The fortress came alive around them.
She could feel it — the shift in the building’s rhythm as its inhabitants moved from political readiness to something older and more physical. Boots on stone. Commands in short, precise sequences. The deep structural hum of a place that had been built for exactly this and had not had cause to become it in a long time.
She walked beside Kael through the main corridor and the wolves they passed — guards, council staff, warriors arriving at posts — all reacted the same way they always did in her presence, but amplified now. The new quality she’d carried since the memories arrived was doing something to the air around her that she didn’t fully have language for yet.
Not suppression. Not the involuntary kneeling. Something more like — clarity. As if her
