~Alora~

The crown was on the table in front of me.

I had taken it off carefully, with both hands, the way Wren had shown me; not because the movement was complicated but because it felt like the kind of thing that deserved to be done with intention rather than haste. I had set it on the archive table in the small room at the back of the pack house, and now I stood looking at it in the quiet that follows ceremonies the way silence follows thunder, the hall still humming distantly with the ...