The quarterly land reports were exactly as interesting as they sounded.
Aria turned the third page without reading it and set it face down on the desk. Outside the tall windows of Eleanor's study the Castein duchy stretched in every direction, grey and orderly under an overcast sky, the kind of landscape that had been managed for so long it had forgotten how to be anything other than managed. Neat field lines. Stone walls at precise intervals. A river that ran where someone had decided it should run three centuries ago and had been running there obediently ever since.
She had been in this body for long enough that the view had stopped feeling strange. That was its own kind of strange.
She opened the status window.
It appeared in her field of vision the way it always did, clean and immediate, overlaid across the grey landscape without obscuring it. She had stopped needing to concentrate to open it months ago. It came when she called it now like a reflex.
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