A tower was silent, high above the rest of the Imperial Palace.
Not the silence of peace, but of distance—a kind that stretched between mountain peaks and made the stars feel closer than people.
Xavier Aregard stood at the balcony, robe half draped across his sculpted frame, golden pauldrons glinting faintly in the stormlight. Below him, the Imperial City breathed in coils of fog and firelight, its veins aglow with enchantment.
He did not look at it.
Instead, he watched the sky—the churn of stormclouds gathered by the palace's ever-turning wards, the slow spin of runic constellations carved into the air by invisible forces.
They responded to his presence, reacting in subtle shifts of light. The heavens knew him. They had to.
Behind him, a bell tolled. Deep. Measured. It wasn't from the temples below but from the Spire of Assembly. Its echoes rolled across the sky like distant thunder.
One day.
