The Universal Union flourished, but the true test of a "Universal" bond wasn’t found in the grand halls of the Council—it was found in the quiet, mundane corners of the world where the old prejudices still lingered like stubborn frost.
To understand the depth of this new peace, we must look at a pair who represented the most impossible of unions: **Valerius** and **Sera**.
Valerius was a human—a high-ranking Alchemist from the Iron Cities who had spent his youth inventing the very silver-toxins used by the Purists. He was a man of logic, gears, and cold equations. Sera, on the other hand, was a Feral—one of the wolves who had been so broken by the "Silence" of the old world that she had lost her human form entirely, living for years as a nameless beast in the northern tundra.
They were
