[Location: Original Space — Raiju]
[Time: A few hours ago]
The breakfast hall sat quiet except for the soft clink of cutlery against porcelain, morning light filtering blue-tinged through crystal paneling that caught Raiju's particular atmosphere and bent it into something like permanent dawn.
Lucy pushed a piece of fruit around her plate without eating it. Across from her, Vivian sat with her spoon resting untouched in a bowl gone cold, eyes fixed somewhere past the window, past the lightning-veined spires visible along the horizon, somewhere that wasn't this table at all.
Damien cleared his throat.
"Robert reached out yesterday," he said, too brightly, the kind of bright that came from a man trying to drag a room somewhere it didn't want to go. "Sterling's rebuilding faster than anyone expected. Aurigon's mostly functional again, if you can believe that, after everything One did to the place."
Neither woman answered.
