Mireth did not sleep on the last night of the conference.
This was not unusual for him. Sleep had always been something he approached practically rather than gratefully, a maintenance requirement rather than a refuge, and on nights when the maintenance could wait he let it wait. There was too much moving tonight for sleep to be useful anyway.
He sat at the writing desk in his wing and looked at the single candle he had left burning and thought about the next six hours.
The complex was quiet in the way large buildings went quiet after midnight, not empty but settled, the sounds of it dropping to the baseline hum of guards rotating and distant servants finishing late work and the occasional creak of old stone adjusting to the cold. He knew this building well. He had been attending conferences in it since he was seventeen and had spent enough sleepless nights mapping its rhythms that he could read its sounds the way a sailor read weather.
Tonight the building sounded almost normal.
