CHAPTER 53:
The week turned crisp, the autumn air sharpening until it bit through wool. The ridge hummed with work from dawn until long after dark — foundations laid, roads graded, a market square staked out where the old training ground had been. But beneath the bustle ran a quiet current of unease. Word had spread: Valerius was defeated, but the Council hadn’t vanished entirely. Remnants lingered in the borderlands, small cells of loyalists who still clung to the old ways, striking isolated homesteads, burning supply caches, vanishing back into the hills before anyone could respond.
I was in the archive room — a small, drafty chamber carved into the western face of the fortress, stacked high with scrolls and records recovered from the Council’s pavilion — when the horn blew. One long,
