Lucian
I walked beside Emma toward the Council Hall with a steadiness I did not entirely feel.
The Flint Hills morning was pale and cold, the kind of cold that didn’t bite the way winter did back home—more of a quiet pressure in the air, a reminder that the land was waking slowly. Outside the Blackwood wing, the Council Palace grounds were already moving with restrained purpose: guards shifting into position, attendants gliding along corridors with stacks of documents, delegations funneling toward the central structures like rivers drawn by gravity.
Everything looked controlled.
Everything was not.
Emma’s steps were measured, but I felt her tension through the bond like a tight wire under my ribs. She was holding herself together the way she’d learned to in the human world—careful bre
