The silence between us carried weight, the kind that pressed down on a room and made breathing through it a conscious effort, and I sat across from Kael with my father's ring between us and felt the full architecture of everything I thought I knew about my own life collapse inward like a structure whose foundations had been quietly rotting for years.
I stared at the plain silver band, worn smooth at the edges from handling, the sovereign circle etched into its inner face with the careful precision of someone who had understood exactly what that symbol meant when they commissioned it. My father's ring, sitting in a drawer in the study of the man who now ruled the kingdom my father had once commanded, and the implications arrived not all at once but in layers, each one heavier than the
