Atop a gleaming tower, an unnaturally slender Elf suppresses a grimace with the ease of long practice as he sips from a potion of monstrous potency, not letting it distract him from making his way through the many reports, missives, and attempts at correspondence that constantly bombard him and have been accumulating for far too long. Vitality that could lend any other Elf enough strength to lift a boulder floods through him and wars with a curse as old as Ulthuan, giving him just enough strength to sit upright and lift his writing implements. He's just returned from a rather fraught expedition to the Turtle Isles, and it would be some time before it would be safe to once more sup dosages that would allow him to heft a sword in one hand and a staff in another. For now, he must serve Ulthuan and the world from his gilded cage.
He smiles slightly, as he always does, as he gets to the latest missive from Northwatch, then frowns as he reads through the figures that it contains. They still show a small but significant and steady increase in energies flowing through it, as those reports had before he left. That means energies from what is now Lyonesse, which in the modern era meant energy from the larger human realms - Bretonnia's northernmost states and the unsuborned portions of the Empire. A greater increase than there should be, considering the times and the state of the world, and too prolonged to just be the result of a storm of magic. He itches to investigate it himself, as he so often does, but he'll have to settle for sending someone else in his stead, as he also so often does. A request for patrols in the Sea of Claws and the emissary in Erengrad to take readings of their own is penned and dispatched with a gesture and the slightest application of willpower. That will have to do.
Several months later he receives those reports from the east, and they skip the pile and are opened and read immediately. If Chaos is stirring faster than expected and turning an early Thirteenth to the same warpath as the Twelfth, then that would result in an uptick in energy through Northwatch very much like what the previous report showed, and should also be found in the reports from the Sea of Claws and Erengrad... but no. The figures are up slightly from the last time they were gauged, but much less so than those from Northwatch. They only show the same proportionate increase that is coming through Rokhame and Whitefire Tor, enough to start keeping a cautious eye on the north, but nowhere near so much as to start mustering armies. The extra energy arriving from the Empire is proportionately much larger than these, and cannot be solely attributed to the general waxing in the energies of Chaos. His eyes are pulled inexorably towards the window from which the phoenix eyrie can be seen, but no, blast it. Instead he drafts instructions for a team of students to go to Northwatch and personally observe the fluctuations in energies.
Another month passes in a haze of duty and parchment before their report comes back, and a glance tells him that this needs more than a glance. With close examination of the minute-to-minute data the pattern becomes clear: about once a day, the inflow of magic swells an almost imperceptible, but discrete and seemingly permanent, amount. And this pattern, it seems, has been recurring day after day for months now. This is no swelling of magical energies in the area, no happenstance reconnection of a temporarily disconnected branch of the network. The only possible explanation is that bit by bit, stone by stone, the network is expanding. More than that - it is being expanded.
"Oh, my sweet, clever children," he laughs, and lifts his quill with a flourish to start writing a series of letters that will make a lot of Elves very upset.
