Tevanne had realized that if you didn’t mind paying a fresh cost for each edit, you didn’t need to bother with capturing a command within a tool or a rig at all. You simply needed life in general: by stealing days, months, or years from a person, you could inflict a fresh command on reality whenever you pleased. This had its own constraints, of course. Each time you made an edit, you’d burn through your victim’s vitality like a flame through a cheap candle, aging or killing them instantly. But, of course, this didn’t matter if you had a whole populace to use as kindling.
