Chapter 73: The Taste of Ashes
Kael's knuckles were bone-white where they gripped the stone windowsill. The storm had properly set in, a howling grey beast that smothered the world beyond the glass. Two days. Forty-eight hours since he'd walked away from that god-cursed mountain, and the silence from the retrieval team sent to fetch Finn was a physical weight in the room.
The war room felt different now. Smaller. The maps on the table weren't just parchment and ink; they were lies. Every border, every alliance, every scrap of history he'd built his life on was a story told by the winners of a war he never knew was fought. The holographic schematics from the data chip glowed mockingly, showing him shields that could stop energy fire, comms that could whisper across continents. Power he couldn't use because the key to it all was buried under a mile of ice.
