(Meanwhile, Chaosbringer's POV, The Time Stilled World)
Chaosbringer sat alone in his quiet office, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded tightly across his chest, as he kept himself a small distance away from the cluttered work desk stacked with sealed reports and pending approvals, while his mind drifted through the tangled web of secrets he had spent the past year unraveling with unwavering, almost obsessive patience.
It had taken him months to track the faint trails of deceit, weeks of observing subtle inconsistencies repeat themselves like hairline cracks in a porcelain mask, until eventually he confirmed what he had suspected from the start — that the Third Elder had been leaking information to the outside world in ways so careful and deliberate that even Chaosbringer's hidden observers had failed to catch him in the act.
