symbol of the unit's shifting focus. They were no longer just surviving the immediate aftermath of a battle; they were building an infrastructure of surveillance and communication. Deacon looked out the window at the growing blizzard. The snow would bury the roads, slowing any traditional army to a crawl, but with the S-6 Glass Eye and the synchronized clocks, the Shadow Command would be operating in a different temporal reality. They would be moving with the precision of a modern watch in a world that still measured time by the sun and the shadows.