(Narrated by your most diligent shadow, the one who lingered behind the tapestries and heard the secrets the stone walls were too polite to repeat.)
Dearest, most inquisitive reader, if you had ventured near the Imperial Wing of the Winter Palace this morning, you would have found the air itself vibrating with a most scandalous energy.
The great bells of Nevareth usually signaled the start of a cold, disciplined day of governance, but today? Today, they seemed to toll with a certain… exhausted embarrassment. For while the sun had risen over the jagged white peaks, the Emperor and his new Empress had most decidedly not.
If one were to believe the whispers of the silver-tongued pages, the Imperial bedchamber had become a fortress from which no one... save for the most harried of laundry maids... was permitted to return.
The atmosphere in the palace had split into two distinct, delicious factions.
