Date: TC1853.10.14
Location: Seven Peaks — Verdant Spire / Thunder Peak
The meeting had been about supply chains.
Raven sat at the long table in the Verdant Spire's council chamber with four of the splinter group's senior elders, reviewing cultivation material distribution for the coming winter months. Prosaic work. Necessary work. The kind of meeting that made you grateful for hot tea and resentful of the amount of paperwork involved in keeping three thousand people alive on a mountainside when temperatures started dropping.
Elder Gao Yunshan was mid-sentence when he stopped talking.
Not paused. Stopped. The way a person's body stopped when something fundamental shifted inside it — an absence of motion so complete it drew every eye in the room.
