Those We Count
"Ninety-four people are dead. The institutions responsible are still arguing over who gets to count them."
A contamination event has torn through the mining settlement of Vaelthorne. The death toll is climbing. The official response is fractured — jurisdictions overlap, reports contradict, and the agencies responsible for containment cannot agree on what they are containing.
Sorcerer Talenai Surmera arrived to document. What she found was worse than the disaster itself: erased archives, altered geological surveys, and a pattern of institutional negligence spanning four decades. The evidence is in her scope. The people who created the evidence would prefer it stayed buried.
A healer whose hands are the only thing standing between the survivors and a second wave. A soldier carrying a guilt he cannot send home. A necromancer reading the dead that no one else will count. Beneath the mountains, something ancient is waking — and it does not distinguish between healing and consumption.
Neither do the institutions built to manage it.
Institutional dispatches, field testimonies, geological surveys, and tribunal proceedings assembled from sources across Terheia. No editorial commentary. No context provided. Companion collection for The Narrowing.
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How do we count the people who don't fit into the math of the powerful?
A mining settlement in the northern Thornmere Basin suffers catastrophic magical contamination. Ninety-four confirmed dead. Earth glazed to black glass in perfect circles. The official classification remains contested. Three separate institutions claim jurisdiction. None claim responsibility.
The Arcanorium dispatches a Sorcerer. The Oathbound Crown dispatches a bureaucrat. The Ossuary Conclave dispatches no one — officially. Field reports indicate at least one unlicensed necromancer operating within the disaster zone, cataloguing the dead by methods the Crown does not recognise and the Arcanorium will not sanction.
Geological surveys suppressed. Seismic data redacted. Something beneath the third seam has been active for longer than the institutions have existed to monitor it. The miners knew. Their testimony was never entered into the record. The mountain breathes. The breathing is getting faster.
Containment perimeter established. Healer capacity at critical threshold. Survivors exhibit symptoms that do not match any catalogued exposure pattern. The equation the institutions use to measure acceptable loss was not designed for this variable. It was never designed to balance.