The wind changed when her father died.

It slipped through the tower like a whispered curse, brushing the banners with just enough force to lift them—then letting them fall limp again, as if the very air had sighed and given up.

**Telaryn** stood motionless in the observation arch, eyes fixed on the field below where the **Third Legion** finished what they had come to do. The battle—if it could be called that—was already dissolving into silence. No thunder of hooves. No last, defiant cry. Just the distant clatter of iron and the flutter of something dark on the snow. A broken banner, maybe. Or a wing.

There was no clear moment when he fell. No heroic death for ballads to cling to. **King Aran** had disappeared into the churn of the charge, his white horse folding under him like parchment. Then he was gone. No hand raised in defiance. No flash of the crown. No final strike.

Just snow. And blood. And the black tide of the Empire closing over everything that had once been his.

Telaryn did not cry. She had already wept, days ago—when the granaries burned, when the old temple fell, when she first saw the legion standards appear across the lake like red scars. But now… now there was only cold. And not just the air. Something colder. Something deeper.

She pressed a hand to the stone sill. It was smoother than she remembered—worn by time, not touch. Her father had once lifted her onto this very ledge when she was small, showing her the rooftops, the towers, the winding roads of the city that would someday be hers.

_A city of smoke now._

Beneath her, **legionnaires moved in silence**, efficient and without cruelty, gathering the dead with quiet purpose. A formation of spearmen closed ranks again—perhaps expecting another charge. But there would be none. The blood of Talpis had spent itself on the frozen earth.

And still the snow came. Slow, unbothered, endless.

Telaryn squinted toward the far edge of the field, where a broken standard lay half-buried in churned ice. For a moment, just a moment, she imagined seeing him—her father, not as a king or symbol, but as a man. Alone in that vast emptiness, standing amid the ruin, his eyes turned upward toward her. Accusing. Or pleading.

But it was only a shadow. A trick of the smoke.

“Princess,” said a voice behind her. A guard. Quiet. Hesitant. “The council has gathered. They… they await your word.”

Telaryn turned from the window. Her gloves were stained with frost and stone dust.

“Tell them I’ll speak when I have something worth saying.”

She did not wait for acknowledgment. The guard bowed and withdrew.

She cast one last look across the field. Then she whispered, not in grief, but in contempt:

“He died chasing a poem.”

And she left the tower.