The shouting at Brom eventually ran out of energy the way shouting always does, not because anyone had been convinced of anything but because sustaining that level of noise required something the chamber was steadily draining out of everyone. It tapered into smaller conversations, then into murmuring, then into the particular quiet of people who have said everything they can think to say and arrived nowhere.
They stood on their bases.
The flames burned at their various heights.
Nobody had a better idea than standing still and hoping, and everyone knew it, and the knowing sat in the chamber the way the cold did, not announced, just present, felt in the spaces between one breath and the next. Some people had stopped looking at the statues and started looking at the floor instead. And if one took a good look at them, the resignation on their faces told a story of someone who had decided that seeing less is easier than seeing everything.
