Dhug’mhar took the Rhakaddon back to the marked positions eleven days after the slope engagement.

Nothing had been reported in that time. Eleven days was simply the interval he had decided on for re-verification, and he did not change intervals based on whether something interesting had happened in them.

Graka rode beside him, as always.

Denn rode ahead, reading the terrain the way Denn always read it. It was the reason Dhug’mhar had requested him specifically for this circuit, and would continue requesting him for as long as Denn was willing to ride north repeatedly into ground that had already frightened him once.

Denn had not said much on the ride out. He had said even less than the last time, before the slope engagement, and Dhug’mhar had noticed the difference without commenting on it.

Commenting on it would have made it a thing that needed managing, rather than a thing a person carried quietly and did their work around.

The first survey stake was exactly where they had left it. The second was also undisturbed.

The third stake, the one on the trail itself twenty yards north of the original engagement site, was gone.

Not knocked over. Gone, the ground around its former position showing the same darkened quality the trail’s first section had shown.

The darkening extended in a rough circle six feet across where the stake had stood. Denn dismounted and examined it without touching it.

"It did not move the stake," he said. "It occupied the stake’s position."

"The stake is inside whatever this is now."

Dhug’mhar looked at the darkened circle, then up the slope toward where the fourth stake should have been visible. It was visible. It had not moved.

"The line is not advancing evenly," he said. "Three points held. One point did not."

Graka looked at the gap between the held points and the missing one. "An uneven advance is harder to map than an even one."

"It is also more informative, if we map it correctly." Dhug’mhar was already dismounting fully. "An even line tells us where the edge is. An uneven line tells us something about why."

They spent the rest of the morning extending the survey eastward and westward from the four original points. New stakes went in at the boundary’s current edge wherever Denn could identify the darkening pattern in the stone.

By midday they had eleven new positions. Dhug’mhar plotted them against the original four on the oilskin Denn carried for exactly this purpose.

The eastern portion of the line, toward Yohan, had moved closer by roughly three miles in the eleven days since the first survey. That alone would have been the morning’s most significant finding on any other day.

It was not the morning’s most significant finding.

The western portion of the line had moved differently. It had not advanced in a straight extension of the original boundary.

It had bulged, the edge pushing westward and southward together in a curve that, when Dhug’mhar extended it on the map, ran toward the highland interior rather than toward Yohan’s perimeter.

"The highland build site," Graka said, looking at where Dhug’mhar’s extended line terminated. "And the Ravine position, depending on how the curve continues."

"Yes."

Denn found the second thing an hour later, four hundred yards west of the missing-stake position.

Two clusters of darkening, each showing the three-point concentration pattern from the first survey, separated by roughly thirty yards. Six contact points total across two locations.

"Or two entities," Dhug’mhar said. "Operating from adjacent points without needing to reform between uses."

Graka crouched beside the nearer cluster and looked at the spacing between the three points within it. "The spacing within each cluster matches the spacing from the first survey almost exactly."

"Which means whatever generated these clusters is using the same method it used before. It has simply learned to use it twice in the same area, close together, without exhausting itself between the two."

"That is not a change in size," Graka said. "That is a change in how often it can do this."

"Yes." Dhug’mhar sat with the oilskin for a long time before he wrote anything.

The original assessment, sent south after the first survey, had given a window of two to four weeks before the eastern edge reached Yohan’s perimeter, with fourteen days as the low-end figure if the rate held steady.

The rate measured over these eleven days was roughly double what the original extrapolation had assumed. Halved, the low-end figure became seven days.

He wrote the report in two parts, addressed to two recipients. The two findings had two different urgent audiences, and he did not want either finding buried under the other.

To Sakh’arran: the eastern boundary’s advance rate over the last eleven days is approximately double the rate used in the original projection. Revised low-end estimate to Yohan’s northern perimeter is seven days, not fourteen. The wall-mount installation timeline should be reassessed against this figure immediately.

To Kael’s office, with a copy to Sakh’arran: the western portion of the breach boundary has developed a bulge directed toward highland interior territory rather than continuing the original eastward-facing line. The bulge’s projected path intersects positions in or near the highland interior within a timeframe comparable to the eastern figure above.

Two adjacent extension points were also found showing the multi-contact pattern previously associated with single-entity activity, suggesting the breach can now support more than one projection-generation point concurrently without full recoalescence between uses. This represents an increase in operational tempo, not only territorial size.

He read both reports twice before sending them, which was not his habit.

He sent them anyway, with two riders leaving in different directions within minutes of each other. The two findings needed to arrive at their destinations without either rider’s urgency competing with the other’s along a shared road.

Then he turned the Rhakaddon back toward Yohan, eleven new stakes marking a line that was eleven days closer than it had been the last time anyone had measured it.