As the Dragon King tried to soothe a howling green dragon, across Drakenfell, Gavriel Sterling lay unconscious. His mind and soul were visiting another life far away.
✦✦✦
Gavriel Sterling stood at the edge of a sunlit courtyard he had never walked, and he recognized it in his bones anyway. He watched a prince conduct the least subtle courtship in the recorded history of the Fae realm, and he watched the girl at the center of it fail to notice a single move, and he thought, with the exhausted fondness of a man reading his own file, she has no idea. She has genuinely no idea.
Lucian was gone north, first king of the wolves, ruling a kingdom he had built out of grit and loyalty. His absence left nobody to elbow Tristan in the ribs and say the obvious thing out loud, which meant the obvious thing had gone gloriously unsaid for months.
AELINDRIS - THE MORNING
The flowers were the first casualty.
