Aether's Obsession
The bite on his neck was a very specific, very deliberate kind of present tense.
Elias looked at the ceiling. He looked at the Aether-lit crystals in the corridor walls, the ambient glow of a restored core running at full capacity through the architecture of a building that had been half-dead two vel'soran ago. He thought about three months. About the outer archipelago cluster, which was far, and diplomatic work, which was boring, and Draven doing it surrounded by whatever species lived on the outer archipelago cluster, which was none of Elias's business, and which Elias was thinking about anyway with the focused unpleasantness of someone whose feelings had stopped cooperating with their pre