The first winter storm fell upon Starfall with sudden ferocity, driving sleet against stained glass and rattling every shutter in the keep. Wind howled in the flues and carried the sound of the city's own troubled debates straight through the council's great vault. Ethan felt the air charged as if lightning itself hovered above; old magic and old politics mixing together in the cold.
Within those walls, every seat was filled. The entire council strained at the seams: former nobles and fresh delegates, borderland elders and city merchants, reformers hungry for more freedom and conservatives desperate for the world they'd lost. The Heart of Maelius, artifact and lightning-rod both, lay at the chamber's very center on its cloth-wrapped plinth—guarded and worshiped by turns, inspiration and threat alike.
