Location: Mid Realm — Temple of Light
Date/Time: 19–28 Emberrise, 9939 AZI
Realm: Mid Realm / Radiant Realm
The reports arrived at dawn.
Sharlin read them standing. She never read intelligence seated — sitting suggested patience, and patience suggested that bad news could be absorbed comfortably. Bad news should hurt. It should arrive while you were already upright, already braced, already prepared to move.
The first report was three pages. Clean handwriting, professional formatting, the particular dryness of a field hunter's assessment stripped of interpretation. Mixed-blood settlements. The outcast communities scattered across the Mid Realm's no-man's-land — the disputed territories between the Ironveil Kingdom and the Silverleaf Territories, where neither royal house patrolled and where abominations bred freely in their squalid little villages.
