Chapter 27

Before dawn, Din finds Tauri and Orbiis colleagues outfitting a cart with wheellock bombards and lypi lances, preparing for unknown threats in the altered forest. Tauri stresses protocol for the Touched Site but hopes to avoid using lethal tools if Jalin can be taken quickly.

At the vault, Ana presents her overnight findings from Burav’s focused tomes on three Daljen figures—Qul (waters), Kurbanthik (earth), and especially Gaddar (orchards), whose works centered near the altered forest. She identifies two key sites: a primary, heavily censored place—temple, tomb, “cup of heaven,” or Meris Chamhali Ayonias—matching the Touched Site; and a lesser site, Naos-Minra (“little blessing”), whose location survives in texts.

Using Tauri’s map, Ana traces a route: enter where Jalin did, proceed by the Hand of Gaddar statue, then to Loutri di Akantha Apalos (“cauldron of the soft spines”), and north for over two leagues to the little temple. Tauri commits the path to memory and prepares to depart, while Ana asks Din to remain.

Alone, Ana consumes semilanka, basidia, and auricula to bypass imposed conditioning and confesses deeper knowledge. She argues the Daljen did not vanish from sterility but were deliberately erased at the end of the fifth century; their pantheon is a later aristocratic invention masking the loss of records and sites.

Ana posits that the Daavir, victorious over the Daljen, committed genocide and concealed it by seeding altered forests over their sacred lands, including the Touched Site. She warns Din that the pursuit of Jalin will lead into the heart of a tremendous imperial crime, urging caution as they enter the forest.