Chapter 41 - Planning the Cathedral Siege

The throne hall pulsed softly like the chest of a giant who had just finished running. Heat still bled out of the stone floor from whatever the wards had done to keep it standing through the last siege, and somewhere below us the castle's old bones groaned the way they always did after a fight—settling, the way a body settles into a chair it's earned. An illusory map of the High Cathedral hovered in the air—a cube of light that mapped the bell tower, the seal grid, and the choir passages in the building's bowels. Threads of gold traced the ley-lines feeding its walls, and every few seconds one of them dimmed and reignited, as if the whole structure were breathing along with the tower's bells.