An hour passed.
Then two.
The fire burned down. Olivia came once, quietly, to add wood and take the empty tea service. She moved through the room with an unhurried grace that said she'd learned to occupy space without intruding on it, and the faint smell of incense in the fabric of her robes mingled with that green clean undertone that seemed to permeate everything in this building.
Celestia had not asked again when Viktor would arrive.
She understood, with the particular comprehension of someone who had spent sixteen years reading power dynamics, what was happening. A nephew who had been abandoned by his mother's family. Who had survived exile and built 'this' and healed a man's severed leg before breakfast. Who had known she was coming, months in advance, and had written to tell her so.
He was not being rude.
He was establishing, wordlessly, that he was not sitting somewhere waiting to be called upon. That she could wait.
