The air was thick with the scent of burning myrrh and cold iron, the mingling fragrances curling through the cavernous halls like ghostly fingers. Torchlight flickered along the obsidian walls, their polished surfaces catching fractured reflections of the figures below—courtiers draped in silks and velvets, nobles wrapped in embroidered arrogance, sycophants disguised as advisors. They gathered in clusters, voices low but laced with ambition, each word another thread in the ever-tightening web of political machination.

Aerion Valdaerys stood just beyond the gilded arch of the throne room, a shadow carved from silver and ice, his presence neither announced nor acknowledged. He did not need to be seen to be felt. He observed in silence, gaze like the blade of a scalpel, dissecting the gathering before him with a cold and surgical precision.

The great chamber was vast, its architecture sculpted in the image of dominion itself—vaulted ceilings rose high above like the ribs of some forgotten colossus, chandeliers of dark crystal casting refracted light in eerie, shifting patterns upon the marble floors. Pillars of black stone stretched upward like skeletal fingers, each one etched with the names of those who had ruled before, those whose legacies had been reduced to mere inscriptions upon an unfeeling monolith.

And at the heart of it all, the throne.

A towering seat of carved obsidian and silver, its edges sharp, its armrests sculpted into the heads of great beasts—wolves, wyverns, creatures born of legend and brutality. It loomed, not as a seat of comfort but a thing of judgment, an altar upon which the unworthy bled out their failures. The King sat there, Aegon I Drazhakar, brooding as ever.

They feasted upon the scraps of influence, gnawing at the bones of power like starved hounds, mistaking their fleeting victories for dominion. They spoke of war as though it were a game, as if conquest were a matter of convenience rather than the lifeblood of empire.

Fools. Every one of the them.