Location:Zhū'kethara — King's Wing, Records Chamber, Broadcast Chamber
Date/Time:Early Emberrise, 9941 AZI
Realm:Demon Realm
The grain of the table was old. Ren's palms rested flat on wood that had been carved before his reign, before the wars that defined it, before the forgetting that had hollowed the realm to its current shape. The table had belonged to a council that no longer existed, in a room small enough to hold a conversation without amplification. Morning light came through narrow windows — pale, angled, the first Emberrise of a new year pressing against stone that hadn't changed in millennia.
Velshan and Sorathia sat across from him. Nobody else. Ren had asked them to come alone — no Vaelith, no Morvhan, no council. Just two parents who had been asleep for fourteen hundred years and a king who needed to hear something that politicians couldn't tell him.
