The Golden Throne
"He was the finest of us. That is not nostalgia, it is diagnosis. The finest steel makes the deepest cut, and Aeloran cut so deep that the wound has not closed in two thousand years. We built him a throne of gold because we believed gold could not tarnish. We were wrong about the gold. We were wrong about him. We were wrong about everything except the architecture, which remains, against all justice, very beautiful."
Inscription found in the ruins of Feladan, attributed to an unnamed Vaelith archivist, post-Breaking
The Vaelith did not conquer the world. They did something more insidious and more effective: they made the world want to be them.
In the three centuries following the Celestial Compact, while the other races were still adjusting to a world that now contained the children of gods, the luminous Seraphim descending from their high places, the branded Korvathi emerging from their deep ones, the Vaelith were building. Not armies, though they had those. Not fortresses, though they had those too, grown from living wood in shapes that made Grundir architects weep with a complicated mixture of admiration and professional jealousy. The Vaelith were building something harder to resist than any army: a civilization so accomplished, so refined, so thoroughly and undeniably superior in its outputs that opposing it felt less like resistance and more like ignorance.
Their cities were the oldest on Aradoth. Not the oldest settlements. The Grundir halls beneath the mountains predated Vaelith civilization by millennia, and the Kithara had been running their migration routes since before the forests learned to drop their leaves. But the Vaelith had been the first to build cities as statements of intent rather than necessities of shelter. Their capital, Feladan, was not merely a place where Vaelith lived. It was an argument. Every spire, every bridge of woven branches spanning the canopy, every hall where the walls were living wood shaped by centuries of patient cultivation, all of it said the same thing: We were here first. We have been doing this longest. We have been doing it best.
And the maddening thing, the thing that made the other races grind their teeth even as they sent their children to study in Vaelith academies, was that it was true.
The magic came first. It always came first with the Vaelith.
They had been listening to the echo of Aethon longer than any other race. Not because they were more attuned. The Dryathi heard the world's song more clearly than any Vaelith ever would, and the Grundir felt the resonance in stone with a directness the Vaelith could only theorize about. But the Vaelith had been studying the echo. Cataloguing it. Measuring the resonant frequencies of different materials, mapping the way the echo flowed through ley lines and pooled in certain groves and dissipated near iron deposits. They had turned the numinous into a discipline. They had made magic into a science, or at least into a technology, and in doing so they had achieved things no other race could match.
Their healers could mend bones with a whispered word. Their shapers could grow a bridge from seedling to span in a single season. Their weavers could spin fabrics that changed color with the wearer's mood, that shed rain like oiled leather, that could stop an arrow at twenty paces. Their scholars had developed a system of magical notation so precise that a spell transcribed in Vaelith arcane script could be cast by anyone with sufficient talent and training, regardless of race. A democratization of magic that the Vaelith loudly celebrated and quietly controlled, since the notation system itself was proprietary, taught only in Vaelith academies, and the advanced texts were kept in Vaelith libraries under Vaelith lock and Vaelith key.
The philosophy came second. The Vaelith had spent centuries asking questions that other races had not yet thought to formulate. What is the nature of the echo? If Aethon's voice created the world, and the echo is the residue of that voice, does the echo contain information about the speaker's intent? Can we reverse-engineer purpose from the physics of creation? Is there a moral order embedded in the structure of reality, or is morality a construct imposed by minds on a universe that is, at its foundation, merely mechanical? These were not idle questions for the Vaelith. They were the basis of a worldview, the Vaelithari, the "Way of Listening," that held that the highest calling of any sentient being was to understand, preserve, and amplify the echo. That the echo was not merely a residue but a responsibility. That to be attuned to the echo was to be, in some meaningful sense, closer to the truth of the world than those who were not.
It was a beautiful philosophy. It was also, conveniently, a philosophy that placed the Vaelith at the top of every hierarchy it described.
The art came third, and the art was devastating. Vaelith sculptors carved figures from living wood that seemed to breathe. Vaelith poets wrote in a form called the taelindra, the "song that teaches," designed to make the listener feel what it described rather than merely understand it. Vaelith painters used pigments derived from resonant minerals that shimmered with a faint luminescence, as if the paintings themselves were generating light. When other races encountered Vaelith art for the first time, the typical reaction was a long silence followed by a quiet reassessment of everything they had previously considered beautiful.
This was the trap, and it was a trap that required no malice to set. The Vaelith did not create their art to make other races feel inferior. They created it because they were, genuinely and without qualification, extraordinary artists. The inferiority was a side effect, not a goal. But the Vaelith were not above noticing the side effect and finding it useful.
And so the other races came to Feladan.
They came as students, at first. Young Tesseri diplomats arrived to study Vaelith rhetoric and departed speaking three languages they hadn't known existed. Grundir artificers came to examine Vaelith resonance theory and returned to their mountain halls with ideas that would take them generations to implement. Even the Kithara sent their sharpest hunters to learn Vaelith tracking magic, spells that could follow a scent through rain, that could read the age of a footprint from the pattern of its erosion, and the hunters came back faster and more lethal and carrying a complicated grudge against the people who had made them so.
They came as diplomats, negotiating trade agreements that were always fair in their letter and always advantageous to the Vaelith in their execution. Vaelith negotiators had a talent for structuring deals in which both parties benefited, but the Vaelith benefited more, and the difference was always just small enough that objecting to it would seem petty. It was the diplomacy of the generous host who always, somehow, ends up sitting at the head of the table.
They came as supplicants. When border disputes arose between the Tesseri city-states, it was Vaelith arbiters who were invited to mediate. When a plague swept through the Hearthborn settlements on the western coast, it was Vaelith healers who arrived with the cure. When the Grundir miners broke through into a caesura pocket in the deep levels of Thornhold and lost forty workers to the grey dissolution, it was Vaelith scholars who analyzed the site and determined the boundary conditions that would prevent future breaches. The Vaelith helped. They genuinely helped. And every act of help was also an act of demonstration: Look what we can do. Look what you cannot. Look how much you need us.
This was not empire in the traditional sense. The Vaelith claimed no territory beyond the Great Forest and its immediate surroundings. They imposed no tributes, demanded no fealty, installed no puppet governments. What they built was something more durable than empire: they built centrality. They became the hub around which the wheel of civilization turned. Other races could refuse Vaelith aid, reject Vaelith scholarship, decline Vaelith arbitration. But doing so meant accepting worse medicine, slower magic, rougher justice. The Vaelith had made themselves indispensable, and indispensability is a form of power that no rebellion can address, because you cannot overthrow someone you need.
The other races saw this clearly. The Tesseri, who understood power in all its forms, watched the Vaelith ascendancy with the professional appreciation of a con artist watching a better con artist work. The Grundir, who valued self-sufficiency above almost everything, chafed at the growing dependence and responded by redoubling their efforts in the deep forges, determined to match Vaelith magic with Grundir craft. The Kithara largely ignored the question, as the Kithara ignored most questions that could not be resolved by running very fast in a straight line.
But no one challenged the Vaelith. Not directly. Because challenging the Vaelith meant challenging the idea that civilization should be led by its most civilized members, and that was an argument that was very difficult to win when the most civilized members were standing right there, being civilized at you.
Into this world of unchallenged supremacy, the three Great Houses rose like pillars beneath a canopy.
House Aelindra had always been the voice of the Vaelith, their public face, their outstretched hand, their smile. The Aelindra were diplomats in the way that water is wet: not as a profession but as a fundamental property. They spoke every major language on Aradoth and several minor ones. They maintained embassies in every significant city. Their representatives attended every festival, every coronation, every funeral of note, arriving with gifts that were always appropriate, always beautiful, and always very slightly more expensive than whatever the host had expected. This was not generosity. It was positioning. Every Aelindra gift said: We know you. We understand your customs. We honor your traditions. And we can afford to honor them more lavishly than you can.
The head of House Aelindra during the ascendancy was a woman named Serathiel, widely considered the finest diplomat of her age and possibly of any age. She had a gift for making other people feel heard. Not merely listened to, but heard, in the deep sense, the sense that implies comprehension and sympathy and genuine engagement. She could sit across a negotiating table from a Grundir clan chief who had sworn blood-oath never to concede a single point, and within an hour the chief would be explaining his deepest concerns while Serathiel nodded and asked the exact right questions and slowly, invisibly, gently, led the conversation to the conclusion she had determined before she walked into the room. The Grundir chief would leave believing he had driven a hard bargain. Serathiel would leave with everything she came for.
She was not unkind. That was the dangerous thing about the Aelindra. They were not unkind. They genuinely liked the people they manipulated. They found the other races charming, in the way that an adult finds a child charming: endearing in their earnestness, touching in their ambitions, worthy of protection and guidance and the gentle correction of their more egregious mistakes. The Aelindra's condescension was not cruelty. It was love, or something that wore love's clothing so well that the difference was academic.
House Thandor wore no such clothing. The Thandor were soldiers, and they had a soldier's relationship with subtlety, which is to say they acknowledged its existence and then ignored it. Where House Aelindra maintained embassies, House Thandor maintained garrisons. Where the Aelindra offered gifts, the Thandor offered protection. And where the Aelindra's influence was invisible, the Thandor's was very deliberately visible: armored patrols moving through the forests beyond Vaelith borders, war-mages stationed at crossroads and mountain passes, sentinel towers rising above the canopy like raised fists.
"For everyone's safety," the Thandor said, and they may even have believed it. The caesurae were spreading, slowly but measurably, and the things that emerged from the grey spaces, the Blighted, the twisted, the wrong, were a genuine threat. Thandor patrols intercepted and destroyed these emergences with professional efficiency. They also, incidentally, maintained a detailed map of every military installation, every trade route, every defensible position, and every strategic resource within three hundred miles of the Great Forest. The Thandor were not conquerors. They were something more modern: they were a security apparatus, and like all security apparatuses, they had discovered that the best way to ensure security was to know everything about everyone and be capable of reaching them quickly.
The Thandor commander was a general named Vaelstrom, a tactical savant who had never lost a battle and never started one, and who considered this second fact more important than the first. Vaelstrom understood something that most military minds do not: that the purpose of an army is not to fight but to make fighting unnecessary. His patrols were not designed to provoke. They were designed to be seen, to remind every settlement within range that the Vaelith were there, that the Vaelith were capable, and that the Vaelith were paying attention. It was the diplomacy of the drawn sword that never strikes, and it was as effective as any treaty Serathiel ever negotiated.
And then there was House Veylith.
If House Aelindra was the voice and House Thandor the fist, House Veylith was the mind, and the mind, as it so often does, harbored the most dangerous ambitions while wearing the mildest expression. The Veylith were scholars. Their libraries contained more knowledge than any other institution on Aradoth. Their archives preserved texts that predated the Celestial Compact, that predated the God War, that predated, some whispered, the Speaking itself, though this was almost certainly exaggeration layered atop wishful thinking. Their researchers mapped ley lines with mathematical precision. Their theorists developed models of resonant energy flow that would not be improved upon for centuries. Their historians wrote accounts so detailed and so carefully sourced that other races simply stopped writing their own histories and adopted the Veylith versions, which was, depending on your perspective, either a tribute to Veylith scholarship or the most successful act of cultural imperialism ever committed without a single soldier being deployed.
The Veylith were keepers, and keepers, by nature, accumulate. They accumulated texts. They accumulated artifacts. They accumulated knowledge of the kind that was too dangerous to share: resonance frequencies that could shatter stone, binding techniques that could immobilize a living mind, theoretical frameworks for manipulating the echo in ways that the Vaelithari philosophy explicitly forbade. The Veylith kept this knowledge the way a responsible adult keeps a loaded weapon: locked away, carefully maintained, never used except in extremis. But they kept it. And they added to it. And with each generation, the vault grew deeper and the key holders fewer, and the line between "preserving dangerous knowledge" and "developing dangerous capabilities" grew thinner, and no one inside House Veylith seemed to notice the line was there at all.
Their ambitions would not become apparent for centuries. But the seeds were planted here, in the quiet libraries of the ascendancy, by scholars who told themselves they were merely curious, merely thorough, merely doing what scholars do. The road to Aeloran's ritual began in a Veylith archive, with a researcher pulling an ancient text from a shelf and thinking: What if?
Aeloran was born in the four hundred and twelfth year after the Compact, the second son of a minor branch of House Aelindra with distant ties to both Thandor and Veylith, a genealogy that gave him claim to all three Houses and deep roots in none, which suited him perfectly. He was, from childhood, the kind of person around whom other people rearranged themselves. Not because he demanded it. Because he deserved it, or seemed to, which amounted to the same thing.
His magical talent manifested early and manifested enormous. By the age of twelve he could hear the echo with a clarity that senior Aethon Seekers achieved only after decades of meditation. By twenty he had developed three new resonance techniques that were still being taught in academies three centuries later. By thirty he had published a treatise on the relationship between the echo and the Anchor Stones, the great stabilizing points where Aethon's creative energy had pooled most deeply, that fundamentally reframed how the Vaelith understood the structure of their world. He was not merely gifted. He was the kind of gifted that makes other gifted people reconsider their definition of the word.
He was also, and this mattered more than his magic, charismatic in the way that a flame is charismatic to moths. Not through any effort of attraction but through the simple, overwhelming fact of burning brighter than anything nearby. When Aeloran spoke, people listened, not because his words were louder but because they were clearer. He had a way of articulating things that others had felt but could not express, of naming the unnamed anxiety, of pointing to the precise crack in the foundation that everyone else had been stepping around. His political rivals, and he accumulated them the way all exceptional people accumulate rivals, effortlessly and inevitably, described him as "dangerously persuasive," which was true, and "manipulative," which was not. Aeloran did not manipulate. He simply saw more clearly than the people around him, and when he described what he saw, they recognized the truth of it, and the recognition felt like being led when it was actually being shown.
He united the three Houses in the span of a single decade, which should have been impossible. The Houses had maintained their independence for centuries, balancing against each other in a triangulation of power that every political theorist on Aradoth considered permanent. Aeloran did not break this balance. He transcended it. He offered House Aelindra the diplomatic expansion they craved: new relationships with the Seraphim courts, formal recognition from the Grundir clanholds. He offered House Thandor the military modernization they needed: new resonance-forged weapons, new war-magic doctrines, new authority to expand their patrols. And he offered House Veylith the one thing they wanted more than anything else: access. Access to texts they had been denied. Access to research sites beyond the Great Forest. Access to the deep archives beneath Feladan, where the oldest and most dangerous knowledge was kept, where even the Veylith's own archivists required royal permission to enter.
In exchange, he asked for unity. One throne. One voice. One direction for the Vaelith people.
The vote was not close.
They crowned him in the Great Hall of Feladan, beneath a canopy of living branches that the shapers had grown into the shape of interlocking hands. They placed on his head a crown of gold and living wood, and they gave him a title that had not been used in eight centuries: Aeloran Tael'shira, Aeloran, Voice of the Forest. And for the first decades of his rule, he was everything the title promised. He expanded the Sovereignty to its greatest extent. He sponsored art that the Vaelith would remember for millennia. He commissioned the Great Survey, which mapped every ley line, every resonance node, every known caesura on the continent. He established the Academy of the Echo, where scholars from every race were welcome to study, an act of genuine generosity that also happened to ensure that the best minds of every civilization spent their formative years in Feladan, learning to think in Vaelith frameworks, absorbing Vaelith values, returning home as ambassadors for a culture they had come to love.
History would have remembered him as a golden king. The greatest of the Vaelith. The architect of a civilization that might have lasted forever.
But Aeloran was listening to something the rest of them could not hear.
It started, as obsessions often do, with a question.
The Great Survey had produced volumes of data about the echo, its patterns, its frequencies, its behavior in different environments. Aeloran, who could hear the echo more clearly than anyone alive, spent years with this data, correlating it with his own perceptions, looking for patterns that the instruments could not detect but his ears could. And what he found disturbed him.
The echo was fading.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. The diminishment was so gradual that it could only be measured across centuries, and even then only if you knew exactly what to measure. But Aeloran could hear it, the way a musician can hear a string going flat before any instrument confirms it. The echo of Aethon's voice, the residual vibration that held the world together, that made magic possible, that made the Anchor Stones stable, that kept the caesurae from spreading, was losing amplitude. Fraction by fraction, century by century, the sound was dying.
He shared this finding with the scholars of House Veylith, and they confirmed it with their instruments. The data was irrefutable. The echo was decaying. The decay was accelerating, imperceptibly but measurably, and at the current rate, the Veylith scholars were careful to note that projections over such long timescales were inherently unreliable, the echo would fall below the threshold necessary to maintain the Anchor Stones within approximately eight thousand years.
Eight thousand years. An eternity, by mortal reckoning. Several lifetimes even by Vaelith standards. Plenty of time to study the problem, to develop solutions, to convene councils and commission research and write very thorough reports.
Aeloran heard the number and understood something the scholars did not: eight thousand years was not a deadline. It was a lie. The decay was not linear. It was geometric. Each diminishment weakened the structures that resisted further diminishment, which accelerated the next diminishment, which further weakened the structures, in a cascading failure that would not announce itself with a gradual dimming but with a sudden, catastrophic collapse. The echo would seem stable for millennia, and then it would simply stop, like a held note that sustains and sustains and then breaks.
He had decades, not millennia. Perhaps less.
Aeloran said nothing of this to the public. He said nothing to the Houses. He locked the Veylith scholars' projections in the deep archives and began his private research, and from this moment forward, everything that followed was both inevitable and catastrophic, the way an avalanche is both inevitable once the snow reaches a certain depth and catastrophic once it begins to move.
He studied the Anchor Stones for seven years. These were the great stabilizing points of the world, places where Aethon's creative energy had pooled during the Speaking, where the echo was strongest, where the fabric of reality was thickest and most resistant to the entropic dissolution of the caesurae. There were nine of them, scattered across Aradoth, and Aeloran visited each one, spending months at a time in silent communion with the residual energy, listening with that impossible clarity that was both his greatest gift and his greatest curse.
What he heard confirmed his worst fears. The Anchor Stones were not merely conducting the echo. They were consuming it. Each Stone drew resonance from its surrounding environment to maintain its own stability, creating a localized zone of strength surrounded by a widening zone of depletion. The Stones were keeping the world stable in their immediate vicinity by draining it everywhere else. They were a treatment that was slowly becoming worse than the disease.
He studied the caesurae, the grey, dead spaces where the echo had already faded below viability, where reality itself had begun to unravel. He stood at the edge of one near the eastern coast, a grey expanse the size of a small lake where nothing grew, nothing moved, nothing existed except a faint visual distortion, like looking at the world through water that was not quite transparent. He listened to the silence inside it. Not the absence of sound. Silence requires a medium through which sound could travel, and inside the caesura there was no medium. There was no air. There was no space, in the way that space is normally understood. There was a condition, he struggled for the word and settled on cessation, that was not death, because death is an event within a living system, and this was the failure of the system itself.
He looked at the caesura and understood, with the crystalline horror of a brilliant mind confronting an insoluble problem, that this was the future. Not the distant future. Not the theoretical future. The future that was already arriving, grey and silent, one inch at a time, eating the world from its edges like a fire that burns without flame.
He could not accept this. He was Aeloran the Bright, the Voice of the Forest, the most powerful mage in the history of the most magically accomplished race on Aradoth. Acceptance was not in his vocabulary. The word that lived in Aeloran's vocabulary, the word that defined him more completely than any title or honorific, was solve. Every problem he had ever encountered had yielded to intelligence and will. Every obstacle had been a puzzle with a solution. He had united three Houses that had been separate for centuries. He had expanded the Sovereignty beyond anything his predecessors had imagined. He had heard things in the echo that no one else could hear, and he had been right every single time.
He would be right about this too.
The theory came to him in pieces, over years, assembled from the Veylith archives and his own observations and the peculiar intuition that genius sometimes mistakes for logic. The echo was fading because it had no source. Aethon was gone, departed, dissolved, transcended, whatever word you preferred for the absence of a god. The echo was a residue, and residues dissipate. This was not a flaw in the world's design. It was the natural consequence of a world that had been spoken into existence by a voice that was no longer speaking.
The solution, then, was not to prevent the dissipation. That was impossible. You could not un-ring a bell, could not un-fade an echo. The solution was to replenish the echo. To feed energy back into the system. To create a resonance amplifier powerful enough to strengthen the echo faster than it decayed, not permanently, nothing was permanent, but long enough to buy the world time. Centuries. Maybe millennia. Enough time for someone, someday, to find a better solution.
The mathematics were elegant. The theory was sound. The energy requirements were staggering.
Aeloran ran the calculations himself, because he trusted no one else to get them right. He needed a resonance output equivalent to the combined magical capacity of every Vaelith mage alive, sustained continuously for seven days. This was impossible. No mage could sustain maximum output for more than a few hours. No group of mages could coordinate their output with the precision the ritual required. The frequencies had to be exact. The harmonics had to be perfect. A variance of one part in ten thousand would not merely cause the ritual to fail. It would cause it to fail catastrophically, releasing the accumulated energy in an uncontrolled burst that would do more damage than the decay it was meant to prevent.
He needed something that was not a mage. Something that did not generate resonance but conducted it, a living channel through which the world's own creative energy could flow, amplified and focused, without the distortion that a thinking mind inevitably introduced. He needed a conduit that was connected to the world's creative substrate at a fundamental level, the way a root is connected to the soil, the way a river is connected to the water table. Something that did not use magic but was magic, in the oldest and most literal sense.
He needed a living thing that was also, in some essential way, the world itself.
He spent three years looking for alternatives. He considered the Anchor Stones themselves, but they were already overburdened. He considered the great trees of the Old Forest, which were deeply resonant, but their consciousness was too diffuse, too slow, too vegetable to serve as a focused conduit. He considered the Seraphim, who carried divine energy, but their energy was derived from the Archons, not from the world itself. They were conduits to heaven, not to earth. He considered artifacts, constructs, theoretical devices.
None of them worked. The mathematics were unforgiving. He needed a living conduit with a direct, empathic connection to the world's creative substrate. He needed something that could feel the echo the way the world felt it, not as a sound heard from outside but as a vibration experienced from within, the way your own heartbeat is not a noise but a condition of being alive.
And somewhere in the third year of his search, during a sleepless night in the deep archives beneath Feladan, surrounded by texts that described in clinical detail the empathic networks of every resonant species on Aradoth, Aeloran's gaze settled on a passage about the Rootsong.
The Rootsong. The empathic network that connected every Dryathi to every other Dryathi and to the living world itself. A consciousness that was not individual but collective, not separate from the world but continuous with it. A network through which resonance flowed as naturally as blood through veins.
He read the passage. He read it again. He ran the calculations a third time, a fourth time, a fifth, hoping to find an error, a flaw, an alternative interpretation that would point him toward a different solution. There was none. The mathematics were clear. The Rootsong was the only conduit on Aradoth with sufficient bandwidth, sufficient depth, sufficient connection to the world's creative substrate to channel the energy the ritual required.
Aeloran closed the book. He sat in the dark for a long time.
He was not a cruel man. That is the thing the histories must reckon with, even the histories written by those who suffered most from what he did. He was not a cruel man. He was a brilliant man who loved the world and could not bear to watch it die, and who had found a solution that required him to do something unconscionable, and who had looked for every other option and found none, and who was now sitting alone in the dark with a choice that no person should ever have to make: watch the world fade, or save it at a cost that would make the saving a kind of damnation.
He thought of the caesurae, grey and spreading. He thought of the echo, fading by fractions too small to measure and too real to deny. He thought of the Anchor Stones, consuming the energy they were meant to preserve. He thought of the future, the grey, silent, empty future in which the last echo died and the world simply ceased, not with fire and drama but with a slow, quiet dissolution into nothing.
And he thought of the Dryathi.
He had met them. He had walked among them in the deep forests where the Rootsong was strongest, where you could feel it in your bones: the hum of living things connected to living things, the pulse of a world that was still, despite everything, alive. The Dryathi had welcomed him with the gentle courtesy they showed all guests, their dark eyes full of the calm certainty of creatures who had never been at war with anything, because they had never needed to be. They were the world's voice. They were the echo made flesh. They were, in every way that mattered, what the Vaelith philosophy said all beings should aspire to be: fully integrated with creation, fully attuned to the Resonance, fully and perfectly alive.
And they were the only thing that could save the world.
Aeloran rose from his chair in the archive. He walked through the dark corridors of Feladan's undercity, past the locked doors of the Veylith vaults, up through the spiraling passages carved into the heartwood of the great tree that formed the palace's core, and emerged onto the balcony that overlooked the forest canopy. The stars were bright. The echo was faint. The world was dying, one imperceptible fraction at a time, and he was the only person alive who knew.
He turned his gaze toward the east, toward the deep forests where the Dryathi lived, and in his eyes there was something that looked like sorrow and something that looked like certainty and something that looked like the terrible, magnificent, unforgivable resolve of a man who has decided to save the world and damn himself in the process.
The Golden Throne had found its purpose. The cost of that purpose would be measured in centuries of suffering, and the bill would come due in ways that Aeloran, for all his brilliance, could not begin to imagine.
But that is the next chapter's grief to carry.
He was the best of us. Remember that, when you read what comes next. He was the best of us, and the best of us was not good enough.
Serathiel of House Aelindra, private correspondence, undated
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