BELLE'S POV It happens on a Sunday.Not planned — which is, I'm learning, how the most significant things in this world tend to happen. The Council sessions are planned. The invocations are planned. The ceremonies with their old tongue and their legal mechanisms are planned down to the syllable.This is not planned.This is the pack deciding, collectively and without announcement, that Sunday is the day.Lucian tells me the night before that the territory's full assembly happens twice a year.Not the formal gathering — the older version, the one that predates the Council's charter and the corporate infrastructure and everything built on top of what this world originally was. All of Eastern territory's pack members, gathered in the same space, no agenda, no procedure. Just the pack being the pack in the oldest way it knows how."It's tomorrow," he says. "I should have told you sooner.""Why didn't you?" I ask.He is quiet for a moment."Because I didn't know what it would be like," he
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