Chapter 43. Council of Clans

The bells began at the very first pale hint of dawn, their voices low and iron-throated, striking the stones in measured pulses that rolled through the fortress like thunder caught in a cage. Each sonorous clang seemed to linger just long enough for its echo to fiddle at the edges of silence before the next arrived, a resonant heartbeat pulsing through corridors still draped in night’s dim velvet.

From the distant hills, other bells took up the call in answering chords, until the world seemed alive with this slow, deliberate music. Then came the signal-fires, one after another blossoming into red flares that crowned each hilltop like petals of flame, a chain of glowing eyes blinking awake in the darkness.

By the time the first carriage clattered across the drawbridge—its wooden wheels drumming on the timbers—the air inside the fortress had already shifted, weighing heavier, more expectant, like that pregnant pause between lightning’s crack and the first silver drops of