No one hurried to leave the council chamber. The hand-drawn map remained spread across the center of the table while Vaelor compared it with two official charts of the western frontier, shifting each parchment beneath the candlelight to align rivers, ridges, and mountain passes. Rowan organized the recovered journals into rough groups, occasionally setting one aside when a date or place corresponded with a mark already noted on the map. Lexi remained where she was, reading the brief notation again, searching its familiar words for some detail she might have overlooked.
The dragons would go no farther.
The sentence did not read like an order or a warning. It carried the quiet certainty of an observation made by someone who had witnessed an unexpected event and lacked the means to explain
