The eastern alliance framework took three more days to complete.
Not because the content was unclear — by the time Kaden and I sat down to finish it, the structural principles had been established through weeks of work and the Dorian Valdris conversation had given us the eastern territorial perspective we needed to make the document genuinely bilateral rather than simply Ironveil-centric. The three days were about precision. Every provision drafted and examined from multiple angles. Every term defined with the specific, unambiguous language that would make the document useful in practice rather than merely impressive on paper.
We worked in the council chamber, mostly in the evenings after the day's operational demands had been addressed. Dinner sent in, maps spread across the table along
