🌍 Chapter Twenty-One: Echoes of the Thorn.Â
​The silence that followed the destruction of the Iron Peaks was more deafening than any explosion. It was the silence of a political landscape utterly and irrevocably rearranged. The intelligence filtered back to the world within three days, carried by the frantic, terrified remnants of the Shadow Cult, by the measured, diplomatic reports of the Northern Pack, and by the undeniable, chilling stability of the arcane currents themselves. The sheer scope of the magical disruption and the subsequent, unnatural quiet in the magical strata signaled a cataclysmic shift in the global balance of power.
