[KAEL — POV]
He couldn't stay in Veyrath indefinitely. The Council was restless, Riven was managing it with his customary precision and slightly less of his customary patience, and the seventy-two hours he'd promised himself and the investigation were ticking.
He used one of them to send a coded message to a Noctis Court contact who had no connection to official channels—a vampire of four hundred years named Thessaly, who had been alive before most of the current political structures had formed and who maintained a singular perspective on them. Thessaly was the most inconvenient kind of elder: one who had survived so long by being almost always correct.
The message was simple: Architects. What do you know?
The reply took six hours, which in Thessaly's terms was essentially immediate: M
