The review panel had been meeting for six days when Vaelor felt it snap.
Not the bond , the bond was fine, the bond was better than fine, the bond was the clearest it had been in a year and a half and it was the part of his daily existence that was most reliably not a problem. What snapped was his composure in a Council session, and it snapped in the specific way that composure snapped after eight months of sustained pressure without adequate rest, which was quietly and in a direction nobody had been watching.
Threx was suspended but not removed. Suspension meant he was not in the session chamber, but it did not mean he was not operating it meant he was operating through the network he had spent decades building, through the two neutral Council members whose neutrality had become something more actively motivated in the last week, through the procedural challenges that were arriving in the review panel's schedule with the regularity of something being coordinated.
