DUKE POV
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He'd drawn the ceremony while it happened, the way he drew everything that mattered — not staged, not asked to leave the moment and observe from outside it, simply present with the sketchbook in hand, capturing what unfolded in real time.
He'd known, watching the crowd assemble that morning, that this was going to be the last page of the current book. Not because the book was nearly full — it had space left, several pages — but because some endings announced themselves before the pencil ever touched paper, and this one had been announcing itself since the moment Corva began speaking.
He drew the whole yard.
Not Ryke and Neva specifically, centered and posed the way a lesser artist might have chosen. The whole arrangement — the crowd surrounding them, the specific spatial
