(Rhea POV)

Aldric requested the conversation the next morning.

He sent the request through Torren — formal, polite, the careful phrasing of a man who understood he was a guest in a territory that had every reason to treat him as an enemy. A private conversation. With me. No aides. No agenda beyond understanding.

Kieran said no before Torren finished the sentence.

"He's gathering intelligence. You let him stay the night. He's seen the compound layout, the personnel count, the defensive positions. Now he wants to sit across from you and read your face while he asks questions designed to map your strategy."

"I know what he's doing."

"Then why are you considering it?"

"Because he came here without an army. He sat in that room and offered me everything I've been fighting for and I said no and he didn't threaten me. He asked to stay." I looked at Kieran. "When has Council ever asked?"

He didn't answer. The silence was his answer — the silence of a man who'd served Council for eight years and knew that Council didn't ask. Council informed. Council directed. Council offered terms with consequences attached. Asking was something Council didn't do because asking implied that the other party's response mattered.

Aldric had asked.

"I'll be in the command room," I said. "Torren outside. You wherever you need to be."

Kieran looked at me. The look that said he disagreed with the decision and trusted me to make it anyway — the particular tension of a partnership where respect outweighs agreement.

"I'll be in the corridor," he said. "Not because I think he'll hurt you. Because I don't trust what sixty years of certainty does to a man when that certainty is threatened."

* * *

The command room. Morning light. Two cups of tea on the table — I'd asked for them because the act of holding something warm changes the shape of a conversation. It's harder to be purely adversarial when your hands are wrapped around heat.

Aldric sat across from me. He held the cup the way Kieran held cups — both hands, centered, the habit of a man who'd spent decades in rooms where your hands needed to be visible.

He looked different this morning. Not older — more present. The negotiator from yesterday had been performing a role. This man was not performing. This man was sitting across from a woman half his age, in a territory he'd tried to starve into submission, drinking tea and preparing to explain why he'd spent sixty years protecting a system built on the bones of murdered children.

"I'd like to tell you something," he said, "that I've never told anyone outside the Council chamber."

"You're in my territory. You can tell me whatever you want."

"I've read the original extermination order. Not a copy — the document itself. I've held it. I know every name on that list. Every age. Every status notation."

He paused. Drank from his cup. Set it down.

"I know about Carrier 31."

The name sat between us. The eight-year-old. The child who'd been given a number instead of a name and a status instead of a future.

"I've known for forty years," he said. "Since I was first elected to the Council. The extermination order is shown to every new elder — a tradition. A reminder. The senior elders call it 'the weight of the chair.' They show you the document and they tell you: this is what was done to build what you're about to govern. Carry it."

"And you carried it."

"For forty years. I carried the knowledge that the system I served was built on an act that would be called genocide by anyone who saw it clearly. And I served anyway. Because the alternative — the thing that the founding Council was afraid of — was worse."

"Worse than killing children."

"Worse than the death of forty-seven people." His voice didn't waver. Not from callousness — from the weight of something he'd carried long enough that it had become structural. "I'm not defending what they did. I'm telling you why they did it."

"I know why they did it. The Firstborn made their system unnecessary."

He looked at me. A different look from yesterday. Yesterday he'd been evaluating. Today he was measuring — measuring whether I understood what I'd just said, or whether I'd said it without grasping the full shape of it.

"Do you know what wolf life looked like before Council?" he asked.

"Chosen bonds. Cross-pack movement. Bond-mediated disputes."

"That's the romantic version. The stone tablets you found — they describe the idealized system. They don't describe what happened when it failed." He set his cup down. "Before Council, wolves lived in a network. No territorial structure. No Alpha hierarchy enforced by borders. Wolves bonded across pack lines, moved freely, resolved conflicts through mediators who could make both sides feel each other's position."

"That sounds functional."

"It was functional when it worked. When a mediator was available. When the Firstborn carriers were present to enable cross-pack bonds. When no one exploited the system." He paused. "Do you know what happened when a Firstborn died? Or when a region had no carrier?"

I waited.

"War. The kind of war that makes territorial disputes look like disagreements. Because the entire social structure depended on a bloodline — on individual people who could make the bonds work. Remove those people, and the system collapsed. Not slowly. Overnight. Wolves who'd been bonded across pack lines lost the mediating connection. Disputes that had been managed through bond-empathy became unresolvable. Alliances shattered. Communities fragmented."

He looked at his hands. The hands of a man who'd held the extermination order and carried its weight for four decades.

"The pre-Council system was beautiful. And it was catastrophically fragile. Because it depended on the existence of specific people. Kill a Firstborn — through war, through illness, through accident — and every bond they'd enabled weakened. The network frayed. The peace collapsed."