Sarvek Tarvond was the oldest person in any room he entered, and he was tired of what that meant.
It meant patience. It meant perspective. It meant being the one who remembered when the others forgot, who cautioned when they rushed, who stood in the present and pointed at the past and said *we have been here before, and here is what it cost us.* It meant being the institutional memory of a civilization that was moving faster than memory could serve, and the exhaustion of watching the young repeat the old mistakes with the confident energy of people who believed that precedent was something that happened to other people.
He was ninety-one. The oldest surviving Lizardman in the Sovereign Dominion — the last of the Basin-generation, the generation that had been born in the origin territory before the expansion, before the kingdom, before the Sovereign's name was known beyond a single swamp.
