NEVA POV
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The compound gathered for dinner the night before departure, the full round table configuration that had become, across every significant threshold this story had crossed, the way this family marked the edges of enormous things.
Bekah outdid herself. She always did, before something that mattered, as though feeding everyone properly was her particular form of blessing the undertaking ahead.
Corva sat beside Maren Loch. Torval Sen, weaker now but present, insisted on making the journey himself despite his cane and his ninety-one years, saying he'd waited seventy years and wasn't going to let his body's opinion on the matter overrule his own.
Pell arrived that evening, quiet, prepared, the specific readiness of a man who had spent eleven years hunting and was about to spend
