The meeting room sat deep in the palace's central tower, walls curved smooth around a table that seated exactly eight, one chair for each original bloodline, most of them empty tonight, occupied instead by whoever the given family had managed to gather on short notice. Damien stood rather than sat, arms crossed behind his back, watching the central display where the Conclave's chosen representative had already begun speaking, translated through a device that rendered the alien cadence into flat, precise Standard.
The representative was tall, four-limbed but built wrong for human proportions, its skin a deep slate gray that caught the display's light without reflecting it, four eyes arranged in a diamond pattern across a face that carried no expression Lucas could read.
