Hale called the gathering six weeks after Tavri's return.
He'd spent those weeks organizing it with the specific, unhurried care of someone who understood that the decision being made would outlast anyone in the room, and so the room needed to contain exactly the right people, given exactly the right information, with enough time to actually think rather than simply react.
Sera went. Darius did not — they'd discussed this carefully, the weight of the Alpha King's presence potentially shifting the balance of a decision that genuinely needed to belong to the territories themselves.
Tavri went, and Iris, and Cole — Cole because Cole went everywhere significant and extracted useful information from rooms without altering them, a skill nobody had ever fully explained and everyone had learned
