The message arrived through the Verakh relay network on a morning in the early cold season when the training grounds were running drills in light frost and the forge district's smoke rose straight up into a windless grey sky.
Rakh'ash'tha received it at the healing chambers, where the healer was reviewing the second printing of the Healer's Codex. The first printing had been worked through so thoroughly that some copies had pages gone soft from handling, the edges worn, margins annotated by the healers-in-training who had used them. The second printing had heavier paper.
The message was from Darak, written in the researcher's compressed precise hand, the words packed together the way urgent writing was when the writer was conscious of using a relay network and did not want to pay for more parchment than the message required.
