The road changed beneath their boots before the forest did.

  Packed earth gave way to something rougher as they left Miller's Cross behind, the smooth trade surface crumbling into older trail where roots pushed through like knuckles of bone. Cael felt each shift through his boots, the ground softening where rainwater pooled, hardening over bedrock shelves the trees hadn't cracked apart. Moss grew thick on the stones, slick and yielding, and the bark of the oaks had deepened from smooth grey to something gnarled and fissured, rough enough to catch skin.

  Garrick moved through it all with the ease of a man walking his own hallway. His heavier boots found solid purchase where Cael's lighter step sometimes slipped, navigating root tangles without looking down. His sword hung at his left hip, practical and unornamented. The shield across his back was newer, its surface scarred from the battle where his Sigil had awakened. He'd carried a hatchet before that night. The shield had felt right afterward, like something the System recognized in him and gave shape to. A shortbow rode his right shoulder, unstrung but ready, an old companion from his ranging days.

  He paused beside a low shrub with waxy leaves and dark red berries, crouching to examine it with casual attention.

  "Thornberry," he said, pinching a leaf between his fingers. "Tastes awful raw, but if you boil the berries down, you get a paste that keeps for months. Saved my life on a winter patrol once when a snowstorm pinned us in a ravine for three days."

  Cael's interface flickered as he focused on the plant, the information materializing in that crystalline overlay he'd grown accustomed to.

  [Thornberry Bush — Common Flora]

  [Edible: Berries (cooked only — mild toxin when raw)]

  [Alchemical: Leaf extract serves as mild anti-inflammatory. Used in traditional poultices.]

  "The System confirms cooking them first," Cael told him. "But it adds something. The leaves have anti-inflammatory properties. Extract from them works as a poultice."

  Garrick straightened, genuine interest crossing his weathered face. "We've been walking past free medicine for twenty years. Mara might know, I suppose. That woman knows more about plants than anyone I've met."

  "She taught me most of what I know," Lyra said, already crouching to collect leaf samples and pressing them between pages of her journal. "But even Gran works from observation and inherited knowledge. The System fills gaps that would take generations of experimentation to discover."

  They continued east, the canopy thickening. An hour later, Garrick pointed out a tall fern with silver-edged fronds. "Silvertip. Rangers use the fronds for bedding on long patrols. Keeps insects away. Something in the oils."

  Lyra's Inspect was faster than Cael's this time, her Focus parsing botanical information with effortless clarity.

  [Silvertip Fern — Common Flora]

  [Utility: Natural insect repellent (frond oils)]

  [Alchemical: Concentrated oil extract enhances Focus-recovery compounds. Moderate reagent value.]

  Her eyes widened. "Focus-recovery compounds. The oil doesn't just repel insects. Concentrated properly, it could help restore mental clarity after resonance exhaustion." She was already pulling fronds, tucking them into her satchel. "Gran is going to lose her mind when she sees these notes."

  Garrick watched her with amusement. "At this rate, you'll have a full pharmacist's kit before we reach Greenhaven."

  The pattern repeated as they walked. Garrick's experience identifying what the forest offered, the System adding layers he'd never had access to. When he steered them around a cluster of pale mushrooms near a rotting log, his warning was immediate.

  "Ghostcaps. Don't touch them. Skin goes numb for hours, and eating them will kill you before you know something's wrong."

  [Ghostcap Mushroom — Toxic Flora]

  [Contact: Dermal numbness (2-4 hours)]

  [Ingestion: Fatal without immediate treatment]

  [Alchemical: Processed spore extract is a powerful local anesthetic. High reagent value. Requires expert handling.]

  "Local anesthetic," Cael read aloud. "Process the spores correctly, and you get something that numbs pain without killing the patient."

  "Figures," Garrick said, shaking his head. "Every deadly thing out here is one careful step from being useful. The old rangers used to say the woods don't care whether you live or die. They just grow, and it's on you to know the difference between the berry that feeds you and the one that stops your heart."

  Wildlife moved through the undergrowth around them as the morning stretched on. A heavy-bodied bird burst from a thicket, wings drumming the air. Cael's Inspect caught it before it vanished.

  [Ridgeback Pheasant — Level 2]

  [Status: Healthy | Disposition: Wary]

  Garrick tracked its flight with a hunter's eye. "Good eating on those. We'll see more as we get closer to Greenhaven. The land gets richer, and the game follows the food."

  Later, a thick-bodied snake lay coiled on a sun-warmed rock, its scales catching dappled light in flashes of copper and bronze.

  [Copperscale Adder — Level 3]

  [Status: Healthy | Disposition: Passive (unless provoked)]

  Lumi gave it a wide berth, nose twitching. She'd been ranging ahead all morning, investigating every stream crossing and hollow log with tireless curiosity, her Cleansing Field a soft shimmer that made the undergrowth seem greener where she passed.

  Garrick stopped during a water break and asked Cael to help him review his interface. He pulled it up with the slow deliberation of someone still learning to read a new language, brow furrowed as the information materialized.

  [Garrick — Level 6 — Class: Stalwart Guardian]

  Health: 198 / 198

  Resonance: 42 / 42

  Strength: 18 | Vigor: 20 | Agility: 12 | Focus: 10 | Will: 12

  [Skills:]

  [Ironhold Stance] — Plant feet and brace. Dramatically increases damage resistance for short duration. Cannot move while active. Draws enemy attention.

  [Shield Bash] — Channel resonance through shield on impact. Staggers target, creates brief opening. Low resonance cost.

  Cael studied the numbers. Garrick's Vigor already matched his own at twenty, and his Strength of eighteen rivaled what Cael had carried at Level 7. The man's body had been building toward this for decades. The System hadn't made him durable. It had measured what was already there.

  His Agility and Focus told the other side. Twelve and ten respectively, reflecting a man who stood his ground rather than danced, who relied on experience over the precise resonance manipulation that came naturally to Lyra. His resonance pool of forty-two meant a handful of skill activations before it ran dry.

  "Your Vigor is as high as mine," Cael said.

  Garrick grunted. "I've been getting hit by things for longer than you've been alive." He flexed one hand, watching his Sigil pulse beneath his collar. "Still getting used to seeing it written down. Knowing the exact number attached to how much punishment I can take."

  "It gets more natural," Lyra offered. "After a while, you stop reading the numbers and start feeling them."

  "Looking forward to that." Garrick closed his interface with a blink that was still slightly too forceful. "Right now it's like trying to read a book while someone's shouting the words at you."

  The trade road deteriorated steadily through the late morning. A proper path with drainage and cleared verges became little more than a game trail, the forest reclaiming ground that travelers had stopped maintaining. Garrick navigated the transition without comment, stepping over fallen timber and ducking branches with automatic precision.

  The texture of the forest shifted. Bark grew rougher on older trees, deeply furrowed and crusted with lichen that crumbled at a touch. The ground softened, loam thick enough to leave clear prints, and the air pressed against exposed skin like damp cloth. Cael felt it in his hands, moisture beading on his spear's haft, the slight tackiness of his leather grip.

  Garrick stopped.

  His hand came up in the ranger signal for halt, and both Cael and Lyra froze. Even Lumi went still, ears perked forward. Garrick crouched beside a massive oak and ran his fingers along deep gouges in the bark, fresh enough that sap still wept from the wounds. Seven feet up the trunk, too high for anything small.

  "Ironhorn elk," he said quietly. "Bull, from the spread of the marks. Scraping velvet or establishing territory." He read the ground near the base, signs Cael could see but wouldn't have known how to interpret. Compressed earth. Stripped undergrowth. Disturbed soil where something heavy had pawed. "Fresh. Within the last day. He's nested somewhere close."

  "How close?" Lyra asked.

  "Those marks span both sides of the trail for the next hundred yards. We're in his territory right now."

  Cael focused on the gouges, and his interface confirmed what Garrick already knew.

  [Territorial Marking: Ironhorn Elk — Estimated Level 5-7]

  [Status: Nesting Season — Heightened Aggression]

  [Threat Assessment: Moderate (party level) / High (individual)]

  "System says Level 5 to 7," Cael said. "Heightened aggression during nesting season."

  "Didn't need the System to tell me that." Garrick's tone carried the dry patience of a man watching someone consult a map to a place he could see. "Normal procedure is detour. Give them wide berth. A bull ironhorn in nesting season will charge anything within fifty yards. A thousand pounds of muscle with antlers that punch through a breastplate makes its own argument."

  "How much time does a detour cost us?" Cael asked.

  "Half a day, maybe more. The terrain off-trail is rough through this stretch. Ravines, dense undergrowth, no clear path."

  Cael looked at Lyra. She shrugged, the gesture carrying a shared understanding. They'd fought deity-class entities. The idea of detouring half a day for an elk felt wrong.

  "We can handle a Level 6 elk," Cael said.

  Garrick studied him. "I know you can. That's not really the question, is it?"

  "What is the question?"

  "Whether you should." Garrick resettled his shield on his arm. "But I can see you've decided. If it charges, we handle it. If we can slip past, we do. Agreed?"

  "Agreed," Lyra said.

  They moved forward, Garrick leading with his shield on his arm. The forest pressed close, the canopy a low vault of green and gold. Every surface felt damp. Leaves slick against Cael's arms. Ground squelching underfoot. Lumi crept low, her usual bounding curiosity replaced by careful silence.

  The trail opened into a natural clearing where a stream fed a muddy hollow, and the ironhorn elk was standing in the center of it.

  Massive. The bull stood nearly seven feet at the shoulder, deep brown muscle scarred by years of territorial combat. Antlers spread four feet across, each tine dark and calcified to a metalite sheen. It was drinking from the stream, and it saw them the moment they entered the clearing.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  [Ironhorn Elk — Level 6 | Status: Territorial, Nesting | Threat: Moderate]

  The elk's head came up. Water sprayed from its muzzle. Its nostrils flared wide, scenting them, and the muscles along its neck bunched as it lowered its antlers.

  "Don't run," Garrick said, his voice dropping to the calm, measured tone of a man who'd faced charging animals before. "Running triggers the chase instinct. Stand your—"

  The elk charged.

  It covered the distance faster than anything that large should have moved, hooves tearing divots from soft earth, antlers lowered like a battering ram. The ground shook with each stride.

  Garrick stepped forward and planted. His shield came up, resonance pulsing through metal as he activated Ironhold Stance. His body became an anchor, rooted to the earth with a solidity that went beyond physical strength. This part was new. Rangers had always rotated who drew a beast's attention, nobody standing in the path of a charge on purpose. You distracted, you flanked, you let the animal commit and punished it from the side. But the System had given him a class built around standing in the way, and something deep in his instincts said to trust it.

  The elk hit his shield with the force of a falling tree. The crack of calcified antler against resonance-hardened metal echoed through the clearing. Garrick's boots dug furrows in the earth, two feet of ground lost, but he held. Arms shaking. Jaw clenched. He held. That was new too. No ranger could have absorbed that impact and stayed upright.

  Cael moved on instinct. Flank left, circle the threat, strike while it's committed. The pattern was burned into muscle memory from Auralis, and his body executed it without thought. Three steps into the arc before he realized the angle wasn't there. Garrick's defensive posture was wide, shield coverage broad, filling the space Cael needed. He adjusted, swung wider, lost the momentum. By the time he found an opening, the elk had disengaged.

  Lyra's sling was loaded and spinning. She'd positioned herself right, creating the crossfire they'd developed in Auralis. Clean lanes, clear shots, each knowing where the other would be. Garrick was not where either of them expected anyone to be. His bulk blocked her firing lane. She adjusted, released late. The stone clipped antler and ricocheted into undergrowth.

  Lumi darted in from the flank, meaning to distract. She nearly ran under Garrick's feet as he shifted weight. An indignant squeak, then she scrambled clear.

  The elk circled and chose Cael for its second charge, sweeping its antlers in a wide arc. Cael met it with Cadence Thrust. His spear bit into the shoulder, drew blood, but the animal's momentum carried through. A sweeping tine caught his forearm. Nothing serious at his level, but it shouldn't have connected. He'd been watching Garrick's position instead of the elk's.

  Garrick closed the distance with Shield Bash, catching the elk in the flank. The blow staggered the animal. Good hit, well timed. But he'd moved from his anchor point, and now Lyra's healing line to Cael was blocked by a stumbling elk and a Guardian who'd stepped into her field of vision.

  Lyra called out a position using shorthand from Auralis.

  Garrick looked back. "What?"

  The elk recovered. The moment passed.

  Cael caught Lyra's eye across the churned clearing.

  "Simple calls," he said. "Garrick, hold center. Don't move. Lyra, behind his shield. I go wide."

  Crude. No rhythm. Just clear instructions.

  Garrick planted. Ironhold Stance flared, boots sinking into soft ground. The elk charged again, slower, favoring its wounded shoulder. Antlers crashed against the shield with a screech of bone against resonant metal. Garrick absorbed it. Set. Immovable.

  Cael circled wide, giving himself room. Cadence Thrust found the exposed flank while the elk was locked against the shield. Clean hit, deep, the blade sliding between ribs.

  Lyra fired from behind Garrick's cover. Clear lane. The sling stone caught the elk in the haunch, and the animal bellowed and wrenched free.

  One more exchange. The elk charged, blood darkening its flank, rage overriding pain. Garrick caught it. Cael drove his spear into the base of the animal's neck.

  The elk collapsed. Legs folding, head dropping, still.

  Silence returned. The stream kept running.

  All three of them were breathing harder than the fight warranted. The physical effort had been trivial. The breathing came from the wrongness of how it had gone.

  Garrick worked his shield arm in slow circles. "That was terrible."

  Cael pulled his spear free and wiped the blade on the grass. "We won. The elk is down, nobody's hurt. I'd call that a success."

  "A Level 6 elk. Between a Level 12, a Level 11, and a Level 6 with a class built around taking hits, that should have been over in thirty seconds. It took us nearly three minutes because we spent half the time tripping over each other." Garrick's voice carried an edge that Cael recognized from every senior ranger who'd ever corrected a junior's form. "Imagine that was something that could actually hurt us. Imagine that was a corrupted construct that hit twice as hard and didn't stop when it was bleeding."

  He set his shield down and looked at them both with an expression Cael had seen on Eldric's face a hundred times. Patient disappointment.

  "You're powerful," Garrick said. "Both of you. I'm not questioning capability. I'm questioning fundamentals."

  He pointed at Cael. "Overlapping coverage. Flanking lanes relative to a fixed point. Contact spacing in a three-person element. Eldric drills that into every trainee by the end of their second month. I've watched him do it, stood there while he ran the junior rangers through the same rotations until they could do them in their sleep. You had your badge, Cael. You passed those evaluations. So tell me what happened between earning that badge and fighting like you've never heard of a flanking lane."

  The words landed. Cael remembered those drills. Eldric's voice barking corrections while trainees shuffled through formations. Remembered thinking it was tedious, that real combat would never be so orderly.

  "I learned it," Cael admitted. He didn't look away from Garrick's gaze. "But none of it applied in Auralis. It was two people against constructs that don't fight like anything we trained for, in corridors too narrow for formations, with no one to anchor around. Everything was reactive, every fight was improvised, and the basics got buried under the simple priority of staying alive until the next morning. I'm not making excuses. That's just what happened."

  "And those instincts kept you alive," Garrick said. "I'm not dismissing that. But survival instincts and unit tactics are different skills. Right now you've got the first one polished to a mirror shine and the second one rusting in a ditch."

  He turned to Lyra. "You've never had any formal combat training, have you?"

  Lyra shook her head. "I was an herbalist's apprentice who played flute at village gatherings and carried a sling for scaring birds out of the garden. Everything I know about fighting, every instinct I have in combat, I learned inside those ruins with nothing but desperation as a teacher. I've never set foot on a practice field in my life."

  "And it shows, but not in the way you're thinking," he added, seeing her expression tighten. "Your accuracy is excellent, you're fast on the draw, and you read a battlefield better than some rangers I've worked with for years. The problem isn't your skill. It's that you read every fight as a solo operator. You position yourself relative to the enemy and to Cael, and that's the whole picture for you. Adding a third person to that equation broke everything because you've never had to account for someone else being in the space."

  Cael felt the truth settling into place. He and Lyra had built their combat instincts in the most extreme classroom imaginable, and they'd developed something powerful but incomplete. Patterns built for two that broke the moment a third person entered.

  "Eldric is going to have my hide," Garrick said, grim humor entering his tone, "when he finds out I let his trainee get this far without finishing the basics. You're the most dangerous junior ranger in history, and you fight like you skipped half the curriculum."

  "I did skip half the curriculum." Cael kept his voice even, taking the criticism the way Eldric had taught him. Straight on, no deflection. "My Sigil activated less than a week after I earned my badge. One day I'm running patrol drills with the other juniors, the next I'm fighting corrupted wolves with powers I don't understand. There wasn't time to go back and finish the formations module. And honestly, by the time we were deep enough in Auralis, I'd forgotten it existed."

  "There's time now." Garrick picked up his shield and checked its straps with practiced hands. "Look, I've been teaching junior rangers to work as a unit for eight years. You two are the most overpowered trainees I've ever had, and somehow the least disciplined. The good news is that the fundamentals aren't complicated. They just need practice, repetition, and someone willing to yell at you when you fall back into bad habits. We fix this before we reach Greenfall, because winning ugly against an elk is something we can laugh about over dinner. Winning ugly inside a corrupted sky isle is how people end up dead."

  Lyra tucked her sling away and squared her shoulders. "Then teach us. That's literally what you've been doing for junior rangers for years, and we're apparently the most junior rangers you've ever met despite being able to level a building. So teach us how to fight properly."

  Garrick's expression shifted into something warmer, the scolding edge giving way to genuine warmth. "That's what I was hoping you'd say. I was worried I'd have to convince you first, and that would have been a much harder fight than the elk."

  Garrick started while they were still in the clearing, using the elk's carcass as a reference point. He knelt beside the animal and began field dressing it with the efficient, practiced motions of a man who wasted nothing the forest provided.

  "Formations first," he said, his knife working as he talked. "Rangers have always used three and four person elements with rotating roles. One person draws attention, the others work the angles. Nobody stands in the path of a charge on purpose, because without the System, that's just a good way to die." He paused, considering. "But this Guardian class changes things. The System is telling me that standing in the way is exactly what I'm supposed to do, and giving me the tools to survive it. So we need to figure out what that looks like, because nobody's ever had a dedicated defender before. Not like this."

  He looked up from the elk. "The ranger fundamentals still apply. But we're adapting them to something new."

  "Eldric covered the basics of rotating point," Cael said. "I just never practiced it with someone who could actually hold position against a charge."

  "Because nobody could, until now." Garrick carved a section of loin free and wrapped it in oiled cloth from his pack. "Here's what I'm thinking. When I plant with Ironhold Stance, I'm not just absorbing a hit. I'm creating geometry. In the old ranger formations, the point man had to keep moving because staying put meant getting killed. I can stay put. That means my position defines where you can move, where Lyra can shoot, where the enemy has to commit. If I'm the anchor, every angle in the fight flows from where I stand. We've never had that before."

  "And when you moved to Shield Bash the elk," Lyra said, "you broke the geometry. Nothing was where it was supposed to be."

  "Exactly. And that's my mistake to learn from too." Garrick pointed his knife at her. "I chased the hit because that's what rangers do. You rotate, you press advantages, you stay mobile. But I think a Guardian who chases hits is worse than no Guardian at all. If this class is built around being an anchor, then my job is to be predictable. Completely, absolutely predictable. You build your tactics around knowing where I'll be, and I reward that trust by never being anywhere else." He shook his head. "We're all learning something new here. I've just got twenty years of the old habits to unlearn on top of it."

  They packed what elk meat they could carry and returned to the trail. Garrick walked them through positioning drills, the fundamental building blocks he'd learned as a second-year ranger and taught to every trainee since. Where to stand. Where to look. How to move relative to a fixed point without crossing lanes. Simple principles that Cael and Lyra had never properly received.

  "We need shared calls," Garrick said. "Not your old shorthand from Auralis, and not the standard ranger signals either, since those were built around a different kind of coordination. New language that all three of us build together from the ground up, so nobody's guessing what anyone else means in the middle of a fight."

  They built the vocabulary as they walked. Anchor meant Garrick planted and drew attention. Lane meant clear a firing line for Lyra. Push meant Cael was going aggressive off the flank. Shell meant collapse behind Garrick's shield so Lyra could heal without exposure.

  Cael contributed what he and Lyra had learned about resonance timing. How Lyra's Harmonic Veil could stack with Garrick's Ironhold Stance, layering protective resonance rather than wasting it. How to time a Shield Bash to create the exact opening Cael needed for a Cadence Thrust. The raw materials were powerful. They just needed structure.

  Lyra added the support framework. Her healing required line of sight. Her buffs had range limits. If Garrick's anchor position kept her in range of both teammates while behind cover, she could sustain the entire party through prolonged engagements without exposing herself.

  "And Lumi?" Garrick asked.

  The otter looked up from where she'd been investigating a beetle on a log, ears perked at the sound of her name.

  "She's a combatant," Cael said. "Her Cleansing Field disrupts enemies and her mobility lets her harass flanks. She works on instinct mostly, but she responds to direction."

  "Then she gets a position in the formation too." Garrick crouched and regarded Lumi with professional assessment. "Fast, small, hard to hit. Disruption role. She operates outside the triangle, pulls attention, creates openings. We just make sure she knows where the triangle is so she doesn't run through it."

  Lumi chirped and flicked her tail, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

  They practiced formations on the trail for the rest of the afternoon. Garrick calling positions, Cael and Lyra snapping into place. Rough at first, muscle memory fighting against months of improvised tactics. But the fundamentals were sound, built on centuries of ranger doctrine. By the third hour, the movements were beginning to smooth out. Recognizable as teamwork rather than three people who happened to show up at the same fight.

  "Better," Garrick said after a particularly clean rotation drill. "Not good yet, not by a long ways, but better than where we started this morning. We practice every morning before we break camp and review every evening before we sleep. That's ranger standard for new elements, and it works because it works, not because anyone enjoys it."

  "Ranger standard," Cael echoed, and meant it.

  The trail crested a long ridge in the late afternoon, and the world ahead of them changed.

  Cael felt it through his boots before his eyes confirmed it. The ground hardened, packed dense with a richness immediately different from the ordinary forest floor. He knelt and pressed his palm flat against the earth. Warm, from something deeper than sunlight. The soil crumbled in dark clumps heavy with moisture, the color shifting from grey-brown loam to something approaching black.

  The trees told the same story. Taller, broader in the trunk, bark smoother and healthier. Leaves hung thicker on the branches, greener than the season warranted, the canopy so dense it turned the trail into a tunnel of shifting emerald shadow. Wildflowers bloomed where they shouldn't, and mushrooms the size of dinner plates crowned every fallen log.

  Cael felt the resonance before he could name it. Warmth beneath the surface, like standing over a buried hearth whose coals still held their glow. Auralis pulsed behind him, westward and distant but reliable, and ahead the dormant signal from Greenfall had grown stronger. Sleeping, but shallowly. Dreaming, perhaps, of the network it had once been part of.

  "I feel it too," Lyra said quietly, one hand resting against a tree trunk as if listening through the bark. "A hum, just below where I can properly hear it. Like someone humming behind a closed door." She looked at the extraordinary growth with new eyes. "This is what ambient resonance does. Centuries of passive leakage from dormant systems, just bleeding energy into the soil."

  Garrick couldn't feel any of it. His Focus of ten wasn't enough. But he could see the evidence in every direction.

  "This is why Greenhaven thrives," he said. "We always thought it was just good land. Blessed soil, the old folks called it. Farmers out here pull twice the yield of anywhere else in the region, and nobody ever had a proper explanation for it. People just accepted it as the way things were and counted themselves lucky."

  "Now we know the reason," Lyra said. "And it changes everything about what Greenfall might be capable of if we can wake it up properly."

  Garrick consulted his mental map of the route and nodded. "If the trail stays this good, we should reach Greenhaven by midday tomorrow. The road improves once we get closer to the village proper, more foot traffic keeping it clear." The landscape ahead promised more of this abundance, every step carrying them deeper into the influence of something vast and patient, a fallen sky isle whose agricultural systems had been designed to make things grow and continued that purpose even in sleep.

  Cael found his awareness shifting. Everything in Auralis had been framed by threat. The resonance there was something to fight through, to purify, to reclaim. Here, the dormant energy was doing what it had been designed to do. Feeding the soil. Strengthening roots. Making the land generous.

  What would happen when they woke it up properly?

  The trail wound deeper into the green. Lumi bounded ahead through undergrowth that seemed to part around her, Cleansing Field brightening in response to ambient resonance, her fur shimmering with reflected vitality. Behind her, three figures followed the path through a forest that grew more alive with every mile, the air thick with the smell of rich earth and growing things, the light filtering through a canopy that glowed.

  The land remembered what it was. And it welcomed them closer.