A month after the hearing, Frostfall Citadel looked the same from the outside.
Same stone walls. Same silverwood forest at its edges. Same eternal wind pulling at the banners of the Northern Crescent Pack. From a distance, nothing had changed. The citadel was what it had always been, ancient and massive and cold in the specific way of things built to last rather than to comfort.
But inside it, things had shifted.
Not everything. Not all at once. Change in large and entrenched institutions moves the way glaciers move, gradually and with enormous force and visible only over time. But the lines of fracture were there, real and spreading in the correct directions, and Elowen could feel them the way she could feel weather coming before it arrived.
The structural reforms had been drafted and
