Spring arrived with its usual insistent optimism, the capital's gardens beginning their slow bloom while palace life settled into a rhythm that felt, for the first time in nearly two years, genuinely stable rather than perpetually crisis-adjacent.
"You seem different," Aldric observed, during our first full council session of the new season, watching me review agricultural reports with an ease that had once required considerable deliberate effort to maintain. "Lighter, somehow, despite everything we've collectively navigated this past year."
"I think I've finally made peace with something," I said, not fully elaborating on the dream connection with Aria, which remained a private matter I'd shared only with Darius. "A kind of resolution I wasn't certain I'd ever actually achieve."
