Institutions had trained masons to think inside fences. I lay stone, I don’t sell. I am a planner, I don’t build. That kind of thinking held up fine inside large institutions with someone else’s name on the gate. It broke when a man tried to raise something of his own.

Specialists were never going to survive what the war was turning into.

The war needed anomalies, men who could fight, plan, and build all at once, because there was no longer anyone left to hand jobs to. Marko’s masons had been the first to go. Some conscripted under General Ozzy’s border, some went towards whichever side paid better that season. What was left to him was: men too frail for the border, old men whose hands knew the work but whose backs no longer did, women, and boys who’d never laid a brick in their lives.

Wisdom without strength. Care without experience. It was not the crew he would have chosen. It was the crew he had.

This was, in its own way, a good time to make masons out of what remained. Anomalies don’t wait for good conditions, they find a way, they make way. Forward was the only direction anomalies understood. Obstacle wasn’t something in their path. Obstacle was the path.

He leaned on humanoids harder than he ever had. Where a mason once carried the whole weight of work alone, a humanoid could hold the tracking, the fetching, the repetition, freeing his thin, mismatched crew to do only the work that needed real hands and real judgment. It wasn’t the workforce he’d planned for. It was enough to keep the walls rising.

Thinking in Volume

Marko learned to stop measuring the day by how it felt and start measuring it in numbers.

How many bricks laid. How many settlers housed. How many men fed, this week, against how many the week before. Numbers didn’t flatter him and didn’t lie to him, they were honest and told a story of whether Ankarra was growing or stagnating.

Volume mattered because pods scaled differently than large ones. A man who talks to twenty settlers found more approvals than one who talked to two. If Ankarra was going to be more than a single wall standing defiantly in a war zone, it needed reach, the kind that came from doing the ugly, repeatable things, over and over, in volume.

There was no one above Marko to tell him what to do, and no one below him to blame when plans failed. No adults in the room, in the way a boy imagines adults exist somewhere to catch him. Just his mind, and what he decided to do with it.

He understood this was freedom most men never claim, it was responsibility, because most men wait to be shown a path before they walk one. Marko stopped waiting. He set meetings himself. He made calls himself. He decided when a decision needed making rather than waiting for permission that was never coming from a province at war.

Age didn’t matter. Experience didn’t matter, not the kind you could point to on paper. What mattered was whether you would act while everyone around you was asking who was in charge.

Boxes

Marko noticed boxes people built without choosing to. Freedom, family, trade, titles, men wore these like badges and mistook them for the whole world. Marko decided a box wasn’t good or bad on its own. The question worth asking was whether you’d built the box, or climbed into one someone left lying around.

He’d inherited boxes he never chose, the mason’s fences, the war, his own bloodline’s long losing streak against T.I.T.A.N. What he could still choose was which walls to keep and which to knock down. That, more than any single wall he raised in Ankarra, was the work.

Every day brought a hundred things clawing for Marko’s attention, reports from the border, rumors from Otterval, a mason’s grievance, a settler’s complaint, another letter from T.I.T.A.N. men circling for what was owed.

What a man built came down to what he could hold his attention on longest, not what he could react to fastest.

Marko had to focus, this meant saying no more often than yes. Saying no to a new wing before the current one could stand on its own. Saying no to a shortcut that would look finished today and crack apart within a season. The men who built things that lasted weren’t the ones who chased every opportunity, they were the ones willing to ignore great ideas to finish what mattered.

Ruins

By the time the worst of that season passed, Marko had learned the shape of the crew he actually had, instead of grieving the one the war had taken.

Sicklings who couldn’t lift stone could still read a ledger, still track a debt, still keep humanoids fed with instructions. Old men who couldn’t climb scaffolding could still teach a boy where a wall was likely to fail before it failed. Boys who’d never held a trowel learned faster than any mason Marko had ever trained, because they had nothing yet to unlearn.

Broken systems, rebuilt from whoever was left standing. That was the whole lesson of that stretch of the war: you don’t wait for the crew you wanted. You build with the hands you have, and you make those hands enough.