The Alpha Queen They Once Threw Away
Talis found herself, for the first time since inheriting her considerable role, genuinely uncertain whether she retained her confederation's full trust.
Then, three months later, word arrived that would prove considerably more troubling than any council disagreement.
A young initiate at the Academy, barely twelve years old, a quiet boy named Emrys who had only recently begun his own integration studies, had begun exhibiting entirely new symptoms unlike anything Ivy's original techniques, developed and refined across generations of careful, dedicated scholarship, had ever anticipated. His skin had grown faintly luminous in low light, a soft, silvery glow visible along his forearms and throat.