Aether's Obsession
It had settled into something more like a missing weight, the specific absence of a person who had been woven so thoroughly into the architecture of every day that two vel'soran of relentless work had not managed to paper over the gaps.
He had restructured an entire civilization. Integrated conquered peoples, built new clans, rewrote laws, found a desert people nobody had documented, and brought them under the banner of Zephyria without a single battle. He had done all of it efficiently and well and with the focused energy of a man who had discovered that as long as he kept moving, the thing chasing him had to keep running to catch up.
It still caught up. Every night, in the quiet after the