Thessara’s private study had a low ceiling, useful shelves, and three different ways of organizing things on the worktable at the sa ti. She used candles instead of ward lights because she liked the quality of the fla better.
Rick thought the room of the head priestess of a three-hundred-year-old institution would be more ceremonial. It had the specific functionality of soone who had worked in the sa space for decades and no longer cared how it looked to visitors.
They brought Zein in, and she was already sitting across from the empty chair at the worktable. She didn’t stand up.
Liora had told her what to expect in the ten minutes between the courtyard and this room. Not completely; there wasn’t enough ti for that, but enough for Thessara to get the basic shape of things.
The man sitting across from her now was the architect of the surveillance network, the leader of the operation that had brought the Shadow Covenant to her temple grounds, and the person who had built the most advanced grief-resonance theoretical frawork she had seen in fifty-five years of sacred ward practice.
She stared at him for about four seconds.
Then she said, "Show the modification."
"Not who you are, what you’ve done, or what exactly made eleven of your agents climb my eastern wall in fake amber robes this afternoon."
"Just let see the work."
Zein’s face looked like soone who had been getting ready to have a different conversation and was now getting back on track. He showed her the work.
It took forty minutes to explain. Zein was clear and didn’t add anything extra.
Thessara asked questions at certain points, which showed she was already three steps ahead of what was being explained, and she was using the questions to confirm what she already knew.
Rick sat to the side and understood about sixty percent of what was said, which was better than he usually did with theoretical discussions before the coalition because he had been in an intensive imrsion program for the past week.
The main idea was that a standard Severance Rite got rid of corruption from a host and cleaned out the cavity. The result is clean, and the issue was that the entity did not conform to a typical corruption frawork.
For two hundred years, corruption had been used to create structures. When the corruption is purified, the grief architecture disappears along with it.
This occurs not because the grief itself is corrupt, but because the dium is what holds the form, much like how water takes the shape of its container. Zein’s modification allowed the final part of the rite to separate the corrupt dium while preserving the basic shape of the grief construct within the socket cavity.
The cavity transford into a temporary and stable transitional receiver, a space for the construct to remain intact while the larger question of what to do next was addressed without haste.
The Eye of the Demon King was an artifact from before the coalition, which is why the socket functioned as a receiver. Removing it had created a hole shaped by pre-coalition resonance, and the corruption that later filled the socket had maintained that shape.
The grief construct was able to fit into a pre-coalition cavity because it was constructed using the sa theoretical frawork. In practical terms, this space was suitable for the specific type of entity it was designed to accommodate.
Thessara asked, "What happens if the transitional receiver doesn’t hold?"
Zein replied, "The construct breaks apart, and consequently, the socket is clean... The host survives."
"That is an acceptable failure condition," Thessara said.
Zein said, "The construct would not survive it."
Thessara looked at him from across the worktable. "I get that..."
"I’m telling you that the failure condition is fine from the point of view of the living host." There was a pause that wasn’t angry, just direct. "That difference is important for how the rite is carried out."
"The main duty is to Rick Rolland, and the secondary duty is to keep the construct alive. If those two duties co into conflict, the main duty cos first."
Zein was quiet for a while. "Yes. I understand," he finally said.
Rick thought that was the most direct anyone had been with Zein about where his priorities were wrong. He watched it land like a perfectly placed strike, with no drama, just weight.
"This is getting confusing, but at least it’s gotten a little better..."
Zephyra had been standing near the shelves with Sophia asleep in the carrier arrangent across her chest. She was good at listening without seeming to do so.
When Zein used a theoretical term to explain the resonance calibration layer, she stepped forward at a certain point in his explanation.
She fixed the way he wrote it down. Exactly, without any fuss, in the sa way she spoke for everything else.
Zein looked at her. "You’re right," he said, making the change.
Thessara glanced at Zephyra, then at Zein, and finally back at Zephyra. Rick noticed an expression on her face that he recognized as the look of soone who had just read a long story condensed into a single paragraph and understood it completely.
She didn’t comnt on her understanding; instead, she returned to the modification. Liora’s role at the eting was to connect Zein’s theoretical frawork prior to the coalition with the sacred ward architecture of the rite.
These were two distinct systems that weren’t designed to work together, but, in so ways, they did. Liora identified common thes and principles that bridged the gap between Zein’s theoretical frawork and the sacred ward architecture of the rite.
She handled the translation. She also posed the questions that Rick and Zephyra didn’t know to ask, drawing from her eighteen years of experience with sacred rites to discern which variables were stable and which were not.
She asked, "Has the entity agreed to the transitional placent?"
Silence enveloped the room.
"Uhh..." Rick replied, "Yeah, probably."
Liora looked at him, and sothing in her expression softened, as if she had placed her trust in an assessnt and had just received confirmation that her trust was well-placed.
Thessara took a little longer to look over the modification paperwork. She then looked Rick in the eye and said, "The modification is theoretically sound..."
"If it fails, it won’t be because of the theory."
"So for now I could only give you so suggestions to get so good sleep because the socket needs to be as quiet as possible before the rite begins, and the rite will begin at dawn."
She turned to Zein. "You will only be there for the calibration, and you won’t take part in the sacred parts."
"The difference is important."
"Understood," Zein said.
The eting was over.
Soone had made tea for about eleven people in the hallway outside. This included the three junior priestesses who were in the hallway at the ti, the archivist who had co from the wrong direction at the wrong ti, and Thessara’s personal assistant, who had been waiting outside the door.
The tea was served in various cups and containers that had clearly co from different parts of the temple kitchen. None of them matched, but they were all outstanding.
At the end of the hallway, Heinz looked at the results of a thodical approach to a kitchen that was available but had so equipnt that wasn’t working right, which made it challenging to prepare the tea consistently.
Rick took a cup, sat down in a chair by the wall, and held it for a mont without drinking.
"Phewww~!" Just what I needed... a good cup of tea," he said.
Sebastian appeared at his shoulder, but the hallway couldn’t see him.
He said in a low voice, "For what it’s worth, the Heinz variable has been way outside of all the projected paraters this week."
"Yeah," Rick said.
"I have added ’earnest undirected competence applied to whatever is directly in front of him’ as a separate category to my modeling frawork."
Rick drank the tea again, and it made his eyes roll up. "Yep."
That’s probably a good idea."
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