Kai's POV
The founding clause session goes the way it was always going to go.
Elara brings it to the table with the specific, precise quality of someone who has been building toward something for a long time and is now placing it exactly where it needs to be. The founding text. The original language. The water-access clause from which everything else in the dispute has been derived, cross-referenced against the Selene Clause that has been sitting in the third section of the founding document for two hundred years, waiting for someone to find it.
She puts it down and she stands behind it and she does not waver.
I watch it land on the Thornveil delegation. Wren's expression — the specific controlled satisfaction of an experienced diplomat watching his lead deploy something that changes t
