Athax did not celebrate the treaty for long.
War had a way of rearranging a city's bones, and peace - if this was peace - did not restore them overnight. Instead, life resumed with careful, deliberate steps, as though the court feared that too much laughter or too much ease might tempt fate to return and claim what had just been won.
Markets reopened. Messengers resumed their predictable routes. The council met at proper hours again rather than at whatever hour the latest crisis demanded. Even the bells of the inner courtyards returned to their measured tolling, no longer signaling alarms but marking the steady passage of days.
Normalcy came not as relief, but as discipline.
