Kyra finds the second cache behind a loose stone in what used to be the fort's tack room. More ash than she expected. More iron. Enough to anchor fifteen constructs, maybe twenty if she's careful with the binding ratios. She kneels and runs her fingers through the ash, feeling for bone fragments. The trunk sits half-buried in rubble near the far wall. Charred wood, brass fittings blackened. She pries it open. Inside: bridles still coiled, buckles fused to leather, everything marked by fire but intact enough to use. She counts twelve sets of tack. Each one can hold a name. Each one can carry what she's building toward — a cavalry that remembers what it lost and refuses to let the accounting go unanswered. She closes the lid and marks the location in her notebook. Twenty constructs changes the scope. Twenty constructs means she's no longer anchoring grief. She's rebuilding what burned. She lifts each piece from the trunk and lays it out on the stone floor. The pattern takes shape without thinking: bridles at the cardinal points, buckles between, ash traced in connecting lines. Candles at each corner. The layout spreads wider than any ritual she's done before. This isn't a single binding. This is the framework for something that can sustain itself, grow, answer back when called. Her hands move steady. No hesitation. She's done the math. She has enough material for a full cavalry formation. But when she reaches the bottom layer of the trunk, her fingers close around a metal plate split clean down the middle. The engraving reads SA on one half, BLE on the other. Scorched edges, blistered from heat. She holds both pieces in her palms and fits them together. Sable's name, broken but still readable. She sets it at the center of the layout. Not as anchor — as marker. This is where it started. This is what she's owed. She lights the first candle and watches the ash begin to move.

The ash settles after an hour. Kyra sits back on her heels and watches the pattern hold. The layout looks stable — four cardinal points, twelve bridle anchors, ash lines connecting them in a grid that mirrors the old stable floor plan. But when she tries the first activation sequence, nothing moves. She checks the ash ratio three times. Measures the spacing between anchors. Rearranges two of the bridles to match the configuration she used for Sable. Still nothing. She pulls out the scorched book she found wedged behind the trunk — a binding manual, half its pages blackened to illegibility. The section on multi-anchor constructs is mostly char and fragments. What she can read contradicts itself: one passage says to activate from the center outward, another insists on sequential ignition starting north. She closes it and wraps it in cloth. This isn't something she can solve by guessing. The tower stands three miles west of the fort, marked by twin pentacles carved above the doorway. Kyra's teacher doesn't take visitors without appointment, but she knocks anyway. The door opens after a long pause. Inside, the desk dominates the room — manuscripts stacked in careful towers, vials arranged by color, tools she doesn't recognize laid out in rows. Her teacher doesn't look up from the grimoire spread open in front of them. "You wouldn't come unless you'd already tried to solve it yourself." Kyra sets the scorched book on the only clear space. "I found this. Half the binding instructions are gone. I don't know if what's left is right or wrong." Her teacher turns the pages slowly, reading what remains. They tap a finger on a passage about anchor synchronization. "This section's backwards. Fire damage didn't destroy it — someone rewrote it before it burned." They look at Kyra directly. "Whoever hid this wanted it found, but not used correctly. If you'd followed these instructions, the binding would've pulled from you instead of the materials." Kyra feels the words settle cold in her chest. Someone expected her to find this. Someone wanted her to fail in a specific way. Her teacher slides the book back across the desk. "I can teach you the correct sequence. But first you tell me what you're building, and why you're doing it alone."