บททั้งหมดของ The King Born In Chains: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 25

Four years of uninterrupted peace transformed the landscape of Oakhaven faster than any war had ruined it. Where the dismal palisades of Sector Four had once stood in the marshy mud of the Black Silt, a broad, stone-paved canal now cut through green pastures, carrying grain barges north to the capital. The coal pits of Coal Ridge were lit by glass oil-lamps, their air ventilated by massive water-driven iron fans engineered by Master Elian’s apprentices. Children born in the year of the Iron Spire’s fall were now ten years old, a generation that had never carried a wicker peat basket, never bowed before a mounted overseer, and never felt the bite of a branding iron.To mark the tenth anniversary of the Liberation, the Grand Representative Assembly commissioned the construction of the Monument of the Awakening, a towering seventy-foot pillar of polished red granite erected atop the grand terrace before the National Senate in Veridia. At

Peace, Kaelen discovered, was a quiet thief. It did not steal life in a sudden flash of steel on a muddy road, nor did it break a man with the sudden roar of a cannon. It eroded him slowly, like river water grinding away the base of a granite cliff, until only the core remained.In the final winter before the Great Transition, a heavy snowfall wrapped the mountains of Coal Ridge in a blanket of absolute, unbroken white.Inside the small wood-paneled study of the Sovereign's retreat at Stone River, Kaelen sat alone before a low oak desk. He was forty-two now. The light hair that had once caught the orange firelight of Sector Four was heavily silvered at his temples and jaw. His face was deeply lined, carved by thirty years of bone-deep fatigue, grief, and unyielding responsibility.On the corner of his desk sat a quiet ledger, not of