Inside the castle, what influence and money can buy together becomes hard to miss.
The main hall is broad and tall enough to swallow sound. Polished black-stone floors veined with thin lines of silver alloy. Tapestries on the side walls—old hunting scenes from the deep, monsters whose silhouettes I recognize and whose colors I've never seen rendered this faithfully.
The blue and white colors are pretty dominant inside.
Lamps overhead glow with soft, contained light. Not flame. Some kind of chambered crystal that hums at a frequency you only notice if you stop talking.
The strange part isn't the architecture.
It's that everyone we pass bows.
Servants pause and bend at the waist. A scribe carrying a stack of papers stops cold and dips his head. Two guards in formal armor straighten and salute. A woman in a high-collared dress drops a half-curtsy and waits for Veric to clear her line of sight before resuming her walk.
Every single person.
