The world did not end with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a slow, inexorable settling. William, King of Blackcliff, the Forge King, the Gardener, the Stone-Talker, felt the settling in his bones. They ached on damp mornings, a deep, grinding complaint that no healer's poultice could soothe. It was the ache of the kingdom itself, he fancied, seeped into his marrow through the cold stone of the throne he had occupied for two decades.
The Eye in the west was a constant. The children born after its coming knew no other sky. They called it the "Kingly Star" in their games, its rhythmic pulse the drumbeat to their dances. The Weather-Speakers' reports were as mundane as grain prices. The kingdom had not just adapted; it had metabolized the unknown into the routine of survival.
William's reign was no longer a series of crises, but a long, slow administration. The Steward's Circle, under Eddard's masterful, patient hand, was the true engine of the realm. It managed the reserves, mediated disputes between districts over water rights and trade routes, and quietly integrated the "ocular anomaly" forecasts into five-year plans. Eddard, now a man in his prime, had grown into his role with a calm authority that William admired and, in his darkest moments, envied. The young lord's justice was firm, his mind agile, but it was his profound, unsentimental care for the machinery of the kingdom that made him indispensable. He was not a visionary; he was a superlative mechanic.
This left William in a strange, twilight role. He was the symbol, the final arbiter, the keeper of the covenant-stone. His days were filled with ceremony, with receiving reports he had already read from Eddard, with nodding at the clever policy proposals of the Academy graduates who now populated the lower tiers of the Royal Administration. Daerlon, aged but undimmed in his ambition, had finally achieved a kind of victory: he had become the chief elder of a system so vast and intricate that the king was its figurehead, not its master. William presided; Eddard and Daerlon, in their constant, quiet struggle, governed.
The one who truly governed the unseen, Alaric, was gone. The old lore-warden had simply failed to appear one morning a year past. He was found in his cell in the archives, seated at his desk, a faint, puzzled smile on his lips, a scroll describing "resonant harmonics in basaltic strata" open before him. He had listened to the world's song until his own note had simply faded out. William had him buried not in the cathedral, but in a niche carved into the living rock of the mountain below Blackcliff, as per instructions left in a will no one knew he had. The kingdom had lost its translator of strange music, and William felt the silence left behind.
He found his solace in two things: his weekly walk with Eddard, and the stone.
The walks were a ritual. Every Seventh-day, they would leave the keep, often with no guard, and tread the same path through the lower bailey, past the herb garden (now tended by a guild of apothecaries), and up to a quiet stretch of the northern wall. They spoke little of statecraft.
"Liana is with child again," Eddard said on one such walk, as autumn leaves skittered across the stone. "A third. She hopes for a daughter this time."
"And you?"William asked.
Eddard's smile was small,genuine. "I hope for a child who likes ledgers. The Vale's accounts are a terror." He glanced at William. "You should visit. The terraces are green. The spring… it sings a different song now. Kinder."
William nodded. He had not been to the Vale in years. The thought of the journey, of the formalities, of seeing the vibrant life Eddard had built from the rubble of his father's ambition, was both appealing and exhausting. "Perhaps in the spring," he said, the non-committal answer of an old man.
Their talk would then drift to the small things: a new breed of sheep the clans were pasturing in the high valleys, the latest convoluted treatise from the Academy on "jurisprudential pluralism," the antics of Eddard's two young boys. It was during these meandering conversations that William felt most like a person, and least like a king.
His other solace was the covenant-stone. Its light was a constant in his private chambers. He no longer sought answers from it. He simply sat with it, as one might sit with an old, silent friend. Its pulse was the pulse of the kingdom he had built—not the frantic beat of war or the steady tick of administration, but the deep, slow, complex rhythm of a living system. The obsidian shard from the Eye remained in its lead box. He never took it out anymore. The stone's multi-hued light was song enough.
The peace of this late reign was broken not by war or metaphysical threat, but by the most predictable of storms: succession.
Daerlon's grandson, Corwin, was now a man. He had not followed his grandfather into subtle bureaucratic manipulation. He was a scholar, but of a different breed—