Arvella didn't tell anyone what Malachar's last words were until later.
She needed time to process them —to understood them the moment he said them, the way you understood things that arrived in the register of truth rather than information. But understanding was not the same as knowing what to do with the understanding, and she had learned in seven months of being the Ascendant and twenty-one years of being a person that the gap between those two things was where most of the actual work happened.
She spent the day in motion. The morning intelligence briefing with Kael and Draven — the picture reshaping itself around the new information from the record. Afternoon council work — the ley line easement documentation that Yara's team had submitted required three separate sign-offs across two
