They worked in the room adjacent to the shrine for two hours before moving to the guest wing, where the work continued.
The work was documentation. He was very good at documentation, and having Miron there to read the Drakonir script and Lysera there to provide the Elyndor archival context made the documentation more complete than anything he had assembled previously. By the end of the first hour they had a complete parallel transcription of the covenant: the Elyndor version on one page, the Drakonir version beside it, with Miron's notes on the linguistic relationship between the two and the places where the translation choices of each version shed light on the original meaning.
By the end of the second hour they had a clause-by-clause comparison between the covenant and the Prophecy. The comparison was the most complete piece of analysis he had produced in three weeks in Elyndor. Forty-seven points of divergence. Some were small — a word choice, a passive construction where an active one had been — and some were significant, and some were transformative: entire clauses that did not exist in the covenant, inserted into the Prophecy. The clauses about the hero. The clauses about the princess. The clauses about the Black Dragon.
He laid the analysis out in the parallel column format he had been using since the early days in the Archive. Forty-seven points, each documented with the covenant's original language and the Prophecy's corresponding passage, each with a brief analysis of what the change produced in terms of meaning and implication.
He said, when he had finished: This is the presentation.
Lysera said: Yes.
Miron said, looking at the forty-seven points: I have been building toward this for eleven years. He said it with the tone of someone taking stock of a journey. It is more complete than I imagined it would be.
Thalion Orr had been sitting in the corner of the room since they had moved there. He was not contributing to the documentation — that was not his expertise — but he was present, which was itself significant. A witness to the documentation. A person who had opened the room.
He said, from the corner: What happens now?
Renji said: The trial is in nine days. The fourteen-day delay request was approved, which gives us the additional time the procedural regulation requires. In nine days, I stand before whatever assembly Caerion has arranged and I present the forty-seven points. And the covenant. And the comparison. And everything we have found.
Thalion Orr said: And the treaty in three pieces. You have this piece. You have the Drakonir piece from Ravenna. And the blade.
Renji said: There is a third piece?
Thalion Orr looked at him. He said: The Lunaryth Sword. The pommel. I have known since I was a child that the pommel contains something. The Orr training describes it as the final witness — a piece of something old that the sword was designed to hold and protect. I was told it was ceremonial. That it was not to be opened except in extraordinary circumstances.
Miron said, quietly: The treaty has three sections?
Thalion Orr said: I did not know it was a treaty. I was told it was a witness document.
Lysera said: A witness document is a record of an agreement's execution. It describes the ceremony of signing. What terms were agreed. Who was present. She paused. It is also evidence.
Renji said: The pommel contains the third section of the original treaty. The witnessing record. He said this not as a question but as the extension of a logic he could now trace. The covenant was divided for protection: one complete copy held by each party, and the witnessing record held by the neutral instrument — the sword itself, which neither party could access unilaterally because the Orr mechanism required the Orr heir to open it, and the sword had been placed in Elyndor's ceremonial space as the neutral ground.
Miron said: The sword was not a weapon.
Renji said: No. It was a witness. A record-holder. The mechanism in the plinth was not designed to test a hero. It was designed to confirm, at each ceremony, that both parties were present to maintain the covenant.
Thalion Orr said, from the corner, with the tone of a man arriving at a conclusion he has been approaching for several days: And I am the holder of the mechanism. Not the hero. The mechanism's custodian.
Renji said: Yes.
Thalion Orr said: Then the extraordinary circumstance has arrived.
Renji said: Yes.
Thalion Orr stood up. He said: We go to the sword tonight. When there are no ceremonies scheduled and the shrine staff have rotated out. He looked at all three of them. I will open the pommel. We will have the complete treaty. And then we will have everything we need for the presentation.
He spent the afternoon after the discovery of the three-part treaty structure working out the implications of the structure for the presentation.
The three-part structure was elegant in a way that he thought was intentional. The main document with both parties' seals. The witnessing record in the sword's pommel. The parallel copy held by the Drakonir. Three pieces, each held by a different party, none of them individually sufficient to prove the whole, all of them together constituting an undeniable complete record.
He thought: someone designed this to be resilient. Designed it so that no single party losing their piece would destroy the covenant's completeness. The Drakonir could always produce their piece. The sword's pommel could always be opened by the Orr mechanism. The main document was in the most secure location in the palace, behind a biological lock that made administrative seizure impossible without Thalion Orr's cooperation.
Three hundred years of Caerion's administrative management and the treaty was still intact in all three pieces, because the treaty had been designed by people who understood that important agreements needed to be protected against the people who might later want to suppress them.
He thought about who had designed it this way. He thought about the High Keeper whose seal was on the main document, the role that had been absorbed into the Oracle's office three hundred years ago. He thought about the Speaker of the Stone Court whose seal was on the Drakonir's piece. He thought about whoever had decided that the witnessing record should be in the sword, protected by the Orr mechanism, held in the family whose function was originally diplomatic rather than ceremonial.
He thought: the people who made this treaty understood what they were making. They understood that it was significant and that significance attracted risk and that the risk needed to be managed by distribution. They distributed the treaty across three parties so that no single party could lose it all at once.
They had been right to do so. The three hundred years had proven them right. Caerion had managed to suppress the knowledge that the treaty existed, but he had not been able to destroy the treaty itself, because destroying it would have required destroying all three pieces simultaneously, which would have required the cooperation of all three parties simultaneously, which was not something he could achieve.
He thought: the covenant had protected itself.
He thought: there is something worth documenting in the specific design choices that made the covenant resilient across three centuries of suppression. He would include it in the presentation, in the section that explained the treaty's structure. The design of the treaty was part of the treaty's significance. It was not just a document. It was a system designed to survive.
He found Elirane in the evening. He told her what they had found. He told her about the three-piece structure. He told her about the final clause from the witnessing record.
She listened. When he had finished she said: Neither party alone can sustain it.
He said: Yes.
She said, quietly: That is true of more than the forest.
He looked at her. She said: The truth has been held by more than one party for three hundred years. The Drakonir held their piece. My memory held the box. Lysera held her mother's knowledge. Miron held the linguistic evidence. None of us alone were sufficient. We needed all of us.
He said: Yes. That is what the presentation needs to make visible. Not just the treaty. The way the treaty survived. The people who held it.
She said: That is a different kind of evidence from the documentary kind.
He said: Yes. It is the human kind. He paused. I think it is the most important kind.
She looked at him. She said: You are learning things here that you did not know before you arrived.
He said: Yes.
She said: Good. She paused. I think Elyndor is learning things too. Even if it is not ready to know all of them yet.
He spent the evening after the discovery working on what the three-piece structure of the treaty meant for the presentation.
The three-piece structure was the most elegant piece of evidence he had assembled in the entire engagement. It was elegant not because of its complexity but because of the opposite: its simplicity. Each piece was independently comprehensible. The main document with both seals — comprehensible to anyone who could read seals. The witnessing record with the final clause — comprehensible to anyone who could read prose. The Drakonir copy — comprehensible when read alongside the Elyndor copy, showing the bilateral nature of the agreement.
The three pieces together produced a picture that no single piece could produce: a nine-hundred-year-old bilateral treaty, jointly executed by both parties, jointly preserved by different custodians across three centuries of suppression, still intact, still valid, still awaiting the participation of both parties in the ceremony that had been designed around it.
He thought about how to present this. He thought about sequence. The most compelling sequence was the sequence that built the picture gradually: introduce one piece, then a second, then the third, each addition changing the understanding of what came before. Or he could present all three simultaneously, in parallel, showing the coherence of the three-piece structure as the evidence of the treaty's design.
He decided on simultaneous. The parallel structure was itself evidence: three independent pieces that fit together is more compelling than three pieces presented sequentially, because the fit reveals the design, and the design reveals the intent of the people who created it.
He also thought about the physical presentation. The main document could be shown from the room adjacent to the shrine, with Thalion Orr providing access. The witnessing record could be presented in transcription, with Thalion Orr confirming he had seen and touched the original. The Drakonir copy could be presented by Ravenna, with the chain of custody she could provide.
He wrote: three witnesses, three pieces, one treaty. The structure of the presentation mirrors the structure of the evidence. That is not an accident. The evidence is structured the way it is because the treaty was structured the way it is. The presentation reflects the treaty's own architecture.
He said this to Lysera when she came to review the presentation outline. She read the section about the three-piece structure and the parallel presentation plan. She said: You are presenting the treaty on the treaty's own terms.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is the right approach. She paused. The treaty was designed to be understood by both parties. Both parties' representatives will be presenting it. It will be understood in the form it was designed to be understood in.
He said: That is what I was going for.
She said: I know. She looked at the outline. She said: It is a good plan.
He said: Thank you.
She said: It is still a good plan even if I say so. She said this with the specific quality she sometimes had of deflecting the significance of something she found genuinely significant by treating it as an observation rather than a judgment. He had learned to read this deflection over thirty days. He filed it under: noted.
He found Elirane at the end of the evening and told her about the three-piece structure and the witnessing record.
She listened with the quality of attention she brought to things she had been expecting. When he finished she said: The sword is a witness, not a weapon.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is the most significant thing you have told me in thirty days.
He said: Why?
She said: Because the Prophecy says the hero draws the sword as the fulfillment of destiny. The covenant says the sword holds the witnessing record of an agreement. The two uses are incompatible. You cannot draw a witness document as a weapon without destroying the purpose of the witness. She paused. The Prophecy's central symbolic act would destroy the treaty's witnessing record if it were performed as described.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is not an accident.
He said: No. He thought about this. The modification was thorough. It did not leave any part of the original structure in place without changing its meaning. The sword was the witness. The modification made the sword the weapon. The witness was hidden in the weapon without anyone knowing it was there.
He made a note at the end of the day's work about the specific significance of the three-part treaty structure for the presentation.
The three-part structure was not just an evidentiary feature. It was a narrative one. The treaty had been divided across three custodians, each holding it independently, each unable alone to constitute the complete picture. The three custodians had been: the Elyndor side, represented by the High Keeper's office and later by the room adjacent to the shrine. The Drakonir side, represented by the Speaker of the Stone Court and maintained through three hundred years of custody transfers. The neutral witness, represented by the Orr family who held the mechanism and the pommel without knowing what they held.
Three custodians. Three hundred years. None of them knowing the complete picture alone. All of them together constituting something that had survived the suppression.
He wrote: the treaty's design anticipated the suppression. The people who made the treaty understood that their agreement might be threatened by one party or the other and designed the treaty to be resilient against that threat. They distributed it so that no single act of suppression could destroy the whole. They were right to do so. The suppression happened. The treaty survived.
This was the story he wanted to tell: not just that the Prophecy had been falsified, but that the truth had survived the falsification. Not through heroism. Through design and patience and the specific courage of people who had held their piece carefully for a very long time.
He wrote, as the final note of the day: three pieces. Three custodians. Three hundred years. None of them alone. All of them together. Tomorrow he would begin the final preparation. He was ready for it.
He wrote one final note before putting the notebook away: the three-piece structure is the most elegant evidentiary design I have encountered. More elegant than anything I have assembled myself. It was not designed by me. It was designed nine hundred years ago by people who understood what they were protecting and built the protection to last. I am presenting their design. I am not the author. I am the person who found the document and assembled the case and will stand in front of the audience and say: here is what was there before the modification, and here is why it matters, and here is what it requires.
He looked at this. He said it was accurate. He put the notebook away.
He went to sleep. In the morning, the work would continue. In six days, the work would be presented. He was ready for both.
He thought about what it meant to have assembled the complete picture from pieces that had been in different hands for different lengths of time. He thought: the picture was always there. The pieces were always real. What was missing was the person who could put them together. He had been that person for thirty days. He would be that person tomorrow, in the trial, in front of the audience that needed to see the complete picture. He was ready to be that person.
He fell asleep thinking about the treaty and the forest and the three-part structure and the way things survive when they are well-designed and held with care. He did not dream, or did not remember dreaming. He woke in the morning ready for the next stage of the work.
He wrote: the three-piece structure is the most elegant thing I have found in thirty days. It is not my work. It is the work of the people who made the covenant nine hundred years ago and understood what they were making. I found it. That is enough.
He would present the design to the audience that needed to understand it. He was ready to do that.
He thought about what the treaty's restoration would require in practice beyond the ceremony.
The ceremony was the acknowledgment. The restoration was the ongoing work of honoring what the ceremony acknowledged. The covenant required both parties to participate in the maintenance ceremonies going forward. It required the bilateral activation at each Blue Moon cycle. It required the relationship between Elyndor and the Drakonir to be a working relationship rather than a hostile one, maintained through the specific practices the covenant described.
That work would not be complete after the trial. It would begin at the trial. The actual restoration would take years: the rebuilding of diplomatic channels, the renegotiation of border practices, the slow reintegration of the Drakonir into the ceremonial structure as partners rather than the enemies the Prophecy had named them. Tomorrow.
You've reached the end of this chapter
They worked in the room adjacent to the shrine for two hours before moving to the guest wing, where the work continued.
The work was documentation. He was very good at documentation, and having Miron there to read the Drakonir script and Lysera there to provide the Elyndor archival context made the documentation more complete than anything he had assembled previously. By the end of the first hour they had a complete parallel transcription of the covenant: the Elyndor version on one page, the Drakonir version beside it, with Miron's notes on the linguistic relationship between the two and the places where the translation choices of each version shed light on the original meaning.
By the end of the second hour they had a clause-by-clause comparison between the covenant and the Prophecy. The comparison was the most complete piece of analysis he had produced in three weeks in Elyndor. Forty-seven points of divergence. Some were small — a word choice, a passive construction where an active one had been — and some were significant, and some were transformative: entire clauses that did not exist in the covenant, inserted into the Prophecy. The clauses about the hero. The clauses about the princess. The clauses about the Black Dragon.
He laid the analysis out in the parallel column format he had been using since the early days in the Archive. Forty-seven points, each documented with the covenant's original language and the Prophecy's corresponding passage, each with a brief analysis of what the change produced in terms of meaning and implication.
He said, when he had finished: This is the presentation.
Lysera said: Yes.
Miron said, looking at the forty-seven points: I have been building toward this for eleven years. He said it with the tone of someone taking stock of a journey. It is more complete than I imagined it would be.
Thalion Orr had been sitting in the corner of the room since they had moved there. He was not contributing to the documentation — that was not his expertise — but he was present, which was itself significant. A witness to the documentation. A person who had opened the room.
He said, from the corner: What happens now?
Renji said: The trial is in nine days. The fourteen-day delay request was approved, which gives us the additional time the procedural regulation requires. In nine days, I stand before whatever assembly Caerion has arranged and I present the forty-seven points. And the covenant. And the comparison. And everything we have found.
Thalion Orr said: And the treaty in three pieces. You have this piece. You have the Drakonir piece from Ravenna. And the blade.
Renji said: There is a third piece?
Thalion Orr looked at him. He said: The Lunaryth Sword. The pommel. I have known since I was a child that the pommel contains something. The Orr training describes it as the final witness — a piece of something old that the sword was designed to hold and protect. I was told it was ceremonial. That it was not to be opened except in extraordinary circumstances.
Miron said, quietly: The treaty has three sections?
Thalion Orr said: I did not know it was a treaty. I was told it was a witness document.
Lysera said: A witness document is a record of an agreement's execution. It describes the ceremony of signing. What terms were agreed. Who was present. She paused. It is also evidence.
Renji said: The pommel contains the third section of the original treaty. The witnessing record. He said this not as a question but as the extension of a logic he could now trace. The covenant was divided for protection: one complete copy held by each party, and the witnessing record held by the neutral instrument — the sword itself, which neither party could access unilaterally because the Orr mechanism required the Orr heir to open it, and the sword had been placed in Elyndor's ceremonial space as the neutral ground.
Miron said: The sword was not a weapon.
Renji said: No. It was a witness. A record-holder. The mechanism in the plinth was not designed to test a hero. It was designed to confirm, at each ceremony, that both parties were present to maintain the covenant.
Thalion Orr said, from the corner, with the tone of a man arriving at a conclusion he has been approaching for several days: And I am the holder of the mechanism. Not the hero. The mechanism's custodian.
Renji said: Yes.
Thalion Orr said: Then the extraordinary circumstance has arrived.
Renji said: Yes.
Thalion Orr stood up. He said: We go to the sword tonight. When there are no ceremonies scheduled and the shrine staff have rotated out. He looked at all three of them. I will open the pommel. We will have the complete treaty. And then we will have everything we need for the presentation.
He spent the afternoon after the discovery of the three-part treaty structure working out the implications of the structure for the presentation.
The three-part structure was elegant in a way that he thought was intentional. The main document with both parties' seals. The witnessing record in the sword's pommel. The parallel copy held by the Drakonir. Three pieces, each held by a different party, none of them individually sufficient to prove the whole, all of them together constituting an undeniable complete record.
He thought: someone designed this to be resilient. Designed it so that no single party losing their piece would destroy the covenant's completeness. The Drakonir could always produce their piece. The sword's pommel could always be opened by the Orr mechanism. The main document was in the most secure location in the palace, behind a biological lock that made administrative seizure impossible without Thalion Orr's cooperation.
Three hundred years of Caerion's administrative management and the treaty was still intact in all three pieces, because the treaty had been designed by people who understood that important agreements needed to be protected against the people who might later want to suppress them.
He thought about who had designed it this way. He thought about the High Keeper whose seal was on the main document, the role that had been absorbed into the Oracle's office three hundred years ago. He thought about the Speaker of the Stone Court whose seal was on the Drakonir's piece. He thought about whoever had decided that the witnessing record should be in the sword, protected by the Orr mechanism, held in the family whose function was originally diplomatic rather than ceremonial.
He thought: the people who made this treaty understood what they were making. They understood that it was significant and that significance attracted risk and that the risk needed to be managed by distribution. They distributed the treaty across three parties so that no single party could lose it all at once.
They had been right to do so. The three hundred years had proven them right. Caerion had managed to suppress the knowledge that the treaty existed, but he had not been able to destroy the treaty itself, because destroying it would have required destroying all three pieces simultaneously, which would have required the cooperation of all three parties simultaneously, which was not something he could achieve.
He thought: the covenant had protected itself.
He thought: there is something worth documenting in the specific design choices that made the covenant resilient across three centuries of suppression. He would include it in the presentation, in the section that explained the treaty's structure. The design of the treaty was part of the treaty's significance. It was not just a document. It was a system designed to survive.
He found Elirane in the evening. He told her what they had found. He told her about the three-piece structure. He told her about the final clause from the witnessing record.
She listened. When he had finished she said: Neither party alone can sustain it.
He said: Yes.
She said, quietly: That is true of more than the forest.
He looked at her. She said: The truth has been held by more than one party for three hundred years. The Drakonir held their piece. My memory held the box. Lysera held her mother's knowledge. Miron held the linguistic evidence. None of us alone were sufficient. We needed all of us.
He said: Yes. That is what the presentation needs to make visible. Not just the treaty. The way the treaty survived. The people who held it.
She said: That is a different kind of evidence from the documentary kind.
He said: Yes. It is the human kind. He paused. I think it is the most important kind.
She looked at him. She said: You are learning things here that you did not know before you arrived.
He said: Yes.
She said: Good. She paused. I think Elyndor is learning things too. Even if it is not ready to know all of them yet.
He spent the evening after the discovery working on what the three-piece structure of the treaty meant for the presentation.
The three-piece structure was the most elegant piece of evidence he had assembled in the entire engagement. It was elegant not because of its complexity but because of the opposite: its simplicity. Each piece was independently comprehensible. The main document with both seals — comprehensible to anyone who could read seals. The witnessing record with the final clause — comprehensible to anyone who could read prose. The Drakonir copy — comprehensible when read alongside the Elyndor copy, showing the bilateral nature of the agreement.
The three pieces together produced a picture that no single piece could produce: a nine-hundred-year-old bilateral treaty, jointly executed by both parties, jointly preserved by different custodians across three centuries of suppression, still intact, still valid, still awaiting the participation of both parties in the ceremony that had been designed around it.
He thought about how to present this. He thought about sequence. The most compelling sequence was the sequence that built the picture gradually: introduce one piece, then a second, then the third, each addition changing the understanding of what came before. Or he could present all three simultaneously, in parallel, showing the coherence of the three-piece structure as the evidence of the treaty's design.
He decided on simultaneous. The parallel structure was itself evidence: three independent pieces that fit together is more compelling than three pieces presented sequentially, because the fit reveals the design, and the design reveals the intent of the people who created it.
He also thought about the physical presentation. The main document could be shown from the room adjacent to the shrine, with Thalion Orr providing access. The witnessing record could be presented in transcription, with Thalion Orr confirming he had seen and touched the original. The Drakonir copy could be presented by Ravenna, with the chain of custody she could provide.
He wrote: three witnesses, three pieces, one treaty. The structure of the presentation mirrors the structure of the evidence. That is not an accident. The evidence is structured the way it is because the treaty was structured the way it is. The presentation reflects the treaty's own architecture.
He said this to Lysera when she came to review the presentation outline. She read the section about the three-piece structure and the parallel presentation plan. She said: You are presenting the treaty on the treaty's own terms.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is the right approach. She paused. The treaty was designed to be understood by both parties. Both parties' representatives will be presenting it. It will be understood in the form it was designed to be understood in.
He said: That is what I was going for.
She said: I know. She looked at the outline. She said: It is a good plan.
He said: Thank you.
She said: It is still a good plan even if I say so. She said this with the specific quality she sometimes had of deflecting the significance of something she found genuinely significant by treating it as an observation rather than a judgment. He had learned to read this deflection over thirty days. He filed it under: noted.
He found Elirane at the end of the evening and told her about the three-piece structure and the witnessing record.
She listened with the quality of attention she brought to things she had been expecting. When he finished she said: The sword is a witness, not a weapon.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is the most significant thing you have told me in thirty days.
He said: Why?
She said: Because the Prophecy says the hero draws the sword as the fulfillment of destiny. The covenant says the sword holds the witnessing record of an agreement. The two uses are incompatible. You cannot draw a witness document as a weapon without destroying the purpose of the witness. She paused. The Prophecy's central symbolic act would destroy the treaty's witnessing record if it were performed as described.
He said: Yes.
She said: That is not an accident.
He said: No. He thought about this. The modification was thorough. It did not leave any part of the original structure in place without changing its meaning. The sword was the witness. The modification made the sword the weapon. The witness was hidden in the weapon without anyone knowing it was there.
He made a note at the end of the day's work about the specific significance of the three-part treaty structure for the presentation.
The three-part structure was not just an evidentiary feature. It was a narrative one. The treaty had been divided across three custodians, each holding it independently, each unable alone to constitute the complete picture. The three custodians had been: the Elyndor side, represented by the High Keeper's office and later by the room adjacent to the shrine. The Drakonir side, represented by the Speaker of the Stone Court and maintained through three hundred years of custody transfers. The neutral witness, represented by the Orr family who held the mechanism and the pommel without knowing what they held.
Three custodians. Three hundred years. None of them knowing the complete picture alone. All of them together constituting something that had survived the suppression.
He wrote: the treaty's design anticipated the suppression. The people who made the treaty understood that their agreement might be threatened by one party or the other and designed the treaty to be resilient against that threat. They distributed it so that no single act of suppression could destroy the whole. They were right to do so. The suppression happened. The treaty survived.
This was the story he wanted to tell: not just that the Prophecy had been falsified, but that the truth had survived the falsification. Not through heroism. Through design and patience and the specific courage of people who had held their piece carefully for a very long time.
He wrote, as the final note of the day: three pieces. Three custodians. Three hundred years. None of them alone. All of them together. Tomorrow he would begin the final preparation. He was ready for it.
He wrote one final note before putting the notebook away: the three-piece structure is the most elegant evidentiary design I have encountered. More elegant than anything I have assembled myself. It was not designed by me. It was designed nine hundred years ago by people who understood what they were protecting and built the protection to last. I am presenting their design. I am not the author. I am the person who found the document and assembled the case and will stand in front of the audience and say: here is what was there before the modification, and here is why it matters, and here is what it requires.
He looked at this. He said it was accurate. He put the notebook away.
He went to sleep. In the morning, the work would continue. In six days, the work would be presented. He was ready for both.
He thought about what it meant to have assembled the complete picture from pieces that had been in different hands for different lengths of time. He thought: the picture was always there. The pieces were always real. What was missing was the person who could put them together. He had been that person for thirty days. He would be that person tomorrow, in the trial, in front of the audience that needed to see the complete picture. He was ready to be that person.
He fell asleep thinking about the treaty and the forest and the three-part structure and the way things survive when they are well-designed and held with care. He did not dream, or did not remember dreaming. He woke in the morning ready for the next stage of the work.
He wrote: the three-piece structure is the most elegant thing I have found in thirty days. It is not my work. It is the work of the people who made the covenant nine hundred years ago and understood what they were making. I found it. That is enough.
He would present the design to the audience that needed to understand it. He was ready to do that.
He thought about what the treaty's restoration would require in practice beyond the ceremony.
The ceremony was the acknowledgment. The restoration was the ongoing work of honoring what the ceremony acknowledged. The covenant required both parties to participate in the maintenance ceremonies going forward. It required the bilateral activation at each Blue Moon cycle. It required the relationship between Elyndor and the Drakonir to be a working relationship rather than a hostile one, maintained through the specific practices the covenant described.
That work would not be complete after the trial. It would begin at the trial. The actual restoration would take years: the rebuilding of diplomatic channels, the renegotiation of border practices, the slow reintegration of the Drakonir into the ceremonial structure as partners rather than the enemies the Prophecy had named them. Tomorrow.
You've reached the end of this chapter