**Alexander's POV:**

The hall fractures into noise.

Not panic — something more layered than panic. The elders break into low, urgent exchanges, leaning toward each other with the particular posture of people who have just identified a legal precedent and are running its implications in real time. I hear one of them say *first-marker* and another say *fated bond supersedes covenant*, and the words land the way I need them to land — in the right ears, ...