POV: Aphrodite
Tomorrow, everything changes. Tonight, she holds what she has.
The fire is real.
Not the sourceless light of the King's court or the ley-line glow running through cracked stone — an actual fire, wood and flame, built by Cassian in the open ground outside the court with the specific efficiency of someone who has been building fires in the field since before this journey. The light it produces is the warm uneven kind that moves with the wood's burning and casts the people around it in the specific amber quality of firelight.
I sit at the center of it.
