The two lights were gone by morning.
Rhea's chip said they had taken the deep channel home with one hull limping and no extra flags. Not a route to the plain. Not a circle back to our quay. Home, or the kind of yard that would have to start from nothing. Sable left the inner stone filled until noon anyway. Cities get generous too early. She did not.
The first work was paper.
Elizabeth wrote Orin the truth in a hand with no decoration. Ears unmade. Pour broken. Two hungry hulls beaten off the glass and pointed home. The cut still closed to the unwritten. No pilgrimage. No relics. If a wrong story reached the grass, Orin was to treat it as a clan tool and burn it. Isolde put that letter on the triangle route with the next living ship and a construct that would not gossip.
Caelis got a different letter.
