(Rhea POV)

Kieran had taken over the archives.

It wasn't a large space. A room off the command corridor, stone walls, a table that had been used for storage until Kieran cleared it and spread the tablets across the surface alongside Vera's documents and the Ashford family records we'd recovered. The room smelled like old paper and the mineral dust that came off the stone tablets when he handled them.

He'd been working here every evening since the south gate. Hours at a time, translating the archaic script passage by passage, building a picture of a world that had existed before Council wiped it clean. I'd watched him do this the way you watch someone assemble a puzzle: patiently, without interruption, trusting that the picture would emerge.

But today he'd asked me to come.

"I found something," he said when I entered. He was sitting at the table, tablets arranged in front of him, his notebook open to pages covered in translation notes. He looked tired. The particular tiredness of a man who'd been reading about a destroyed civilization while counting down the days until three thousand wolves arrived to test the one he was trying to build.

"The dispute system," he said. "I've been looking for it since we started planning the framework. How did the pre-Council world handle disagreements between packs? Between wolves? Without an authority to appeal to?"

"And?"

He picked up a tablet. Smaller than the others, the script finer, compressed. "They used mediators. Firstborn carriers who could feel both sides of a dispute through their bond connection. Not judges. Not arbitrators. Facilitators."

He translated the passage, reading slowly from his notes. The language was formal, the kind of phrasing that sounded like it had been carved with ceremony.

"When wolves who share the open bond cannot find agreement, a carrier comes between them. The carrier holds both wolves' feeling at once, and makes visible to each what the other carries. In the seeing, resolution becomes possible. Not because the carrier decides. Because the wolves, having felt what the other feels, can choose differently than when they felt only themselves."

I sat across from him. Let the words settle.

"Bond-empathy mediation," Kieran said. "The carrier doesn't judge. Doesn't rule. Just opens a channel between two wolves so each can feel the other's position. And from that shared feeling, they find their own resolution."

"That's beautiful," I said.

"It was." He set the tablet down carefully. "And it was fragile."

He opened his notebook to a page of notes drawn from the Ashford records, Vera's handwriting alongside his own. "The mediator system depended on living carriers. When a carrier mediated a dispute, the resolution held because the carrier's bond connection reinforced it. Like a bridge. As long as the carrier was alive and connected, the bridge stood."

"And when the carrier died?"

"The bonds they'd mediated weakened. Not immediately. Over time. The resolutions they'd facilitated started to erode. Packs that had found agreement drifted back into conflict. Territories that had been shared became disputed again." He looked at me. "The system's greatest strength was that it was human. Living, responsive, adaptive. But that meant it was also mortal. Every carrier who died took their mediation network with them."

I thought about Aldric. The argument he'd made in the Council chamber, the one Nolan had reported, the one that had been Council's philosophical justification for six hundred years: The Firstborn system was unstable. Beautiful, yes. Powerful, yes. But unstable. When the carriers failed, the system failed. Council replaced instability with structure. Structure requires hierarchy. Hierarchy requires obedience.

And the part he didn't say out loud: Obedience requires eliminating anyone who offers an alternative.

"He was right," I said.

Kieran looked at me.

"Aldric. About the old system's weakness. He was right that it depended on individual carriers. He was right that it was fragile. He was wrong about the solution, but he wasn't wrong about the problem."

Kieran nodded. He'd been waiting for me to see it. The patience of a man who'd learned something difficult and needed the other person to arrive at it themselves.