He was looking at the horizon when he said it, not at them, and not at the table behind him.

The sunrise was still in the air, the first clean light spreading across the Oasis of Grain, and Alistair Thorne was looking east when he opened his mouth.

His voice was quieter than the ritual had been.

"Weep not, my Harvest. I am the Sword of the Sun."

He did not turn around, nor did he look at any of them.

Nobody answered.

It was not a line for the Echelon, nor for Solnar, nor for the Record.

It was for the three people standing behind him on the ground that was, now and always, the ground of the faction they had bled to make real.

Due, behind him, was very quiet. He did not adjust his collar, and he did not say anything about the strangeness of the line, because this morning was not like the others.

Elara was crying without making it a performance, and she had not planned to.

Her shoulders shifted once, slightly, and her hand came up to her face, while the tears were on her face, and she kept looking at the sunrise.

She did not turn away, and she did not apologize.

Silas, at the edge, was the most still of them, and he was looking at the three of them rather than at the sunrise, showing his hope for Sun Harvest.

Alistair’s miscalibrated Equalizer ran its passive scan, and the offset caught at his right side, so he adjusted slightly.

The scan returned the territory in flat grey, the readings he had been adjusting for since the crater.

He looked once at the eastern stone, where the mark was still there, small and dark, the circle and the offset line.

’Whatever it means, it can mean it tomorrow.’

The sun was fully above the horizon now, and Sun Harvest was real.

Eventually, he turned and looked at them. Due nodded once, without saying anything.

Elara wiped her face with the cuff of her coat and did not pretend the tears had not happened. Silas, at the edge, did not move, since he did not have to.

Following that, the four of them walked back to the base together.

Inside, the candle in the eastern window had gone out at some point during the ritual, the wax pooled around the holder, and Due lit a new one without ceremony before sitting down.

Elara sat across from him, and Silas took the chair to Due’s right, which had been empty for most of the volume. Alistair sat at the head.

The dispatch from the Sovereign Record arrived an hour later.

Due read it first, and then Alistair, then Elara, then Silas.

The continental section had a feature on Sun Harvest’s registration. Three lines, institutional, dry.

The Record had used the same register it used for every founding ritual ever entered into the permanent record, and that was the point.

The faction was very real, and the Echelon had received the document.

But below the feature, in the smaller item set off by itself on the right side of the page, there was a single new line.

Alistair read it twice. His grip tightened on the paper; however, his jaw did not clench, which was, in some ways, more telling than it would have been if it had.

The line said:

The Shadow of Former Glory has moved for the first time in three hundred years. Direction: unknown.

The room went still.

Due was the first to speak, his voice low. "Three hundred years, and the man chooses today to start walking. Today, of all days."

"Three hundred years," Alistair confirmed quietly.

"The Black Mountains, then? That is where you went to find him."

"Yes, sitting in a house that was barely standing."

"He has not moved since before the current Echelon was even structured. Not for any famine, not for any war, not for any of the founding rituals before ours, and now he picks the morning of ours to leave."

Alistair was quiet for a moment, since he had no good answer for that.

"He picked it for a reason," he eventually said. "Glory does nothing for no reason."

Elara was reading the line over Alistair’s shoulder, and her brows furrowed. "Direction unknown? The most powerful man on the continent, and the Record prints unknown next to his name?"

"They print unknown when they cannot find him," Alistair said.

"And they truly cannot find him."

"No, they cannot, and that means he is not letting them."

She set the page down slowly, since she had been looking at Alistair in the careful way she had been looking at him since the Field of Fallen Banners, the look of a person who had begun to read him with attention.

"You triggered this," she said. "You went there, you spoke with him, and now, nine months later, he is walking, while the Record cannot tell anyone where he is going."

"I did trigger it, yes."

"For what, Alistair? What did you say to him that took three hundred years to land?"

"I do not know yet, and that is the part I cannot stop thinking about."

"Do you have a guess, at least?"

He thought about it for a long moment.

Glory’s smile, at the cave. The way the smile had reached the eyes. You are eligible to construct your own faction. Do what you will with that. The hand on his shoulder. The sentence Glory had not finished, that Alistair had carried for nine months without telling anyone.

Seeing this in his head one more time, he looked at the three of them.

"I have a guess, but I am not going to share it yet, not until I am certain. I will not put a half-formed thought in front of you and call it a plan."

Due nodded slowly, since he had learned to recognize the pieces of information Alistair would speak about in his own time.

"Alright. We will wait."

Silas spoke from his chair, his hands flat on the table. "The ritual is in. The Record is in. The continental factions are positioning, and Caldren has tried to break us and has failed. The Upholders are four weeks from our border, and now Glory is moving in a direction no one can name."

He looked at his hands.

"Sun Harvest is an official faction now."

The room was quiet.

Alistair set the dispatch on the table.

Outside, the cookfires were lit, and the runners were on the roads, and the Oasis of Grain was doing what it did in the late morning, which is the work of being a region.

He looked at the eastern window, where the new candle was burning steadily, and he thought about the unsigned note in the drawer, the case beneath it, and the leader of the accelerated movement sending messages on Sun Harvest’s behalf without permission.

Eventually, he said the only thing there was to say.

"We rest today," Alistair said.

Due raised his brows. "We rest? In the morning, the strongest man on the continent finally moves?" 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"One day. Tomorrow we begin."

"Begin what, exactly?"

Alistair’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"The next part... The part Glory was warning me about, the day he sent me down the mountain."

The candle in the window held its light, and the morning continued. Somewhere on the continent, in a direction the Sovereign Record could not name, the Shadow of Former Glory was walking for the first time in three hundred years, toward something only he, and perhaps Alistair, could guess at.

Alistair’s lips slightly curved upwards, surprising his crew. Slowly, he uttered:

"The beginning of a new era."

Volume 1: Children of the Sun — End.