Near the front of the procession, priests of the Ice Creed prepared their ritual implements, bowls of sacred ash, ceremonial blades forged from glacier ice and blessed by generations of faithful, scrolls containing the exact wording of prayers that had been spoken at imperial weddings for three centuries.
High Priestess Serah moved among them with quiet authority, her white robes trimmed with silver, her staff topped with a crystal that supposedly contained a fragment of Aenithra's own essence.
She noticed Soren and Eris's interaction and allowed herself the smallest smile. In her century of service to the Ice Creed, she'd blessed two imperial weddings. Both had been political arrangements, cold contracts sealed with colder vows, unions that produced heirs and alliances but little else.
This one, she suspected, would be different.
The caravan began to move, a slow procession of horses and wagons winding through the palace gates and into the frozen landscape beyond.
