The days following the invitation didn't explode into the kind of panic you'd expect when the gods of the universe call for a meeting.
Instead, everything just felt compressed. The Astralis Empire kept running with its usual scary precision. The trade corridors pulsed, ships moved on schedule, and the military did its rounds like nothing was wrong. To anyone watching from the outside, Astralis was still the same unstoppable machine.
But inside the Imperial palace, the air was thick. Vahn didn't say a word about the meeting to the public. He didn't call the big council or let rumors turn into a full-blown freak-out. He just started getting ready. Quietly. On purpose.
The first big thing he did was step back from running the daily expansion of the Empire. He didn't make a speech about it, but Celestine noticed the second it happened.
She found him one evening in the private archives, surrounded by glowing shelves of records that regular people aren't even allowed to know exist.
