The opening was scheduled for two weeks out — enough time for the territories to prepare, for Vass to make whatever personal arrangements a ninety-one-year-old needed to make before attending something significant, for Hale to organize the specific practical details that the opening of a sealed underground chamber required.
Sera and Darius were given that night.
She told him everything when she got home — the four hours, Senna's speech, Corvin's, Vass naming Asha for the first time, the room's long exhale as the decision finally came. He listened the way he listened to things that mattered, and didn't speak until she'd given him all of it, every piece.
Then: "Asha."
"Asha," she said.
He held that name — the specific weight of a person who'd been sealed away for two hundred years final
