Date: TC1853.11.10–12
Location: Seven Peaks — Sect Leader's Residence / Council Terrace / Training Grounds
Raven didn't sleep the rest of that night.
She sat in the dark of her quarters with the blanket pulled around her shoulders like armor that wouldn't stop anything, and she listened to the silence and told herself it was nothing. Stress. Exhaustion. The reports from the eastern border seeding themselves into her subconscious and flowering into nightmares that felt too vivid, too structured, too specific to be the random firing of a sleeping brain.
It didn't work. She could still taste metal on her tongue.
By dawn, she'd made tea twice, drunk neither cup, and read every intelligence report Naida's people had filed in the last two weeks. Livestock deaths in Harrowfield, Briar's Hollow, Copper Bend, and Greymarsh. Animals drained of something. Six militia vanished on patrol, their equipment arranged on the road with deliberate care.
