The second requisition order came with a request attached, which Marek read aloud with the particular flatness of a man delivering news he already knew would land badly.

"'The Chancellery requests the Marshal's personal presence, without delay, at the newly discovered rift cluster near Ashvale Pass, to assess and, if operationally feasible, neutralize the anomaly using the bonded capabilities demonstrated to Envoy Vire.'" He lowered the paper. "Ashvale Pass is six full days' ride past our current border. That's not our jurisdiction, Marshal. That's the Chancellery borrowing you like a tool from someone else's toolbox, and expecting us to foot the travel costs besides."

"Because that's exactly what they think I am now," Vane said, low, reading the order himself twice over with a stillness Eric recognized as barely-contained anger simmering just beneath the surface. "Vire's report didn't just buy us safety. It advertised me as an asset available for deployment wherever the Chancellery finds a problem too dangerous for ordinary soldiers."

*This is precisely what we feared,* Eric said, cold fury threading through his own composure. *They cut your supply lines with one hand and borrow your body with the other, and somehow expect gratitude for the privilege of being used twice in the same season.*

"Can we refuse it," Marek asked.

"Not without consequences that would make the grain cuts look generous by comparison." Vane set the order down, jaw tight. "Refusing a direct Chancellery request, after a report already flagged this garrison as 'unusual,' invites exactly the kind of scrutiny we spent Vire's entire visit trying to avoid in the first place."

*Then we go,* Eric said, though every word of it cost him something he didn't have a clean clinical term for. *But not on their terms entirely. We set the conditions. Full support escort, not the skeleton crew they'll try to save money on. Adequate rest before and after. And a written acknowledgment that this is a singular request, not a standing arrangement they can invoke whenever convenient.*

Vane relayed the conditions to Marek, who nodded grimly and set about drafting the response with the particular efficiency of a man glad to have something concrete to argue for rather than simply absorbing bad news, and it was only once they were alone again, the tent quiet around them, that Eric let the fuller weight of his anger surface.

*I hate this,* he said, quiet and raw. *I hate that Vire's careful, modest report somehow made things worse instead of better. I hate that surviving one test just opened the door to being treated as permanently available for the next one. You're not a weapon they can requisition alongside grain and coal, Vane.*

"Apparently I am, as far as the Chancellery's concerned." Vane's voice had gone flat with old, familiar resignation, the exact tone Eric had spent months trying to coax him out of. "This is what I signed up for, in a sense. Eight years of being useful to people who'll never actually see me as anything else."

*Don't.* Eric's voice sharpened, unwilling to let that particular old wound reopen without a fight. *Don't collapse back into that just because the Chancellery's being predictably awful. You are not what they think you are. You're not even what Vire's report says you are. You're the man who cracked a rib rather than admit weakness and still told me the truth eventually. You're the man who chose me, out loud, on the ninth of last month, and has kept choosing me every day since. Their paperwork doesn't get to define you. I don't accept their definition, and neither should you.*

Vane was quiet a long moment, something in his shoulders loosening fractionally at the force of the argument. "You get fierce when you're defending me," Vane said, something almost like wonder threading through the exhaustion in his voice, as if he still hadn't fully adjusted to the novelty of someone taking his side against the world without being asked.

*I contain multitudes,* Eric said, dry despite the lingering heat of his anger. *Also, apparently, an entirely undiminished capacity for outrage on your behalf. That part of me never actually died with the rest of my old life.*

---

The ride to Ashvale Pass took them through territory neither Vane nor most of the escort had ever crossed before, the black stone of the Frontier gradually giving way to steeper, colder ground where the wind carried an edge that cut through even the heaviest winter cloaks. Eric spent the days cataloguing the changing terrain with the same restless attention he gave everything now — less out of necessity than habit, the old surgeon's need to understand every variable before trusting himself to act on any of them.

*You're quieter than usual,* he observed, on the fourth day, watching Vane's shoulders set into a harder line the further they traveled from familiar ground. *Talk to me.*

"Just thinking." Vane's eyes tracked the horizon, ever alert. "Six days from home, on a mission that shouldn't exist, for a Chancellery that's spent the whole season squeezing us for resources with one hand and demanding miracles with the other. Makes a man wonder exactly how much more they think they're entitled to before they'd consider the debt repaid."

*They'll never consider it repaid. That's rather the nature of an institution that sees a person as a resource rather than a man. There's no ceiling on what a resource owes.* Eric let the bitterness of it show, unfiltered, something he'd have once smoothed over with clinical detachment but no longer bothered concealing from the one person who'd earned his honesty completely. *Which is precisely why the two of us setting our own limits matters as much as it does. Nobody else is going to set them for us.*

"No," Vane agreed, quiet. "They certainly aren't."

Ashvale Pass, when they finally reached it six days later with a full support escort and considerably better rations than the standard patrol allotment, proved to be everything the Chancellery's report had undersold and everything Eric had feared in equal measure.

The rift cluster wasn't a single tear but three, clustered close together in a narrow mountain pass barely wide enough for two riders abreast, their combined light staining the surrounding rock a sickly, shifting violet that made even Marek's normally unshakeable composure visibly falter as they crested the final ridge and saw the full scope of it laid out below.

"Three," Talwyn breathed, having insisted on accompanying them despite his obvious dread of the journey. "I've never recorded a cluster this dense in thirty years of cataloguing rift activity. The resonance alone could destabilize the surrounding rock face if left unmanaged for long enough."

*This isn't a routine assessment at all,* Eric said grimly, watching the shifting light with clinical dread pooling somewhere he no longer had a proper organ to hold it in. *This is a genuinely dangerous phenomenon, and the Chancellery sent us here with six days' notice and a request that reads like they expect a miracle rather than a careful, measured response.*

"Can it be closed," Vane asked, already assessing the terrain with a commander's eye, looking for chokepoints, sightlines, places three simultaneous Rift-Spawn swarms could be funneled and managed rather than allowed to overwhelm a small survey team.

"Not by any means I understand, Marshal, and I've spent thirty years studying these phenomena," Talwyn admitted. "Rifts of this size don't close. They're managed, contained, monitored until they eventually burn themselves out over years, sometimes decades. Whoever wrote that Chancellery request either doesn't understand rift theory at all, or understood it perfectly and sent you here anyway, hoping the bond might do something no ordinary intervention could."

*That's the worse possibility,* Eric said, quiet, to Vane alone, watching the shifting violet light with a new and colder kind of dread. *They're not testing whether you can handle a dangerous mission. They're testing whether I can do something specifically. Whether the bond itself has capabilities beyond battlefield weaponry that they'd find useful to document, catalogue, and eventually replicate in someone with far less say in the matter than either of us has had.*

"Then we don't give them that data," Vane said, low and resolute, already turning to survey the narrow pass with a commander's practiced eye for terrain and chokepoints. "We assess. We report honestly that this cluster requires long-term containment infrastructure, not a single heroic intervention. And we come home without either of us doing something reckless enough to end up in someone's research notes, filed away for whoever comes looking next."

They spent two days at the pass, methodical and careful, mapping the cluster's boundaries with Talwyn's fussy, exacting precision, establishing what containment measures might actually work over time — stone wards at the choke points, a rotating watch schedule for whichever garrison eventually took responsibility for long-term monitoring, careful notation of which Rift-Spawn species emerged most frequently from each of the three tears. It was disciplined, unglamorous work, punctuated only twice by genuine danger: once when a scouting soldier strayed too close to the second tear and had to be pulled back by Marek before the shifting light could do more than singe his sleeve, and once when a larger-than-expected swarm tested the perimeter on the first night, requiring nothing more dramatic from Vane than his ordinary blade and the thin defensive lattice Eric had long since stopped needing to think twice about raising.

Eric found himself grudgingly proud of the restraint it required from both of them — the temptation to simply push harder, to try something dramatic that might actually close one of the tears and hand the Chancellery the miracle they'd clearly hoped for, sitting there unspoken and, by unspoken agreement, refused, hour after difficult hour.

"They're going to be disappointed," Marek observed on the second evening, reviewing Talwyn's draft report by lamplight. "A careful containment plan isn't what that request was fishing for."

"Then they can be disappointed," Vane said, flat. "I'd rather disappoint a Chancellery clerk than lie about what's actually possible here."

On the second night, with the report largely drafted and the return journey set for dawn, Vane sat outside the camp perimeter alone, watching the sickly violet light pulse against the mountain rock, and Eric felt the particular, familiar weight of a man turning something difficult over in his mind.

"If I'd pushed harder," Vane said quietly, "if I'd let you go past every boundary we've set, maybe I could have actually closed one of those. Maybe that would have mattered more than a careful report that just tells the Chancellery what they already suspected."

*And maybe it would have killed you, or fractured me past any hope of recovery, in service of a problem that isn't actually solvable by force in the first place.* Eric let his voice stay gentle but firm. *Talwyn's right. Rifts this size aren't closed by a single dramatic act. They're managed, patiently, over years. Wanting to be the hero who fixes it in one impossible gesture is exactly the same instinct that got you a cracked rib two weeks ago. I love that instinct in you, Vane, genuinely. But it's not always the right one, and tonight it would have been catastrophic.*

Vane exhaled, long and slow, some of the tension finally easing out of his shoulders. "I know. Doesn't make the wanting go away."

*It doesn't have to. You're allowed to want to fix everything and still choose not to act on it when the cost is too high.* Eric let warmth settle into the words, an anchor against the mountain's cold and the sickly light still pulsing beyond the camp's edge. *That restraint is its own kind of courage. Harder to see than a crystal spear, but no less real.*

"You always have the right thing to say."

*I have four months of practice and a career's worth of bedside manner behind me. Occasionally it adds up to something useful.*

They sat together a while longer in the cold, watching the sickly light pulse and shift against the mountain rock, and Eric let himself simply exist in the quiet of it — no performance required, no Chancellery clerk to satisfy, only the two of them and a problem too large for either to solve alone.

"Do you think it'll always be like this?" Vane asked eventually, low. "Someone always wanting something from us. The Chancellery, the Institute, whoever wrote that request hoping for a miracle instead of an honest assessment."

*Probably,* Eric admitted, unwilling to offer false comfort even now. *Power invites people who want to use it, and you have more of it now than you did a season ago, however unwillingly you came by it. That's not going to stop just because we're tired of it.*

"That's bleak, even for you."

*I prefer to call it realistic.* Eric let a thread of warmth soften the assessment. *But here's the part that isn't bleak at all — whatever they want from us, they don't get to decide how we respond to it. We proved that this week. A careful, honest report instead of a reckless miracle. That's still our choice to make, every single time they come asking for more than we're willing to give.*

Vane's hand found his chest, steady now, some of the mountain's cold finally losing its grip on him. "Our choice."

*Ours,* Eric confirmed. *Always ours. That much, at least, nobody's taken from us yet.*

---

They rode back into the garrison eight days after they'd left, weary but intact, the report on Ashvale Pass drafted with careful, deliberate honesty about the limits of what the bond could safely attempt, and Marek met them at the gate with news that pushed the whole difficult mission momentarily out of both their minds.

"Captain Adler's transfer came through early," he said. "She'll be riding in within the week, weather permitting. And Marshal — the letter that came with her transfer paperwork mentioned her spirit's name for the first time. Kael. Apparently things have been rough enough between them that her previous commander flagged it as a readiness concern before approving the transfer at all."

*Rough,* Eric repeated slowly, something in him already bracing for whatever shape that roughness might take, and reaching, despite the exhaustion of the mission just behind them, for the particular attentive care he'd once reserved for a difficult new case arriving on his table. *We'll need to be ready for her. Whatever she's carrying, it sounds like she's been carrying it mostly alone.*

"We'll manage it," Vane said, echoing the words that had become, over the past months, something like a private vow between them. "Same as everything else."

"There's more to it," Marek added, unfolding a second letter, this one bearing the same eastern garrison seal, creased from having been read and refolded several times already. "Her previous commander's note is longer than the transfer paperwork usually warrants. Says the bond formed under bad circumstances — a botched rescue, the spirit forced to manifest before either of them had any preparation for it. Says Captain Adler's been unusually guarded since, difficult to read, prone to pushing people away who try to help. Sound familiar, Marshal?"

Vane's mouth twisted, wry and a little pained at the memory. "Uncomfortably familiar, yes, more than I'd like to admit."

*A bond formed in crisis, without preparation, followed by withdrawal instead of trust,* Eric said, turning the description over carefully, with real concern coloring every word of it. *That's not so different from where we started, except we had the advantage of nobody else watching us learn how to manage it. She'll have an entire garrison observing her stumble through the same process we had the privacy to fumble through quietly.*

"Then we make sure she doesn't have to fumble through the whole process entirely alone the way we did," Vane said. "Talwyn, when she arrives, I want you present for the initial briefing — you understand the theory of these bonds better than anyone else here. Marek, quarters near mine, not isolated at the edge of camp where she'll feel like nothing more than a specimen under quiet observation."

"And Eric?" Marek asked, addressing the question toward Vane's chest with the easy familiarity of months of practice.

*Tell him I said I'll be there too, every step of it,* Eric said, quiet but certain. *Whatever she and Kael are struggling with, I'd rather she hear it from someone who's actually lived through the early version of the same fear, instead of receiving it as theory from people who've only read about bonds like ours secondhand.*

Vane relayed it, and Marek nodded, satisfied, already turning to draft the arrangements. "I'll have it ready before she arrives, Marshal. All of it."

Outside the garrison walls, the season continued its slow grind toward whatever came next — supply cuts and Chancellery demands, an Institute conspiracy still circling somewhere unseen, and now, arriving within the week, a young captain and her struggling spirit, carrying a wound that Eric suspected, even before meeting her, would look uncomfortably familiar.

That night, exhausted from the long ride home and the two days of careful, unglamorous work at Ashvale Pass before it, Vane fell asleep faster than he had in weeks, and Eric stayed awake a while longer in the quiet dark of him, turning over everything the season had already cost them and everything still, clearly, on its way. A rift cluster too large to close. A Chancellery that saw a man's body as an asset to be borrowed whenever convenient. And now a young woman arriving with a spirit she didn't yet know how to trust, carrying a fear Eric remembered intimately from his own first disoriented weeks inside this borrowed, impossible life. Whatever came next, he thought, settling into the steady, familiar rhythm of Vane's heartbeat, they would meet it the way they'd met everything else since that first battlefield awakening — together, imperfectly, one difficult choice at a time.