The War Begins

Sophia's POV

It started on a Monday.

Not with a declaration. Not with a formal challenge delivered by herald to the castle gates in the old ceremonial way, with its rules and its pageantry and its implicit acknowledgment that both sides believed the conflict had a structure worth honoring. What Vane and Gravis had built was not that kind of war. It was the kind that begins in the dark, in the quiet repositioning of bodies through territories that had been prepared over weeks, in ...