Ashring wasn't on fire, which was the baseline I tried to work with these days. The problem was that it felt like it should be. Which was worse.
I sat at the provisional command shelter—a sloped wall of mosscrete shielding a table that no longer had legs—and shuffled through four different reports that each contradicted the last one. The southern perimeter node was either overheating, flickering, or offline entirely. Food stores were stable, unless you asked Bitterstack, in which case we were three days from ration collapse. And the latest trade proposal from the goblin envoy included something called "fermented dust eggs," which sounded like a trap.
I rubbed between my eyes. The system still hadn't updated the Sovereign's status marker.
[Sovereign Presence: Displaced]
[Local Authority Thread: Inert]
[Command Status: Acting Officer – Provisional, Non-Myth Aligned]
Which was a lot of words to say: no one's listening.
