"Legacy families are exiled beings, Phei."
Roxanne's voice had changed, carrying a lethal edge beneath the persistent tremor. The trembling was still there—coiled beneath every syllable like a serpent waiting to strike—but something unbreakable had emerged.
This was the voice of a woman who had spent twenty years unearthing secrets that should have destroyed her, yet instead had hammered her into a weapon of pure desperation, now seeking aid from a seventeen-year-old boy as void-ice crystallized the air around them in deadly fractals.
"Thrown from their original world. Cast out. Banished to this realm like prisoners condemned to a lesser existence."
She leaned forward, shifting heavily with the motion as she closed the distance between them. Her green eyes burned with the feverish intensity of a prophet revealing the end of days.
