Chapter 57. Love Reborn

The clearing was silent save for the murmur of the newly appointed Circle of Equals. The Omega Founder was holding court, surrounded by the greatest threat to her newly won peace: paperwork.

Neriah sat at a crudely fashioned wooden table, sorting through the Council archives that Kael’s team had managed to salvage from the Fortress ruins. She was stripped of divine fire, but cloaked in a fierce, focused determination.

Caius stood a few feet away, working with Kael to establish watch schedules for the external war brewing on the borders. He was alive, stabilized, and fully recovered, thanks to the purging of the silver and the sheer, desperate jolt of Neriah’s survival. But the Final Bond, though now a secure conduit of shared emotional presence, was empty of magic, leaving a strange, quiet ache in his chest.

Neriah finally pushed a sheaf of documents aside, sighing in frustration.

“The old laws are a tangle of contradictions, Caius,” she announced, leaning ba