chapter 38
The elders did not grieve the loss.
They sat in the council chamber, robed in authority, faces carved from discipline and old belief. The air was heavy, but not with sorrow. It was thick with calculation.
“The child did not survive,” one of them said at last, voice steady. “Then the balance has corrected itself.”
No one answered.
Because even as the words settled, the room did not.
Power still lingered—unsettled, restless. The silence pressed harder than before, and the oldest among them felt it most. They had lived long enough to know when the world had shifted.
“This was inevitable,” another elder added. “Such unions were never meant to last.”
They wrote the loss into their records as a failure of nature. A mistake corrected. A threat ended before it could begin.
But
