Darius's POV
The chamber had emptied, but the shift it carried had not.
I remained seated at the head of the table, the last of the documents still spread before me. The silence that followed a council session was rarely quiet in any meaningful sense; it simply removed the voices, leaving behind the structure of what had been said and what had been decided.
Today, that structure held something new.
My attention moved across the reports without truly reading them, my focus not on the content but on the pattern the meeting had taken. The eastern border had finally begun to move toward a decision, and the hesitation that had slowed it for weeks had narrowed into something more direct. The western route had been addressed earlier than expected, preventing the shift from creating a second point of weakness.
It had not been a complete resolution, but it had been movement, and that alone was enough to mark the difference.
