Eran was already there when we arrived.
The meeting location was a stone waystation two hours north of the territory — old, pre-settlement, the kind of structure that had been built when the ward line network was being established and had been maintained since by the specific logic of things that were useful enough that nobody had gotten around to stopping. A single room, a fireplace, a table. Root systems running deep and old beneath the stone floor.
Eran had arrived early enough that the fire was already going.
He was standing when we came in — not formally, not the Noble Council posture I'd been studying in the historical records. Just standing. The specific quality of someone who had been waiting for something for a very long time and was finding the moment of its arrival slightly l
