Led through the gates by a detachment of stone-faced Veynar veterans, the delegation entered the settlement…. and immediately, an eerie, suffocating unease settled over every single foreign envoy.
The Veynar was not the Veynar they remembered.
In the past, when rare trade delegations or peace emissaries had visited this settlement, the atmosphere had always carried a tense, prickly wariness.
Back then, even though the Veynar were fiercely proud, their people had lived under the constant, exhausting shadow of encroaching enemies.
Common hunters would eye strangers with tight jaws and twitching fingers near their weapon; women would hurry children inside the huts watching warily from the shadows of their huts with sharp, defensive glares, and the guards maintained a tight, paranoid perimeter.
Now, the air itself felt completely rewritten and the entire settlement seemed to breathe with an alien, effortless grandeur.
