The council chamber had been built to intimidate.

Its ceiling rose far too high for comfort, carved with constellations older than the city itself—stars arranged not as they appeared in the sky, but as scholars had once decided they should be. The message was clear: order was eternal, deliberate, imposed. Pillars of black-veined stone ringed the circular floor, each etched with sigils of lineage, authority, and ancient sanction. Names were carved there—families long extinct, bloodlines ...