Azaliyah faced him one final, devastating time, her posture framed by the vast violet expanse of her flared wings.
“You marched into this valley explicitly wanting to drag me somewhere entirely unwilling,” she said, her voice dropping into a lethal, quiet resonance. “Instead, your own people are leaving this courtyard with an actual purpose.”
Camron folded his massive arms over his chest, his ears twitching with unbridled malice as he grinned down at the broken high elder. “Man, I have got to admit… that has absolutely got to hurt your feelings.”
Varos’s prominent jaw trembled once, a violent, involuntary spasm of raw humiliation, before his years of political discipline forced it completely still. He looked around the spinning square at faces that were no longer under his thumb, banner
