While celebrations echoed across the mountaintop, while crowds chanted blessings and prophecies spoke of futures bright with promise, darkness gathered in chambers where light had not been welcome for hours.
Vetra's private rooms, deep within the palace's oldest wing, in sections that predated current architecture, that existed in spaces most servants avoided without quite knowing why, had been transformed into something that would have horrified anyone unfortunate enough to witness it.
Candles surrounded a blood-drawn circle, dozens of them, positioned at precise intervals, burning with flames that flickered colors that shouldn't exist. A colour so dark it was almost lightless.
They generated heat without warmth, light without illumination, creating an atmosphere of wrongness so profound it made the air itself taste corrupted.
