Location:Zhu'kethara
Date/Time:Mid Scorchwind, 9939 AZI
Realm:Demon Realm
The fourth leaf grew in silence.
Voresh felt it before he saw it — a loosening in his chest, as though something knotted for centuries had unclenched between one breath and the next. He was sitting on the garrison wall in Zhu'kethara's eastern quarter, watching the twilight shift through its endless purple-grey cycle, when the sensation arrived: warmth. Not temperature. Not the ambient heat of the volcanic vents that fed the city's formation arrays. Something internal. Something that started behind his sternum and radiated outward through his meridians and into his fingers and his jaw and the backs of his eyes, and the feeling — the feeling — was so foreign that his body responded before his mind could catch up.
His hand went to his throat.
