The war room had gone very quiet, the kind of silence that pressed against the ears more than any noise could, thick with the weight of a sentence none of them knew how to respond to yet.
"Say that again," Fenris said, low, like he was hoping he'd misheard, like repetition might somehow soften what Elara had just told them.
"The King who wrote the original curse into your bloodline four generations ago." Elara didn't flinch from repeating it, though her voice carried none of its usual clinical steadiness. "Aria descends from him directly. Not a distant branch, not some cousin's cousin lost to the family tree's outer edges. A direct line."
Aria stared at the lineage chart on the screen, at the red circle marking a name she'd never heard before today, and felt the ground shift beneath a l
