The Second Visit to the River Abbey

Elvira, warden-heir of Dún Rí, makes the walk down to the old abbey on the tidal stretch of the Boyne for the second time that year, and tells nobody in the household the real reason for either trip. The first visit had ended in a diagram that seemed to hold its shape wrong when she looked at it directly, and a promise from Brother Daire that the next one would go further. Aldera goes with her, as Aldera goes everywhere with her — not following, not leading.

The abbey is a contemplative chapter of the Fellowship of Light, which is why Daire keeps a forge that produces no metalwork anyone could sell and a locked wing of library where the shelving runs to vellum instead of paper. What he gives Elvira is not instrumentation and does not pretend to be. Your sensitivity runs in your mother's line, he tells her. The boundaries are thin here, and thinning further. You are not mad. You are reading something real. And he gives her the household name for it: the Fellowship calls it the Overfold.

She takes the word without asking what stands behind it, on the reasoning that a name — even an imprecise one — beats standing in a garden at dusk being watched by nothing she can point to. It is a folk label for what the Survey Corps will eventually classify with instruments as Etheric interference and later grade as Intermembrane Bleed, and Elvira does not yet know that. What she knows is the metallic taste in the autumn air, and that the cat reacts to the same moments she does — the sundial, the east wall, the well — half a second earlier every time.

Weeks later, in the late autumn of the same year, Aldera chooses the garden gate over the terrace and does not come back.

Canon facts:

• Elvira visits the old river abbey twice in 2822 UCSD; this is the second of the two, in Early Autumn, and both fall before Aldera's departure in Late Autumn.
• The abbey is a contemplative chapter of the Fellowship of Light, kept by Brother Daire, on a tidal stretch of the Boyne near Dún Rí.
• Daire tells Elvira her sensitivity is inherited through her mother's line, and that the local boundaries are thin and thinning further.
• The Overfold enters Elvira's vocabulary here, as the Fellowship's own inherited name — not as a Survey Corps classification, which is a later and separate framework for the same lawful phenomenon.
• Aldera's sensitivity to boundary phenomena predates any augmentation or agency affiliation, and registers before Elvira's own does.
• This Brother Daire's relation to the Brother Daire who set down The Life of Saint Aoife at Cill Aoife fourteen centuries earlier — same man, later namesake, or a title within the role — is not settled by any record that has surfaced.

See: Below the Bells (S01E00C00), The Garden Gate (S01E00C01), Brother Daire, The Fellowship of Light, Overfold, Elvira, Aldera.