The flames of the Unity Summit had barely cooled when the world’s old darkness crawled back to the surface.
Even as new banners fluttered on the towers of Sanctum, even as children learned to laugh in a dozen mingled tongues beneath the Gathering Tree, there were those who could not accept what had changed. In hollow halls where the scent of power still clung to stone and in chambers where bloodlines whispered treason, new conspiracies bloomed like mould, silent, patient, deadly.
Not all of Elara’s enemies would come as armies. Some, she knew, would come quietly with nothing but a blade and a name carved from vengeance.
It was the third night after the Summit when the past tried to reclaim her.
Elara had dismissed her last guard with a gentle shake of her head, leaving the north path that wound beneath the Gathering Tree hers alone. She walked in the half-light, dusk trailing the sound of her steps, reading a letter from a child in the far west, a scrawled note about moonflowers and a
