Location:Seven Peaks — Residential Quarter, Diplomatic Office
Date/Time:TC1854.10.15
The boy had learned to pull himself up.
This was, in Kael's professional assessment, the most dangerous development in the history of Seven Peaks — more strategically significant than the Federation assault, more tactically complex than the shadowspawn incursion, and more personally threatening than anything the Imperial Court had produced in thirty years of political maneuvering.
Tianlei had discovered verticality.
He'd been crawling for weeks — the military-grade crawl of an infant who treated horizontal distance as a personal challenge. Across the room. Under the table. Behind the chair where Kael kept his diplomatic correspondence, which Tianlei had attempted to eat on three separate occasions, and which Kael now stored on a shelf the boy couldn't reach. Couldn't reach while crawling.
Standing changed the calculations.
