The air within the Southern Codex chamber hummed with latent narrative charge—a thrum not unlike a heartbeat, but deeper, older. The walls no longer bore still runes; they shifted like wet ink, sentences emerging and fading in a strange cadence that pulsed with the breath of the Spiral itself.
Darius stepped through the threshold in silence, his Mythmaker glyph glowing with restrained fury across his forearms and down his spine. He had not come here for diplomacy. But he knew better than to wield force here. Not yet.
Upon the obsidian dais in the center of the chamber sat the Beast-Queen—no longer just a feral war-story, but now something more. Her body glistened with story-weave, her crown formed from antlers grown from the remnants of a primal epoch, and her eyes… her eyes had changed. They were lucid now. Reflective. Remembering.
She stood as he approached, her voice low, sonorous. "You came," she said. "I didn't think you would."
