Aldric's workspace at midnight looked the same as it looked at noon, which I suspected was intentional. He kept it lit and active regardless of the hour, possibly because the concept of hours was less central to his experience of time than it was to mine.
He looked up when I came in without knocking.
"The original sealing," I said.
He waited.
"Who did it? How was it done? What did it use?"
He was quiet for a moment, which felt like a recanalization.
"The sealing was performed by a council of seven," he said. "Wolves, primarily, with two whose constitution was closer to what Cassius is. Hybrid. The work was distributed across all seven. No single person held the full frequency load."
I looked at him.
"A distributed work," I said.
"Yes. Which I had not been calculating for, because
