44: The Weight of Unwitnessed Things
They brought her through the halls barefoot.
Not as an act of cruelty—though cruelty had long ago become incidental to the system—but as ritual. Every contact between her skin and the crystalline weave of the Council Corridor was a tacit reminder: she belonged to something vaster. Something ancient. Something that demanded offerings, even if only the quiet intimacy of her steps upon its memory-soaked floors.
Yara Kel did not flinch.
She counted the reflections in the panels above. The glass was war-tempered, rippling subtly with old impact scars, remnants of a hundred acts of subversion. They had not repaired the ceiling since the Stammer Revolt. Another reminder. Another relic.
