Location:Dragon estate — cellar
Date/Time:2 Frostforge, 9942 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
Jayde went down at dawn.
She had slept. Actually slept. Not the combat fragments she had taken on the mantis's back for sixty days, the short shifts that kept the body functional without ever letting the mind stop. A full night. In a bed. Under a ceiling that was not stone, in a room that did not vibrate with the footsteps of something trying to kill her. She woke at first light with the disorientation of a body that had forgotten what rest was, and the first thought that arrived was not tactical.
It was a name.
She dressed. Didn't eat. Walked through the estate's corridors in the grey morning light — past the operations room where Yinxin's map covered the wall, past the outer yard where the mantis slept with Green's compound drying on its chitin, past the door behind which three wyrmlings were unconscious in the total abandon of children who had stayed up much too late and paid for it.
