"Isn't it?" Kael asked, his deep, broken baritone quiet, yet it carried an edge of raw, unyielding iron that vibrated against the silence of the dying valley.
The teenage prince stood with his boots sunk deep into the calcified dust of Oakhaven, his knuckles white where they wrapped around the leather-bound hilt of his forged greatsword. He didn't look at the gathered rebels or the weeping elders; his mismatched eyes—the right an incandescent platinum solar core, the left a bottomless pool of absolute violet vacuum—were fixed entirely on the shifting, geometric lattice of the upper sky.
"The machine is up there, sister," Kael continued, his breath forming a faint, silver mist in the freezing air. "The ledger monitors our every breath from the stratosphere. If we don't break the gold gears, if we don't tear down the central orbit, the ground beneath our feet doesn't matter. It's just a temporary stage before the deletion."
