Kael arrived at the Ashwall on the war's twelfth day — five days after the secondary wall's collapse, three days after the Cinder Corps' deployment stabilized the central breach, and precisely on the day that Vrenn's intelligence predicted Thalveris's siege engineers would begin arriving.
He came alone.
The war council had formalized it a week before mobilization. No formal command authority. No staff. No escort. Kael operated as an independent strike element — an individual asset deployed at the sovereign's discretion for specific objectives that exceeded the capability of conventional military units. The discretion was Zephyr's, though in practice, the deployment authority had been delegated to Marshal Boreth with a single constraint: Kael was not to be placed in situations where his death was probable.
