POV: Ashina
The session with Seraphina the following morning was different from their previous work together.
The earlier sessions had been exploratory, both of them learning what the inheritance contained and how to access it, moving through the accumulated knowledge with the careful attention of people cataloguing something vast and unfamiliar. This session had a specific objective and a deadline, and the difference in atmosphere was immediate and clarifying.
They worked in Seraphina's room in the early morning quiet, before the pack had fully woken, sitting in the arrangement they had developed for deliberate access work. Seraphina had pushed the furniture back to create clear space, which Ashina had noticed she always did when she was preparing for something that required her full concentration. The habit of a woman who had learned to make her environment support her work rather than simply existing in it.
