The first problem was the form.

Dorren had been staring at it since sixth bell — a single-page devotional access request, standard Crucible design, printed forty years ago and never revised because no one had ever needed to revise it. The fields were arranged in devotional logic: Name of sponsoring temple. Devotional frequency. Name of attending deacon. Blessing type requested. Duration of continuous temple membership.

None of these fields applied to Tev.

Tev was a Gnome forge-hand, twenty-six years old, employed at the Municipal Forge annex — one of the three workshops that had shut down during the solidarity action and reopened four days later when the Covenant was filed. He had never entered a shrine for any purpose other than sheltering from rain. He could not name a deacon. He did not have a sponsoring temple. He had a callus on each palm from ten years of foundry tongs and an employer’s letter confirming his forge-complex assignment, and he wanted a domain blessing for his right shoulder, which had been giving him trouble since a crucible-tipping incident in Emberdusk, and which, under the new civic access framework, he was legally entitled to receive without entering a shrine or saying the Iron Sovereign’s name.

None of which fit on the form.

"Name of sponsoring temple," Dorren read aloud. He was sitting across the counter from the registry clerk — a Dwarf woman, mid-fifties, named Tessara, who had staffed this counter for nineteen years and processed over four thousand devotional access requests and had never once encountered someone who didn’t know their temple’s name.

"He doesn’t have one," Tessara said. Her voice was flat — three hours of saying the same thing had ground it down from administrative complaint to a statement of physical law.

"Employing forge complex," Dorren said. "Write: Municipal Forge annex, Ashenveil, district three."

Tessara looked at the field. It was six centimeters wide. "Municipal Forge annex, Ashenveil, district three" was eight centimeters of ink at her handwriting size.

She wrote it. The final three letters ran off the right edge of the field and onto the margin.

"Devotional frequency."

"Leave it blank."

"I can’t leave it blank. The filing system requires an entry for every field."

"Write ’not applicable.’"

Tessara wrote N/A in the devotional frequency field with neat, precise penmanship — someone who understood she was committing an administrative heresy and had decided, in the absence of better instructions, to commit it legibly.

They worked through the remaining fields together. Slowly. Name of attending deacon: N/A — civic access, Ordinator’s Authority S3/ss1. Blessing type requested: Forge-domain, musculoskeletal, right shoulder — per attached employer’s medical notation. Duration of continuous temple membership: N/A — civic access.

The form looked, when they finished, like a devotional request that had been attacked by a different vocabulary. Half the fields were crossed out or written over. The margin notes were longer than the primary entries. The employer’s medical notation — a single paragraph from the forge-complex’s relief overseer — was paper-clipped to the back because there was no field for it.

Tessara stamped it.

"This is going to happen forty more times today," she said.

"At least."

"We need new forms."

"Yes."

"Someone will have to design them."

"Someone will."

She looked at him once — a look that contained the full weight of nineteen years behind this counter and the complete understanding that her job had just changed in a way nobody had prepared her for and nobody was going to thank her for adapting to — and returned to the next applicant in the queue.

The queue stretched past the corridor and into the street. Dock workers, forge-hands, a canal-district cartage crew who’d come in together because their foreman had told them the new access applied to work-related injuries and three of them had injuries and all of them had opinions about whether this was actually true.

Pella Caskrunner was seventh in line. She had her own question, separate from the queue: whether the civic access retroactively covered her dock worker’s permanent arm injury (pre-Covenant). She’d filed the retroactivity petition yesterday. She knew it didn’t apply backward — Dorren had told her, and she’d accepted it with the minimum number of words required to convey acceptance without conveying agreement — but she was here anyway because the queue was a public record of how many people needed this, and she wanted her name in the record.

When she reached the counter, she presented her dock-identification card — twenty years of service, Canal District, no temple affiliation — and watched Tessara cross out the devotional fields with the same efficient heresy she’d performed thirty-six times that morning.

"You’re good at this," Pella said.

Tessara didn’t look up. "I’ve been doing it for three hours."

"Takes some people three years."

The stamp came down. Pella took her receipt and stepped aside for the next applicant.

Tev — the first civic domain access applicant in the Sovereign Dominion’s history — received his allocation receipt at eighth bell and fourteen minutes. A single page. Tessara’s handwriting in six fields, N/A in four, the Ordinator’s authority citation in the margin, and a filing stamp dated Forgeday, 18th Ironfall, Year 460 AF.

He folded it once, put it in his coat pocket, and walked back to the Municipal Forge annex. His shift started at ninth bell. The shoulder still ached — the blessing wouldn’t be administered until the allocation was processed, forty-eight to seventy-two hours — but the paper in his pocket was the shape of something that hadn’t existed four days ago, and he could feel its weight against his chest as he walked, which was strange, because it weighed almost nothing.

Tessara went home at sixth bell in the evening. Her husband was cooking — root stew, his Emberday recipe, which he made every Emberday regardless of the month because routines were the architecture of a life and he had learned this from his father, who had learned it from his.

"Designed a new form today," she said. She sat at the kitchen table and pulled off her boots, which were wet from the canal-district streets. They smelled of mud and iron.

"What for?"

"People who want blessings without being members."

He stirred the stew. Thought about it. "Can’t tell if that’s less religious or more."

She didn’t answer. She started on the second boot.

Outside, the forge-district chimneys were smoking again — all three of the solidarity workshops had reopened, and the sound of iron on iron carried through the kitchen window with the particular rhythm that meant the evening shift had begun, which meant the city was working, which meant something had changed and the stew was the same and both of those things were true at the same time.