Sakh’arran waited until Takar had eaten before asking the second round of questions. This was not courtesy for courtesy’s sake. A rider who had come down from the Iron Hills ridgelines in severe weather and spent nine days in the saddle each direction had a body running on the last of its reserves, and a body in that condition answered questions with information filtered through exhaustion. The meal gave Takar twenty minutes. It was enough.

The second questions were about the approach terrain, the weather patterns in the final two days, and whether Takar had seen any sign of movement in the ridgeline areas north of the Ferrath site. Not dwarven movement. Any movement.

Takar answered each question with the same quality of composure that had characterized his initial report. He had seen no movement. The ridgeline had been still in the way that high places were still in deep cold: birds present, nothing larger. He had not gone closer than forty feet to the central destruction point because the stone at thirty-five feet had felt warm beneath his boot soles despite the ambient temperature, and a warm stone field in deep cold was the kind of thing a competent rider did not step into without more information than he had.

Khao’khen was standing at the operations room’s window when Takar said that. He turned.

"Warm," he said.

"Not hot," Takar said. "Not burning warm. The warmth a stone holds after a fire has been out for several days. But we were above the snow line, and the ambient temperature was well below freezing. There was no fire source I could identify."

Khao’khen looked at Sakh’arran.

"The destruction was not recent," Sakh’arran said. "Six to eight weeks. A stone field that has held residual warmth for six to eight weeks in Iron Hills winter conditions is not holding warmth from an ordinary fire."

"No," Khao’khen said.

He crossed to the table where the cloth-wrapped stone sample sat. He looked at it without touching it. The cloth was undisturbed. He left it undisturbed.

"Send for Durrek Stonepick," he said.

Durrek arrived within the quarter hour. The Ironbeard commercial envoy had been in the market district completing a secondary purchase agreement with one of the eastern supply depot’s procurement officers, and he came with ink still drying on one hand and the expression of a man interrupted at work he considered important. The expression changed when he saw Takar. It changed again when Sakh’arran gave him the summary report in two sentences.

"The Ferrath Arch," Durrek said. He said it once, flatly, and then was quiet for a moment. "My clan’s territory."

"Thirty miles from your nearest settlement, based on Takar’s terrain assessment," Sakh’arran said. "The ridgeline where the Arch was located is above the mining territory."

"I know the Ferrath ridge," Durrek said. "I know it well. My grandfather surveyed that ridge for the archive records." He paused. "Thirty miles is not a comfortable distance."

"No," Khao’khen said. "It is not."

He told Durrek what Takar had told them. All of it. The condition of the site. The warmth in the stone at thirty-five feet. The absence of debris, of bodies, of recognizable residue. The smell of nothing. He did not soften any of it and he did not add commentary. He gave Durrek the facts and then he set the cloth-wrapped stone sample on the table in front of the envoy.

"I am asking you to carry this to Thane yourself," he said. "Not through a courier. You. With Takar’s full report written in your hand, because you will have read it and understood it, and the Thane will be able to ask you questions that a courier cannot answer. He needs to know what this is before he decides what to do about the territory thirty miles south of it."

Durrek looked at the cloth-wrapped stone. He reached out and touched the corner of the cloth with two fingers, testing its weight. He did not unwrap it. He was a commercial man and he was doing the mental arithmetic of someone who had come south to negotiate ore and medicinal routes and was now holding a sealed box that contained something from a destroyed dimensional gateway.

"The trade agreement," he said.

"Stands," Khao’khen said. "Every provision. Your caravan routes are the Horde’s concern in the south. I am not withdrawing that guarantee. I am adding to what I am asking you to carry north."

Durrek Stonepick sat back in his chair. He looked at the cloth-wrapped stone sample for a long moment with the expression of a man who had come expecting to negotiate tariff rates and was leaving with something considerably heavier.

"The Thane will want to know what we are dealing with," Durrek said. "He will not send a decision-maker south on the word of a trade envoy and a stone sample. He will want someone who can explain the Archs. What they are. What their failure means."

"Tell him," Khao’khen said, "to send someone who can listen. I will have Warden Aliyah Winters available when that person arrives. She will explain what the Archs are and what the failure of one means for the territory adjacent to it." He held Durrek’s eyes. "Tell the Thane that what destroyed the Ferrath Arch six to eight weeks ago is still in the Iron Hills’ northern ridge system. His people have been thirty miles from it since before he knew it existed."

Durrek left the following morning with four Verakh escorts, the stone sample packed in an iron-sealed box, and Takar’s written report folded inside his travel chest. The northern gate closed behind him in the early cold, before the market district opened.

Sakh’arran watched the gate close and then went to his desk and began writing his revised assessment. He did not call it a revision. He titled it: the new frame.

The five-year window, he wrote, assumed the primary threat was political and military. That assumption is no longer the governing one. He stared at the line for a moment, then kept writing. The political threat remains. It has not dissolved. What has changed is that a second threat now runs on a different timeline entirely, and the two timelines are not coordinated. Managing both simultaneously is not a question of resources alone. It is a question of architecture. We must build an organization capable of operating in two directions at once without either direction compromising the other.

He paused. Then added: begin with the Arch.

He stared at that final line for another moment and then added one more: the Arch is the foundation. Everything else is built on whether it holds. If it holds, the window is irrelevant. If it does not hold, the window does not matter in the way we imagined it would. That is the frame we must work from now.