The morning air on the Artanis bastion’s highest balcony was cool and carried the scent of damp soil and blooming night-flowers. Vernon leaned against the smooth, cream-colored stone, his gaze sweeping over the world his father governed. It was a vista of profound, untouched beauty: rolling grassy plains gave way to dense, purple-hued forests that stretched to the horizon, all beneath a sky streaked with the gentle pinks and golds of dawn. The only marks of technology were the distant, elegant spires and terraced agriculture of the Frendis settlements, designed to blend into the landscape rather than conquer it. They were like careful brushstrokes on a living canvas.

He heard the soft chime of the balcony door and turned.

His mother, Freiga, moved with a silence that seemed borrowed from the forests below. She came to stand beside him, and for a moment, they simply absorbed the view together. Vernon felt, as he always did, a deep sense of kinship just being near her. His own features were a map of her lineage.

Freiga was beauty etched in serene, otherworldly lines. Her face was a delicate heart shape, with high, sharp cheekbones that cast subtle shadows. Her eyes, the same luminous silver as Vernon’s, were large and slightly upturned at the corners, framed by lashes so pale they were almost white. Her hair, the color of winter moonlight, fell in a straight, heavy sheet down her back. From her, Vernon had inherited the elegant bone structure, the androgynous slenderness, and the peculiar, arresting silver of his gaze. His Terran father’s contribution was subtler—a slight broadening of the shoulders, a faint, stubborn set to the jaw that occasionally broke through the elven harmony of his face. But it was Freiga’s genes that sang the dominant song in his blood.

“They have arrived,” Vernon said finally, his voice quiet. “The Outerworld Concord delegation.”

Freiga did not look at him. Her silver eyes remained fixed on the horizon, on the direction from which ships would come. “And from my home? From the Sylvan Reach?”

He heard the hope, carefully banked but unmistakable. He hated to extinguish it. “None. I reviewed the manifests. The delegation is from the Ironstead, the Dust Barrens, the Glass Flats. No one from the Reach.”

A silence stretched between them, filled with the whisper of the wind. He saw her slender fingers tighten on the stone balustrade, the knuckles …