Location: Zhū'kethara (Vor'anthel) — Grand Hall
Date/Time: 11 Emberrise, 9939 AZI
Realm: Demon Realm
The rumors had started before dawn.
Ren felt them through the Common Path — not words, not images, but the particular tremor of 8.7 million minds trying to make sense of something they'd only half-witnessed. The blood oath ceremony. The city named by strangers. Three hundred women walking into the Hall of Remembrance and emerging changed, their skin glowing, their eyes streaked with colours that hadn't been seen on female faces in ten millennia.
The warriors were asking questions. Through garrison channels, mess hall conversations, patrol route chatter — the specific, lateral information flow of a military civilisation that had spent ten thousand years with nothing to talk about but the border and the dying. Now they had something else. And they were building theories.
Some of the theories were close to the truth. Some were dangerously far.
