THE FOURTH CEREMONY
It was Coran who suggested it.
Not abruptly. Not in a way that disrupted the rhythm of the meeting. He waited until the moment when the formal reports had settled, when the air had shifted from structured updates into something quieter, something more reflective.
Three months after the accession.
The first formal network meeting attended by representatives of all four packs for the first time in one hundred and thirty years.
That fact alone carried weight.
It lived in the room like a presence.
The council table was fuller than it had ever been in my lifetime. Voices that had once existed only as distant references were now here, embodied, distinct. The subtle differences in posture, in tone, in the way each representative occupied their space it all spoke of his
