The carbon-fiber briefcase remained on the marble counter, left behind by a deeply shaken Alistair Vance. Outside, the twilight of Manhattan began to bleed into a thick, starless night, but inside the back room of Aura Scents, the only illumination came from a single, low-burning brass lamp. Kiara sat perfectly still at her mahogany desk, her emerald eyes reflecting the pale glow of the page. Before her lay the leather-bound journal of Elara, the long-dead Matriarch of the Sovereign Dawn.
Beside the manuscript, the sealed vial of luminescent silver blood sat in a glass stand, its metallic fluid pulsing with a faint, rhythmic frequency that seemed to match Kiara’s own heartbeat.
“The script is encoded in the oldest dialect of the ancestral courts,” Naura’s voice echoed softly within her m
