LYSSARA
Dawn arrived the way significant things arrived, without announcement, simply present when the conditions for it were correct, the grey light coming up over Ashfen's tree line with the specific indifference of mornings that had been doing this for considerably longer than the events they preceded and that were going to continue doing it regardless of what the events produced.
I had been ready before dawn. The meeting location was a neutral clearing at the boundary between Ashfen's territory and the eastern borderlands, not inside Ashfen and not in Dravenor's operational territory, but the specific founding compact neutral ground that the challenge protocol designated for exactly this kind of encounter. Ground that belonged to neither party and therefore to both. Ground that had b
