The road Vale chose did not remain a road for long.
By midday, the packed dirt thinned into uneven stone, then into stretches where passage was implied rather than maintained. Grass bent where travelers had once passed, but no ruts remained. No grooves. No memory of wheels.
Roads like this did not record history.
They forgot it.
Vale walked without hurry. The world no longer resisted him, but neither did it assist. Each step felt acknowledged only after it was taken, as though the land refused to anticipate his intent.
He preferred it that way.
At a shallow ravine, he paused. The bridge that should have been there—marked faintly on an old map he carried—was gone. Not broken. Removed. The stone supports remained, cleanly cut, as if the structure had been rescinded rather than destroyed.
Covenant work, he thought. Suppression through subtraction.
He descended into the ravine and crossed on foot, boots scraping against exposed rock. The climb on the far side took longer than it should have. The incline did not steepen, yet each step required deliberation.
Listeners, perhaps. Or preparatory friction.
Vale reached the top and did not slow.
Somewhere unseen, the resistance adjusted again.
By evening, he reached a settlement too small to qualify as a village. Six buildings. One well. A shrine whose iconography had been weathered into abstraction.
The people watched him openly.
Not with suspicion.
With calculation.
Travelers had become rare in places like this. Routes redirected, permits delayed, movement discouraged by inconvenience rather than force. Anyone still walking roads without tracks was either desperate or deliberate.
Vale was neither.
A woman drawing water asked him, "Which city are you headed to?"
"I don't know yet," he replied.
She studied him for a long moment, then nodded. "That tracks."
He stayed the night in an unused storage shed offered without comment. No one asked for payment. No one offered conversation. The town functioned as if silence itself were a mutual agreement.
As he lay awake, Vale felt it again—the subtle shift, the sense that something had tried to settle into place and failed.
Not air.
Expectation.
He turned onto his side and let his breathing slow.
If the Covenant believed that narrowing options would force alignment, they misunderstood the nature of choice. Constraint only mattered when someone wanted efficiency.
Vale wanted clarity.
At dawn, he left before anyone rose.
Behind him, the settlement resumed its quiet survival. Ahead, the land opened into low hills scarred by old conflict—trenches softened by time, markers stripped of names.
War without memory.
As Vale crossed the field, the grass stirred faintly around his ankles, responding not to motion, but to direction. He stopped, then took a step sideways.
The grass did nothing.
He stepped forward again.
The response returned.
Vale's eyes narrowed.
"They're watching how the world follows," he murmured. "Not whether it does."
Far away, a listener hesitated over a report.
Subject traverses non-infrastructure zones.
Environmental alignment reacts post-decision.
No evidence of guidance-seeking behavior.
The listener added a note, then paused, unsure whether to include the next observation.
Subject appears unconcerned with arrival.
Vale crested the hill and saw smoke in the distance—not thick, not urgent. Domestic. Lived-in.
Another settlement.
Another place where the world would test him by pretending not to care.
He adjusted his course slightly—not toward the smoke, not away from it, but along a line that felt… undecided.
The land followed.
Not eagerly.
But willingly.
And somewhere within the Covenant's expanding web of quiet observation, a realization began to form—slow, unwelcome, and difficult to suppress.
They were building barriers.
He was teaching the world how to step around them.