Seth POV
The Council chambers smell of soaked ash and dying magic. Smoke curls upward from the fractures in the basalt floor, rising through the gaping wound in the ceiling where Shane’s ambition and Artemis’s fury split the stone clean open. Pale morning light filters through the ruin, catching on suspended dust motes that shimmer like drifting embers. I walk through it all slowly, gloves already darkened with soot, as if I am surveying the bones of something I once knew well enough to predict but never well enough to save.
My boots make no sound on the cracked marble. Silence feels appropriate; this place was born from arrogance and held together by fear, and now it’s reduced to a carcass waiting to see which scavenger claims it. The irony is irritating. I had expected fire and blood t
