The days following the announcement blurred into a haze of waiting and dread. I remained in my room, a prisoner of my own uncertain fate, while the Academy council chamber became a battlefield where lawyers and theologians fought over the legality of my engagement.
Sir Edric brought reports each evening, his face carved from stone, his voice flat and clinical as he described the day's proceedings. I listened, absorbed, and tried to find hope in the fragments he delivered. But hope was a fragile thing, and the Church's arguments were anything but.
"The Church's legal team filed their formal challenge this morning," he reported on the first day. "They're arguing that spiritual matters supersede temporal contracts. The engagement, they claim, is a secular arrangement that cannot bind a soul claimed by the divine."
