And the world answers. Far beneath Thrykis, the ground splits. Across the city, stone cracks. From darkness, from earth, from places long sealed and forgotten?—
They come.
Creatures surge upward into the open air, bursting through streets, through courtyards, through the bones of the kingdom itself.
Wings ignite the sky, red and endless.
Teorin pulls his hood back into place. “My turn,” he murmurs.
Filar House
COLSAR
Filar House sat on the outer grounds of Rathmor Palace, close enough that its lights were visible from the upper corridors at night. Colsar had not stepped inside it in months. Not since the luncheon with his mother. The day Asharin had chosen sword fighting with him over ballroom dance lessons.
The servant who received him at the door was new, young, the particular nervousness of someone who had been told exactly how to behave and was concentrating very hard on it. Colsar gave him nothing to work with and followed him through the familiar corridors without comment.
The air feels wrong as they move deeper into the house, the sensation quiet but persistent, the same underlying distortion he had felt in the mountains when the dead began to move beneath them. It lingers at the edges of his awareness, threaded through the corridors and into the walls themselves, something that does not belong to Rathmor and never has.
She was in the smaller dining room. The table set for two, candles already burning at their midpoints, a meal laid out with the particular precision that meant it had been arranged well inadvance. The doors to the veranda stood open, vines thick along the pillars outside, the lower gardens visible in the last of the evening light.
The room is as it has always been, unchanged in every visible way, and yet the feeling follows him here, faint but insistent.
She stood when he entered.
"Colsar." Her voice carried the warmth of someone who had practiced it. "Come, sit." Her eyes moved over him. "You look different. But well."
He took the chair across from hers without ceremony.
"Is fatherhood treating you well?" she asked.
"Yes." He reached for his glass and left it where it was. "You have two grandchildren, as you know. Perhaps you will deign to meet them when you are not busy doing things of more…” He pauses. "Importance."
She smiled. "Of course."
A servant filled his glass, the pour steady, precise. For a moment the light catches at his fingertips, the color there faintly gray before he withdraws. Colsar left it untouched.
The Queen Dowager leaned back into her chair with the unhurried ease of a woman who had never once needed to fill a silence she did not intend to fill. She looked well. She always looked well. Dark hair pinned high, silver threading through it now more than before, the particular composure of someone who has long since decided that aging is a matter of posture.
The pin at her temple draws his attention then, the stone set within it wrong in a way that is not easily missed, shiftingbeneath the surface in a way he has seen before and has not forgotten from Alarna.
“Yorali,” he says.
Her hand lifts lightly, brushing the pin as though it means very little. “You always did have a good eye.”
“You must have done something unforgettable,” he adds, his tone even, “to be gifted something so rare.”
Her smile deepens. “Perhaps I did.”
He holds her eyes a moment longer than the exchange requires.
"Your wife," she said pleasantly, "caused quite a stir."
"I am aware."
"The Avanki. The children." She lifted her glass. "The firebirds flying ahead. It was quite something." A pause. "She has grown into the role."
"She was always suited to it."
