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(Matting Preparation.) A few hours later…
The mountain always felt different after a siege.
It was not the walls. The stone was the same. The plates Lirien had wedged into the worst gouges still sat where she had hammered them, complaining faintly about their treatment.
It was the air.
It carried the thin, raw taste of too many breaths taken too fast and then cut off. It hummed with the absence of noise, the way a room did after a long argument when everyone had finally run out of things to shout.
Kai felt it as soon as he stepped back through the side gate.
Inside, torches had been banked low. Drones moved in slower lines, no longer in tight, braced formations, but in the shuffling, careful paths of people finally allowed to feel the weight of their own bodies. Someone had started a pot of stew somewhere; the smell of simmering bones and herbs drifted faintly down the central hall.
His ribs did not protest when he breathed it in.
