Six months in the palace passed both too fast and too slow.
Natalie went from a month-old bundle that slept through threats and woke only to make opinions known to a child who could hold her own head up, stare directly at a general like she was assessing his usefulness, and grab at anything that shimmered with the kind of greedy optimism only babies and emperors possessed.
The godfatherhood had stopped being a line in a document and become real: archived in the imperial registry, sealed in a warded vault, and copied to a secondary ether-backup that lived inside the palace grid like a heartbeat. Damian had signed. Gabriel had written half of the draft in the margins with a pen, leaving no room for interpretation. Witnesses had been dragged in, seals pressed into wax that cooled with a faint blue glow, and a clerk had nearly cried when Gabriel added an addendum titled "NO RUNES NEAR THE INFANT" in crisp, unforgiving script.
Now came the public presentation.
