NEVA POV
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The convening was held in the council hall at the centre of the nearest formal wolf territory — a building that had been built to impress, all cold stone and high ceilings and the specific architectural language of institutions that wanted you to understand, before you said a single word, that you were small and what you were standing inside was very large.
I walked in anyway.
The hall had fourteen family seats arranged in a horseshoe around a central floor — the families with convening rights, some of them represented by their own people, some by advocates, all of them present in the specific watching quality of people who had come to see how something resolved. Not neutral. Watching had already decided, most of them, in whatever direction the intelligence they'd received
