Those We Arm
Book Two of The Narrowing
"The institutions are arming. The ground is burning. No one in authority is asking whether sharpening a weapon beside a fire is wise."
The contamination is accelerating. Activation sites are multiplying across the northern provinces faster than any model predicted. The nine healers who can treat cascade contamination have not become ten. The number of patients has.
Within the Oathbound Crown, a wizard named Viro Mahrz has discovered that Elemental magic can be weaponized at scales no institution thought possible. His public demonstration reshapes institutional authority overnight. Committees restructure. Research divisions redirect. The man who spent his career predicting this catastrophe watches from the margins of rooms where decisions are made without him.
A healer adapts her technique and achieves a sixty-percent survival rate. She hates that it works — because if it works, it will be documented, replicated, and called progress by people who will stop looking for the technique that saves the other forty. A soldier signs a training authorization with names he recognizes on the roster. A necromancer reads the boundary between life and death and finds it dissolving.
The Crown provides. The Crown protects. The Crown is sharpening instruments it does not fully understand, beside a fire it cannot control.
Committee memoranda, deployment authorizations, field healer case notes, suppressed intelligence assessments, and intercepted correspondence assembled during a period no institution chose to name. Companion collection for The Narrowing.
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What happens when the institution measures sixty percent survival and calls it progress?
A public demonstration of weaponized Elemental magic. Stones suspended by magnetism. Atmospheric electricity channeled along predetermined paths. Heat concentrated into visible form. The room applauded. The committees restructured. Authority shifted without formal declaration. The man who predicted this outcome became unnecessary.
Forty-eight units of classified equipment distributed to northern garrisons before training authorization was issued. The procurement sequence was inverted. You train before you equip, or you are planning to use the equipment before the training is complete. The rosters are compliance documentation, not requests. Every name on the list is a signature on a consequence that has not yet arrived.
Twenty-seven confirmed activation sites. The projection model's upper confidence interval has been exceeded for three consecutive fortnights. The model assumes linear interaction. The acceleration is nonlinear. Each event contributes to conditions that produce the next. The Bureau's recommendation for interinstitutional consultation was deferred pending completion of a military assessment that does not reference the acceleration data.
The Crown provides. The Crown protects. The instruments of order are being sharpened. A dissent memorandum was filed, received, and suppressed. The projection data was received and superseded by a committee assessment that does not account for it. Filing is not consultation. It is storage. The record is all the strategist has. The record is not enough.