AZRATH POV
Night has swallowed the sky for three nights now. The moon has hidden its face. No stars dare to burn. The world has gone quiet in the way people go quiet when something big and awful wakes.
I stand at the highest window of the Nocturnis keep and watch the black sky. Their lands stretch below me, a sea of houses and halls and pale faces. The Nocturnis are loyal — they have been loyal through disappearances and silence, through my absence and the cold that followed. They have worked to bring me back like priests tending an altar. I see their devotion in the torches that do not die, in the way their leaders bow their heads when they speak my name.
Still, it is not enough.
