Outside the palace walls, Valeria was changing beneath new authority. Inside this chamber, nothing had changed at all in the ways that mattered most. The bed remained at the center of everything. Liora remained unmoving, her condition stable but her consciousness absent. Nyla remained too quiet, her breathing steady but artificial. And Thessian remained standing watch over both of them, as though the fate of an entire kingdom could wait, but this absolutely could not.
Night settled fully over the palace, though it brought no real silence with it. The quality of sound had simply changed—footsteps in corridors no longer echoed the same way, voices lowered themselves before reaching doorways, and the distant movement of soldiers repositioning throughout the captured city created a constant low background awareness of occupation in progress.
