A week after the Starlight Ball, Valdria's political class was losing its collective mind.
The Noble Consortium had convened three emergency sessions in seven days. Evangeline was on a warpath, demanding accountability as to how shadow mages snuck into the academy from the academy itself, the church, and anyone else within general screaming distance.
Duke Cindergrave was trying to leverage the crisis into expanded church authority over Rosevale, because apparently a shadow cult building a bomb under everyone's nose meant commoners needed more oversight, somehow. Talia shut that shit down quickly.
Aegis, overall, didn't care.
She'd absorbed a weapon of mass destruction, was legally dead for about thirty seconds, had a conversation with a deity in a void, and came back with eleven hundred MP and a new apprentice. Whatever the Consortium wanted to scream about, they could scream about it without her.
