Neth's footsteps made no sound on the Iron Citadel's floor, because the floor was not floor. It was divine substrate — the interior architecture of a god's workspace, rendered in dark metal and amber light and controlled silence. The walls were iron. The ceiling was higher than it needed to be. Nothing had a scent here — no temperature, no humidity, no biological presence. A room without weather.
Neth stood at the reporting position — an unmarked spot on the floor that was the reporting position because he always stood there, and Zephyr had never corrected him. Kobold. Four feet tall. Grey-scaled, yellow-eyed, still in the way his species had evolved to be — overlooked by default, and he'd refined that evolutionary advantage into a professional methodology.
"Thendris," he said.
No preamble. Neth did not use preambles. They were syllables that served no intelligence function.
